Politics & Power Quote by Wim Wenders

Wenders is doing something canny here: he turns a dry market-share stat into a miniature drama about cultural sovereignty. Four or five percent isn’t just an industry slump; it’s a near-evaporation of a national voice. By placing “German films” against the blunt monolith of “American,” he’s not simply tallying box office receipts. He’s naming an imbalance of storytelling power, where the default imagination in German cinemas had become imported, formatted, and financially insulated by Hollywood’s scale.

The late-1980s context matters. West Germany was still a separate entity, the New German Cinema wave had crested, and commercial exhibition increasingly rewarded high-concept American product. For a director associated with that auteur movement, the statistic carries a quiet sting: artistic innovation doesn’t automatically translate into a durable ecosystem. The subtext is institutional, not just aesthetic. If screens are occupied, so are attention spans; distribution, subsidies, television partnerships, and cultural policy become the real auteurs.

His pivot to “It is now 20 to 30 percent” is restrained optimism, not triumphalism. He doesn’t claim parity, and that’s the point: even an improved share still leaves German cinema fighting for oxygen in its own house. The phrasing implies hard-won infrastructure rather than a sudden burst of genius. Wenders is effectively arguing that national cinema isn’t a natural resource; it’s a negotiated space, one that can be lost quietly and rebuilt only through collective, often political, effort.