A stranded film crew in Portugal mirrors the real-life chaos of Wim Wenders' career.
In short: When production on Wim Wenders' 1981 film Hammett stalled, he retreated to Portugal to help a colleague. There, he captured the existential dread of a crew abandoned by their producer. The resulting 1982 film, The State of Things, became a meta-commentary on the precarious, often absurd nature of filmmaking itself.
The State of Things originated from a professional crisis. During the 1981 production of Hammett for Francis Ford Coppola, Wenders faced an unexpected halt when Coppola demanded a screenplay rewrite. Seeking an intermediate project, Wenders traveled to Portugal to assist director Raúl Ruiz on The Territory. Using the same cast and crew, Wenders quickly pivoted to his own feature, which follows a production team left in limbo after their money and film stock vanish.
The film is a dense web of cinematic references and personal homages. The protagonist, director Friedrich Munro, is named for the silent film pioneer Friedrich Murnau, while his cinematographer’s name is an anagram for Joe Biroc. Wenders even recruited Henri Alekan, the legendary cinematographer of the 1946 classic Beauty and the Beast, to lens the project. These layers of industry history ground the narrative in a deep appreciation for the medium, even as the plot explores the desperate, Mafia-entangled reality of a missing producer hiding in a Los Angeles mobile home.
The production’s influence extended well beyond its 1982 Venice Film Festival Golden Lion win. Leftover film stock from the shoot was famously repurposed for the first third of Jim Jarmusch’s 1984 film, Stranger Than Paradise. The project’s legacy also proved enduring for Wenders himself; in 1994, he revisited the character of Friedrich Munro in Lisbon Story, depicting the director as having finally expatriated to Portugal. Despite persistent rumors that the film-within-a-film, The Survivors, was a remake of older science fiction titles like Day the World Ended, Wenders’ work remains a distinct, singular meditation on the fragility of creative labor.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: The State of Things (film)
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