Watched in the ARD Media Library

"Shoot anything you can't stand."

"Alice in den Städten" is a story of traveling with a man and a child in the leading roles, just like in Wim Wenders' later "Paris, Texas". But here it's not father and son, but two strangers who embark on an odyssey and get close to each other. Yet as different as this constellation may be, the principle is the same: through contact with the child, the adults concern themselves with their own identity, come closer and finally find themselves again.

"Alice in den Städten" tells of destruction and reconstruction. It is the destruction of Philip Winter, the journalist who is destroyed by America and its culture - or does he destroy himself in the end because he can't help it? When he writes in bitter, accusatory words about American television, when he can no longer bear it, but still sticks to the screen late at night, in silent stunnedness and fascination at the same time about what he sees there. Philip refuses to belong to the American consumer society, but he can't escape fast food and television, and the result is a deconstructed person who no longer knows himself, who depressed in the evening flees to a girlfriend because he wants to be built up by her. She asks him to leave, but he doesn't hear that at first, because he only hears what he wants to hear. This is part of his survival strategy, which is later thrown overboard by the little girl Alice. It is said that he has lost the feeling of himself, he no longer feels alive. That's why he takes the photos, because it's about proving that he's still alive, and through all these strategies he creates his own universe, which is expected to welcome him in a friendly way, but the opposite is the case, because paradoxically he still feels strange, unable to escape.

Nevertheless, he keeps on trying, he keeps on trying to "shoot" until a small human being does not leave his side and is dependent on him. In one of the most memorable scenes of the film, Alice's face merges with that of her headstrong protector Philip in one photograph - because the two are not as different as one might think. Alice is a hippie, as is her new friend, the journalist with writer's block. She breaks what she breaks. What she doesn't want to do, she doesn't do, and unlike Philip, who has to look after her, she gets away with it because no such heavy responsibility rests on her shoulders. She also plays, she also wants to escape, she also wants to taste freedom with all her senses. Perhaps she will succeed. What she has succeeded in is the restoration of Philip, who is constantly nervously tense, but who must realize more and more how good this reflection through this encounter does him.