But his beginnings at the Munich Academy present a rather oppositional relation to American cinema. His early short features have little in common with the Hollywood cinema of the 1940s and the 1950s (fast paced stories, suspense, excitement, narrative closure, witty dialogue). In his avant-garde beginnings he adopts modernist techniques, downplaying action and narrative direction in order to make room for the images. Same Player shoots again or Silver City seemed like exercises of "contemplative passivity" while 3 American LP's let rock music speak as a non-verbal protest against Hollywood aesthetics.
While the infusion of American culture in Wenders" early films underwent complex mediation and negotiations, it manifested itself more readily in the film reviews he wrote that period. He comments that he "feels more familiar with these reviews, rereading them now, than with [his] first films from about the same period".
Although the power of Wenders" immediate predecessors like Kluge or Straub was not lost in his school films, soon (as he was entering the world of commercial film making) he turned away from some of the modernist tendencies of them, pursuing a "new realism". He had this to say about Kluge's cinema: "Films from the brain, are all right, but if they don't reach the audience, it's no good".
Combining Kracauer's notions of cinema as "a means to redeem the physical world", Bazin's desire to "allow the camera to be faithful to temporal and spatial duration" and his own faith in the "desiring gaze" -"the loving camera, the longing desire for the indefinite"- Wenders allows the image to tell his character's story: motion, places, exile, escape and desire. Soon, he realized that the cinematic tradition of "pure seeing" he wanted to re-create was a thing of the past and that he would have to transform this style to fit his own aesthetic purposes.
The "fatherless" Wenders finds in the American cinematic patron my of Ford and Ray paternal security and images emotion-laden.
