Free screening of Wim Wenders’ unsettling sophomore feature

Soccer fever continues at Goethe-Institut New York with a free screening of Wim Wenders’ classic The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick.

Alone in an unfamiliar Vienna after being ejected from a soccer match for a foul, goalkeeper Josef wanders aimlessly through the streets, ducking into bars, theaters, and telephone booths. He spends the night with a cinema cashier after following her home, but when the morning-after turns violent, Josef finds himself fleeing to his former girlfriend’s house in the country. There, he decides to live in plain sight, whether the police arrive or not.

Based on the novella of the same title by Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke, The Goalie’s Anxiety gathers urban flaneurism, Hitchcockian suspense, mid-century ennui, and post-war cultural Americanization into a queasy but definitive early work of one of German cinema’s greats.

“Wim Wenders’ bizarre noir is a keeper... [a] majestic meditation on madness, misogyny and the American dream.” —Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 07/13/2018

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick screened at the 1972 Venice Film Festival, where it was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize, and at the first edition of New Directors/New Films in the same year. Unavailable outside of Germany for forty years due to uncleared music rights, the film was restored and re-released internationally in 2014.

Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter
Dir. Wim Wenders
West Germany/Austria, 1971
100 min.
With Arthur Brauss, Kai Fischer, Erika Pluhar