Ashwin whined about it endlessly, but he came with me. An auto, a train, a walk, a disgusting raspberry ice cream, a tequila sunrise, and a taxi later, we reached to find a line already forming - 2 hours before he was to come.

This kind of waiting is something that we just don’t have do anymore, and the out-of-your-control feeling is a thing of the past.

“One of last pure experiences remaining”, I said, trying to find the silver lining, but my dear friend, unconvinced, went off for a walk.

The first Wim Wenders film I watched was Alice In The Cities, when I was 19. I can’t say for sure why I loved the film.

Maybe it’s because a good teacher can make all the difference - in this case, my final year film theory professor Mr Ajit Duara. He clearly loved the film, and spoke about the context of the protagonist’s identity crisis in a post- World War II world; the critique of the American Dream; and little details in the film that made me love it even more - Chuck Berry, Coca Cola, different modes of transportation.

Or it could be the entire premise of the film - the unlikely bond between a thirty year old man and a nine year old girl on an endless trip across New York, Amsterdam, and Germany; or it could be the amazing performances where actors manage to say so much without dialogue.

Alice In The Cities falls under my favourite genre - films where nothing much happens. And yet, amidst the nothingness are these moments - the kind only cinema allows for.

Varma says that his measure for whether a film is a good film is that there should be 3 Moments which you can hold on to. And Alice In The Cities has many such distinct moments, like this photobooth one, and this one, where Philip pretends to blow out the lights of the Empire State Building.

I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person's experience - and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema.

Andrei Tarkovsky, from Sculpting In Time

Alice In The Cities is available online on Mubi.

The elastic time of waiting in that line felt a little like Alice In The Cities. Although I’m not a 9 year old girl anymore, I do feel hungry all the time, like Alice in the film; and Ashwin is like Philip Winters from the film - a jaded thirty year old man - but instead of television and radio, he endlessly scrolls Instagram reels and YouTube Shorts.

We shot the shit, people-watched, and played this or that as time crawled by.

Apart from “milling around” and “knocking around”, this was not the first time Ashwin and I were doing time pass.

The summer of the year that I watched Alice In The Cities for the first time, we felt like kings of the road as a group of us drove down the Malvan coast. College had just got over and our confidence was at an all-time high; we didn’t yet know how the real world was going to hit us.

We made a brief plan before we left: “This is the southernmost point we’ll touch. Here are the beaches we want to visit. There are turtles on this beach, so we’ll definitely go there. Rocky and Mayur ate here”. With ten people and a democratic set up, things don’t go according to plan. It’s not that easy to just find places to stay. The turtles only come out at sunrise.

There were countless U-turns, not having a destination in mind, driving driving driving until you can’t remember the beginning, the middle, or the end of the trip. There were no wrong turns, nowhere that we were supposed to be. Just a lot of… time pass.

We didn’t know back then that having this nothing time with someone is a luxury.

Back in Bombay, an hour and a half into waiting in the line, Nayana called to say that a friend worked in the embassy, and could get us in. Our wait had been unnecessary. Ashwin rolled his eyes. We got nice seats - up front and centre.

Wim Wenders is known for his road movies. Film Heritage Foundation with the Wim Wenders Foundation and Goethe-Institut organised “King Of The Road”, a Wim Wenders retrospective, where the man himself is currently traveling across five cities in India, along with his films.

You can watch as many YouTube videos you want, but there’s a different energy when you’re physically in the presence of someone you greatly admire - in this case, a person who has been making films for the last six decades. When Wim Wenders entered Regal Cinema, the air changed.

He had an ease to him. He thought before answering questions, which he did with such depth and wit. It fells like he just… Knows, with a capital K.

Finding your voice as an artist has so much to do with figuring out how to bring yourself to your work. I loved what Wim said about making personal films versus making private films. To him, a sex scene in a film feels private, not personal. There’s a lot of work that goes into making something that feels honest… “You have to invest something of yourself to learn something from it”. And you can feel while watching his films, that there is something of him in them. Watching Perfect Days, his latest film, felt like a spiritual experience.

In 1973, in the first few days of filming Alice In The Cities, Wim decided to throw out the script. For the rest of the shoot, he wrote the next day’s scenes the previous night. Someone asked, “How do you do it without a script?”

And I love what he said, which applies to making films as well as it does to life:

“I love not knowing… it’s amazing to find out”

In Alice, the protagonist Philip keeps taking polaroid pictures.

Wim Wenders say that with a polaroid, “there was a discrepancy between what you try to capture and what you saw …it’s a physically existing piece of the world - a duplicate, a doppelgänger. There was a drama to it. It was a little reckless, it had less to do with photography, more to do with fun”.

Nayana lent me her Instax Mini, and I took a polaroid of Wim Wenders on stage. It’s a stunning photograph - see if you can spot a Wim.

Susan Sontag says “Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.”
Perhaps because of its timing, I felt constantly like I was already viewing this road trip in hindsight, even while I was in the present, wind hitting my face.

Now when I try and think back to the person I was when I was 19, it’s getting harder and harder to remember. Like when you get a faint whiff and then reach for it too much, and you stop being able to smell it entirely. Maybe that’s why we take photographs - to remember the people we were?

nityamisra

A post shared by @nityamisra

At whatever point in life you are, the road ahead can feel daunting. We’re just trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B on the best possible road.

But imagine, you might find people in your life with whom going off the highway and making U-turns becomes fun, not inconveniences. And sometimes, point B loses its importance, and you start liking the drive. And as you drive, the way you see things starts to shift. Like in Wim Wenders films, when he lingers on a shot after the action is over, instead of cutting because “When you linger, you see things. You stay on it until you see it a different way”.

You might not know the way to point B, or even what point B is. But it’s going to be amazing to find out.