Lisbon Story (1994 film)

Plot

Lisbon Story is partially a sequel to Wenders' 1982 film, The State of Things. The fictitious movie director in the previous film, Friedrich Munro, reappears, again played by Patrick Bauchau. In Lisbon Story Friedrich has moved to Lisbon, Portugal (the country where The State of Things was set). The principal character, Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler), a sound engineer, receives a postcard invitation from Friedrich to come to Lisbon to record sounds of the capital city for his forthcoming film. On arriving, the director is nowhere to be found, though he leaves cryptic messages. This sets in motion a mysterious quest.

The sound engineer doesn't meet up with the director until the end of the movie, when it materialises that, disturbed by the commercialization of images, he had set out to capture what he terms the "unseen image" of the city, one devoid of the subjective view, while also pretending that the whole history of cinema had never happened. A semi-non-fictional aspect of the plot is the appearance of the internationally famous Portuguese folk music group Madredeus and Manoel de Oliveira, who at that time was the oldest living active film director in the world.

Homage to The Road Movie Trilogy

During the mid-1970s, Wim Wenders made three films which critics have called The Road Movie Trilogy. Lisbon Story pays subtle homage to these films. The sound engineer in Lisbon Story, Philip Winter, has the same name and is played by the same actor (Rüdiger Vogler) as the lead character in Alice in the Cities (1974), though the character Phil Winter was a writer in the first film. The name Winter is repeated in Kings of the Road (1976), also starring Vogler, although his full name in Kings is Bruno Winter and he is a projection-equipment mechanic.