Paris, Texas (film)

Paris, Texas is a 1984 film directed by Wim Wenders. The screenplay is by L.M. Kit Carson and Sam Shepard, and the distinctive musical score was composed by Ry Cooder. The cinematography is by Robby Muller.

The film stars Harry Dean Stanton as Travis, an amnesiac who has been lost for four years and is taken in by his brother (played by Dean Stockwell). He later tries to put his life back together and understand what happened between him, his wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski), and his son Hunter (Hunter Carson).

The film was a co production between companies in France and West Germany, but was filmed in the US.

Title
The film is named after the Texas town of Paris, but no footage was shot there. Instead, Paris is referred to as the location of a vacant lot owned by Travis that is seen in a photograph.

The photograph shows a desert landscape, but in fact the real Paris rests on the edge of the forests of East Texas, far from any desert.

Style
Paris, Texas is notable for its stunning images of the Texan landscape. The first shot is a bird's eye-view of the desert, a bleak, dry, alien landscape. A hawk lands on a boulder. A man walking alone in the desert stops and looks. He is wearing a cheap Mexican suit, a red baseball cap, has several days of stubble, and his ankles are bandaged. He staggers, lost and alone. His clothes are covered in dust and damp with sweat. Shots follow of old advertisement billboards, placards, graffiti, rusty iron carcasses, old railway lines, neon signs, motels, seemingly never-ending roads, and Los Angeles, finally culminating in some famous scenes shot outside a drive-through bank in down-town Houston. The cinematography is typical of Robby Muller's work, a long-time collaborator of Wim Wenders.

The film is accompanied by a haunting slide-guitar score by Ry Cooder, based on Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground."

Theme
The central theme in the film is social alienation in America, in this case torn from personal alienation so deep that the characters struggle for language to describe it. The barren, sagebrush scenery of Texas, the hodgepodge development in the hills of Los Angeles, and the cold architecture in then-booming Houston resonate as an underscore to this theme.

Responses
The film won the 1984 Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the Cannes Film Festival. It was screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 1985 and again in 2006 as part of the Sundance Collection category.

In popular culture
Irish pop-rock group U2 cite Paris, Texas as an inspiration for their album The Joshua Tree.
Scottish rock group, Primal Scream, sampled Nastassja Kinski in the film for use on their critically acclaimed album Screamadelica.
Both Kurt Cobain and Elliott Smith mentioned this film as one of their favorite movies of all time.
Brooklyn-based band Nada Surf mentions the movie in their song "Comes a Time" from the album The Weight Is a Gift.
The last track of Gotan Project's second album Lunático is a cover of Ry Cooder's theme song for the film.
Scottish group Texas was named based on the film.
The band Travis is named after the main character of this movie and mention the film in their song "New Amsterdam" from the album The Boy With No Name.
Video game developer Goichi Suda named it his favorite movie in an IGN interview.
Australian band, Cog, have a song called "Paris, Texas".
Francois Bovon was influenced to write Luke the Theologian after he saw Paris, Texas.
The film is mentioned by the comedy troupe The State in a skit on their MTV television series.
Los Angeles singer/songwriter Fontaine, has a song called "Paris, Texas".
Instrumental rock band The six parts seven have a song called "From California to Houston, on lightspeed" which uses audio samples from the film. The song's title is also an homage to the film.
Travis Towe lived in Paris, Texas during childhood and in 1984, but it is not known whether the lead character's name is based on this particular Travis.