The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
Wim Wenders’s second feature, adapted from Peter Handke’s novel of the same name, is a tautly constructed, Hitchcockian tale of anomie and isolation. After goalkeeper Josef Bloch (Arthur Brauss) is ejected from a football match, he wanders around Vienna, spends the night with a cinema cashier, and commits a seemingly purposeless crime. As always, Wenders’s use of music is unerringly precise and surprising—“The Lion Sleeps Tonight” as the anthem to an existential crisis?—and as Bloch puts another coin in the jukebox, the film charts his moral disintegration with a resolute lack of sentimentality.
Presented by The Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center as part of New Directors/New Films, in collaboration with the German Film Office
Die Angst des Tormanns vor dem Elfmeter
Dir. Wim Wenders
West Germany/Austria, 1972
101 minutes