As legendary German filmmaker Wim Wenders approaches his 80th birthday, the Federal Art Hall in Bonn is celebrating his extraordinary career with a comprehensive exhibition. The show reveals fascinating discoveries, including a letter to former Chancellor Willy Brandt and alternative titles for his masterpiece "Wings of Desire."

No, this is not a shrine. It's more like a clinic. A dissection room for images. White display walls stand between white walls, white light falls on black-and-white and color photographs and film clips. A temple of cinema would have to look completely different, with many more shadow zones, darkness, secret chambers, hidden places. But here, in the Federal Art Hall, it's not about cinema in general, but about his cinema: the life's work of Wim Wenders, who turns eighty in ten days. The Bonn museum greets him with an exhibition. And Wenders warmly greets back.

But shouldn't they have built some kind of temple for him, the greatest living German film director? After all, in the nearly sixty years since his first tentative steps with the camera, Wenders hasn't simply made films, but cult films. Objects of worship. Sequences and film stills that museums around the world use to adorn themselves. Just like the Grand Palais in Paris, which six years ago made its great dome hall available to Wenders for a massive installation: scenes from "Pina," "Wings of Desire," "Paris, Texas," "The American Friend," and twelve other films that flowed together in the enormous hall into a single visual intoxication. That was the altar one had wished for his cinema. But the mass celebrated there was for himself. One cannot stage one's own cult more powerfully. It was as if Wenders had anticipated his own birthday celebration.

Therefore, it's perhaps quite fitting that the Federal Art Hall, which developed its show together with the German Film Institute and Film Museum Frankfurt, has cooled down the pathos of the presentation to museum temperature. Against a white background, things can be seen more clearly. The harsh light etches away the blurs, the superficial effects. What remains then truly has substance.

There is, right at the beginning, the art. That Wenders wanted to become a painter before he became a filmmaker has long been known, but very few have seen his early pictures. Here they hang now: drawings, watercolors, mixed forms. Industrial landscapes, towers and smokestacks, a view into the green, a church. A hint of Cézanne, a bit of Beckmann. And quite a lot of Paul Klee. Klee's talent for making the symbolic concrete and the concrete symbolic has always fascinated Wenders, not only in the "Angelus Novus," which he chose as the guiding image of his most famous film. But the Angelus became his lucky charm.

And so the exhibition jumps from childhood directly into "Wings of Desire." From here, from this masterwork, the stages of an unprecedented director's career could be surveyed like a landscape: the apprentice years at the Munich Film Academy, the mature period in New German Cinema, the trauma of "Hammett" and the self-liberation with "Paris, Texas," the return to Berlin and the departure to Australia, the second American phase, the renewed return and the discovery of 3D, finally the parallel work on unsuccessful fiction films and successful documentaries. And lastly, like a sunset, the miracle of "Perfect Days."

But the exhibition doesn't look for chronological patterns in this filmmaker's life. It wants to assemble the Wenders phenomenon from individual facets: the photographer, the cineast, the traveler, the friend of Peter Handke and Sam Shepard, the reader of Rilke and Paul Auster, the admirer of Lou Reed, Anselm Kiefer, Sebastião Salgado and Yoji Yamamoto, the art connoisseur, the tech freak, and so forth. It could have also mentioned the film professor, opera director, and president of the European Film Academy, without even beginning to exhaust the quantity of possible mosaic pieces.

Because Wenders is not only a cinema animal but also a workhorse. Where others have a private life, he has projects. The administrative structure he founded in 1977 with his production company Road Movies has long since become a conglomerate of film production, photo studio (which he operates with his wife, photographer Donata Wenders), and the Wim Wenders Foundation. As the only German director, he owns the rights to all the films he has ever made.

In this way, he controls not only the exploitation but also the interpretation of his work. It's no coincidence that one of his first and two of his last films practically don't appear in the exhibition. That he doesn't consider the 1973 adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel "The Scarlet Letter" with Senta Berger and Lou Castel to be a real Wenders film, its creator has explained many times, but "Every Thing Will Be Fine" and "Submergence" are also faded out in Bonn – two fiction films from 2015 and 2017 that failed both artistically and commercially, but precisely thereby complete the picture of a director who occasionally gets caught up in ideas that don't suit him. Wenders has struck them from his balance sheet.

The positive side of this alliance between exhibition makers and exhibition subject is the climate of trust into which one is inevitably drawn. Wim Wenders himself wrote and recorded the texts of the audio guide, and so the guide has become the most important exhibit in the Federal Art Hall, if only because it contains an entire catalog of those golden Wenders sentences that have always accompanied his work. "The view from the windows of childhood days is the first cinema in our lives." "The camera is an eye that can look forward and backward at the same time." "I don't like films that only pretend to be set somewhere." "Actually, that's the only possible way to tell stories: one after the other."

That's not only well said. It is, when read as text to the photos that Wenders took of car graveyards in Australia, parking garages in Houston, Texas, street corners in Butte, Montana, and the no-man's land at the Berlin Wall, also well seen, well thought. One appeal of engaging with Wenders lies in the fact that when watching his films, one immediately notices that someone there doesn't simply want to make cinema. But that he wants to get everything out of cinema that is at all possible: self-knowledge, world knowledge, feelings, thoughts, essence and appearance. And that's why the clinical presentation of the photos, film stills, posters, and projections on the white walls is perhaps not the perfect key to Wim Wenders' world after all. Because with him, it's always about much more than film. Namely, also about literature, pop music, painting, photography, morality and metaphysics, and much else. About art and life. And about himself.

Therefore, an exhibition that wanted to show the whole Wenders would also have to talk about what complements him: the art of others. From the beginning, his images were shaped by role models – first by the American Western, then by Truffaut and the Nouvelle Vague, then again by the Americans, Scorsese and Cassavetes, and finally increasingly by Yasujirō Ozu, the unreachable role model to whom he has at least come within sight with "Perfect Days," the story of a toilet cleaner in Tokyo and his lonely, modest happiness. Added to this are the poets and writers he has read and revered and often also accommodated in his films: Goethe, Rilke, Hammett, Shepard, Paul Auster, and again and again Peter Handke, the oldest friend.

A few of them hang as photos in the Federal Art Hall, others stand with their books in a hand library that was compiled in consultation with Wenders. But actually, "Wilhelm Meister" should hang next to the scene images from "Wrong Move" and the "Duino Elegies" next to "Wings of Desire," which they inspired.

And then there's the loneliness. "When photographing, I must fundamentally be alone," Wenders explains in the audio guide. The places of the world only open themselves to those who face them alone. But cinema is teamwork. In every Wenders work, one feels the tension between the community and the egomaniac, which should tear the films apart if the director hadn't had helpers who enabled him to simultaneously shut himself off from everything and connect with everyone. Among them are the cameramen Robby Müller and Franz Lustig, the editor Peter Przygodda, the assistant Dagmar Forelle, and some others.

Some of them have already died. In Bonn, one would have liked to encounter them again, in the reverse shot to the film images. Because the cinema of loneliness is not a lonely affair; it needs accomplices. In the Federal Art Hall, the appearance of the films reigns: it seems as if Wenders was alone with his actors on the set. But even the angel on the Victory Column was in company. He sat on a studio prop, far from the gilded original.

In the last hall sits the brain of the exhibition: its archive. Here one finally comes very close to the trade secret of the Wenders universe. It's a mixture of thoroughness and improvisation. There are the receipts from a beer hall on which Wenders noted two dozen alternative film titles for "Wings of Desire" with a ballpoint pen, including "Heaven and Earth," "The Celestial Tent," and "Berlin and the End of Eternity." And there is the error-free typed, pencil-edited typescript of his devastating review of Joachim Fest's documentary "Hitler – A Career," still one of the best film reviews ever written in Germany.

Finally, a letter that reached the seriously ill former Chancellor Willy Brandt in February 1992: "I would like to shoot another film in Berlin this spring, this time a less poetic, more reality-based one... and there I think above all of you." Brandt was supposed to play one of the celebrities in "Faraway, So Close!" over whose shoulder Otto Sander as the angel Cassiel looks, but he was already too frail. In his place stepped Mikhail Gorbachev, the last regent of the dying Soviet empire.

The legend-teller is always in danger of becoming a legend himself. Wim Wenders becomes Wim le Grand or, as in the Bonn exhibition, W.I.M. Consequently, the Federal Art Hall passes over the numerous breaks in his career in silence. Yet it was precisely the negative impulses that repeatedly drove his cinema forward. The traumatic experiences of the "Hammett" production gave him the energy to shoot "The State of Things" and "Paris, Texas." The disappointment over the failure of the major project "Until the End of the World" and, even more, the cold reception of his second angel film in Germany drove Wenders once again to America, where he shot with Andie MacDowell ("The End of Violence") and Milla Jovovich ("The Million Dollar Hotel").

When the USA fell into patriotic paranoia after September 11, he returned to Europe to complete his collection of lonely men in life crises with "Palermo Shooting" and finally get serious about 3D technology in "Pina." And when the 3D fiction films "Every Thing Will Be Fine" and "The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez" didn't work, he continued the documentary work with his papal portrait and his homage to Anselm Kiefer.

A life in zigzag, back and forth. In the Federal Art Hall, it appears as a finished puzzle in which one piece fits into another. It may be that Wim Wenders wants to see himself this way, but it would be better for his films if he remained unfinished, curious, on the road. "Actually, I think that's my real profession: traveler." How true. The exhibition has found a true image after all: through a window, one looks into the inner courtyard where a pair of angel wings lies on the gravel. With Wenders, the fall from heaven is not an end but a beginning. The world is rediscovered. His and ours.

"W.I.M. – The Art of Seeing" runs until January 11, 2026, at the Federal Art Hall Bonn, and from March 10 at the Film Museum Frankfurt.