It was a decision that rippled through the festival circuit like a thunderclap in a silent theatre. Wim Wenders, the German auteur whose slow-burning epics have long been the preserve of cinephiles with a taste for melancholy landscapes and existential drift, has withdrawn his 1975 film "The Wrong Move" from a retrospective at the Locarno Film Festival. The reason? A scene featuring a topless 14-year-old actress, Rüdiger Vogler’s co-star in a film that now feels like a relic from a different moral universe.
The move comes amid a broader cultural shift, one that has seen institutions from the British Film Institute to the New York Film Festival grapple with the legacy of art made in less scrupulous times. Wenders, now 78, issued a statement expressing regret for what he called a "failure of sensitivity," acknowledging that the scene, intended as a symbol of youthful liberation, now reads as a violation. The actress, whom he did not name, has reportedly supported his decision.
This is not a simple case of censorship. It is the awkward, necessary work of historical reckoning. We have become accustomed to excising problematic material from classic films: the blackface in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," the sexual assault in "The Accused" (though that was the point). But what do we do when the transgression is not a fictional depiction but a real, historical exploitation? The actress in question was 14. The scene was shot in 1974. Wenders has not claimed special pleading. He has pulled the film.
The announcement sent a shiver through the cineaste community. On forums and in screening rooms, the debate is already fracturing into familiar camps: those who see this as a necessary purification of art, others who fear a whitewashing of cinema history, and a third group, arguably the most honest, who simply don't know where to stand. The film itself, a loose adaptation of Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship," is not a masterpiece in the Wenders canon. It is a curio, a stepping stone to "Paris, Texas" and "Wings of Desire."
Yet the principle remains. If we withdraw every film that features a naked teenager, we lose a swath of European cinema from the 1960s and 1970s. Bernardo Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" (though that was consensual adults, albeit with the notorious butter scene). Louis Malle's "Pretty Baby" (Brooke Shields, aged 12). Even the early work of directors like François Truffaut, whose camera lingered on the adolescent girls of "L'Argent de Poche.” These films were made under a different cultural licence, one that assumed the male gaze was universal and the teenage body a valid object of artistic inquiry.
The reckoning is not just about Wenders. It is about the hundreds of films, many still in circulation, that feature minors in vulnerable states. The British Board of Film Classification, for instance, has a list of films that are either cut or banned outright under the Protection of Children Act 1978. But those are explicit cases. Wenders’s withdrawal is voluntary, a gesture of atonement from an artist who has spent a lifetime thinking about images and their moral weight.
On the ground, the reaction is predictably mixed. In the cafes of Notting Hill, I heard a thirtysomething film buff say: "It’s like burning books. Where does it end?" At the bar of the ICA, a young curator told me: "Good. Let’s not pretend art is beyond ethics." Both are right, which is the problem.
What is lost is not just a film but a moment of collective innocence that was never innocent. The topless teen, the smiling director, the approving critics: they all belonged to a world that believed the camera could do no wrong. That world is now closed to us. Wenders has locked the door from the inside. The question is whether we would have had the courage to do the same.
