The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972)

The goalkeeper Josef Bloch (Arthur Brauss) is sent off after committing a foul during an away game. This causes him to completely lose his bearings. He wanders aimlessly through the unfamiliar town, spends the night with the box-office attendant of a movie theater (Erika Pluhar), and strangles her the next morning. But instead of turning himself in or fleeing, Bloch then goes to the country place of his ex-girlfriend (Kai Fischer) and passively waits there for the police to come and arrest him. As Wim Wenders himself has stated, the visual idiom of Alfred Hitchcock’s films provided the model for his debut film. He adheres minutely to the thoroughly “cinematic” source, a novel by Peter Handke. With his cameraman Robby Müller and his editor Peter Przygodda—both of whom had already worked with him on his film thesis at the HFF (University of Television and Film Munich)—in The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, he set forth a collaboration that would weld this team together for years.