Fords offers the pull for stability and the need for controlled pattern of human relationships while Ray offers the opposition of affirmation as he is an archetype of the unsettled filmmaker. These two influences may set out the contradiction in Wenders" work.
After Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, Wenders bemoans the end of those westerns that "spread out a surface that was nothing else but what you could see" and speaks of "a death of a genre and a dream, both of them American. Wenders's faith in American cinema will erode slowly and finally come to an abrupt end when he goes to Hollywood to make Hammett (1978-1982).
Wenders lies somewhere between European film art and the classical American idiom. His films share a lot with modernism and its traits but he also employs postmodernist devices. His films generally feature a solitary male protagonist who resembles the typical alienated outsider of modernist texts. However, he neither rejects the social order as a whole nor does he put things back in order like the hero in American cinema. Also, to the extent that Wenders" work reflects on the experience of the filmmaker, it seems to resort to the modernist reliance of the subjectivity of the artist. At the same time, he demands self-validation and self-assertion. Modernism doesn't permit access to the romantic emotional directness and the patrimonial connection that Wenders desires. So, he resorts to allusion and intertextuality to stave off the pain of mourning and the loss of history and provide himself cinematic security.
After the Hollywood experience of Hammett and The State of Things, he describes 1982 as a pivotal year in his filmmaking. Wenders, aware of the modernist crisis he was in, instead of "committing suicide" decided to "tell [just] a story". "I want to find a narrative cinema that avidly and with self-confidence establishes a connection between film art and life and which no longer needs to reflect its own textuality in the narrative.
