„Wyzwolić oko ze stanu zamętu”. Retoryka przestrzeni, tożsamości i migracji w filmach Wima Wendersa
“Liberating the eye from confusion”: The rhetoric of space, identity, and migration in the films of Wim Wenders

Summary/Abstract: This article explores the rhetoric of borders in selected films by German filmmaker and photographer Wim Wenders (b. 1945), a key figure in the New German Cinema. It focuses on how boundaries – spatial, cultural, and symbolic – are constructed, represented, and challenged in Wenders’s films set in or referring to the American landscape, including Alice in the Cities (1974), The American Friend (1977), and Paris, Texas (1984). The analysis foregrounds the rhetorical function of borders as metaphors of separation and liminality: between reality and fiction, belonging and alienation, center and periphery. Adopting the perspective of visual and cultural rhetoric, the author asks how Wenders critiques the myth of America and how his films rhetorically negotiate meanings of identity, migration, and otherness. America, seen through the external lens of the director and his characters, becomes a site of rhetorical tension – at once a promise and a void. The aim is to demonstrate how Wenders, through film form and visual tropes, engages in a transnational dialogue on the boundaries of identity, geography, and cultural imagination.

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