This is the first of Wenders' three collaborations (with The Left Handed Woman and Wings of Desire) with the Austrian writer Peter Handke. The soccer player Bloch (Arthur Brauss) quits the game, goes to the movies, picks up the ticket-seller, quietly kills her, and takes refuge in a small village. Wenders translates the mystery of Bloch's anxiety, the mystery of Handke's prose, into cinematic terms: the action progresses by increments, punctuated by black. Bloch is without redemption, seemingly without self-knowledge: he only reacts. So objects become meaningless clues to this man's interior life. (From the book: "Each glimpse of a thing was immediately followed by its word. The chair, the clothes hangers, the key.") Everyone Bloch meets is in the grip of an obsession, given to longwinded spiels or the ominous non-sequitur ("One of our children was killed by pumpkins"). The music, likewise, is insistent, atonal. As in Alice in the Cities, the soundtrack is a brilliantly understated melange of radio, juke box, odd city sounds, and silence. It is the language that surrounds Bloch, and propels him, the language that he doesn't hear.