Politics & Power Quote by Wim Wenders

There is a particular exhaustion baked into Wenders' phrasing: "for years" and "all I seemed to be doing" frames advocacy as a kind of unpaid, endless B-roll to the real work of making films. The line lands because it flips the romantic myth of the auteur. Here, the director isn’t merely an artist; he’s been forced into the role of cultural lobbyist, arguing for cinema as infrastructure, not ornament.

The intent is pragmatic and defensive. Wenders is speaking from the long European anxiety that movies, especially in a Hollywood-dominated market, won’t survive on taste alone. The subtext is that "European culture" has historically been coded as literature, painting, opera, architecture - forms with institutional prestige and state protection. Film, newer and commercially entangled, has often been treated as suspect: too popular to be "culture", too cultural to be left to the market. By insisting Europe "needed movies", Wenders isn’t making an aesthetic claim so much as a political one: cinema should be understood as a public good, part of the continent’s self-description.

Context matters: postwar European cinema built its identity in conversation and competition with American mass entertainment, while relying on subsidies, public broadcasters, and co-productions to stay afloat. "Protect it" carries both a preservationist tone and a warning: without policy - quotas, funding, distribution support - Europe doesn’t just lose an industry; it loses a way of seeing itself on screen, replaced by imported narratives with different assumptions about heroism, history, and desire.