Politics & Power Quote by Wim Wenders

Boredom is doing a lot of work here: Wenders isn’t shrugging off a fussy semantic debate so much as calling time on an old map of cultural power. For decades, “American” and “European” film functioned less like geography than like shorthand for ideology: Hollywood as speed, plot, clarity, commerce; Europe as mood, ambiguity, authorial prestige. Wenders, a director who built his career in the porous space between those myths, knows how much of that division was marketing and self-flattery dressed up as criticism.

The intent is corrective. By insisting the split is “no longer true,” he’s pointing to the collapse of neat national containers in an era of co-productions, festival pipelines, streaming platforms, and crews assembled like touring bands. Money crosses borders faster than aesthetics do; a “European” film can be financed by American capital and calibrated for global taste, while a U.S. indie can borrow the long takes and quiet dread once filed under “continental.”

The subtext is also a warning to gatekeepers. National labels used to police value: “European” could be a halo, “American” a suspicion of vulgarity, or vice versa depending on the room. Wenders is impatient with that lazy sorting because it flatters critics and festivals more than it describes what’s on screen. His own work - road movies, alienation, landscape as psychology - has always been transnational in spirit, which makes the quote a small manifesto: stop treating cinema like passports and start treating it like a language with dialects that constantly steal from each other.