A man walks out of the West Texas desert in a dark suit and a red baseball cap, carrying an empty water jug. The cap is the most saturated colour in the first frame of Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders’s film of 1984, a small red against a washed-out blue sky and rock the colour of dust. For the next two hours and twenty-five minutes the colours of Paris, Texas keep doing what that cap does: red sits on people, Travis’s cap and Jane’s pink sweater, and the world around them is more and more often green.
The red is in the costumes. The green comes from the way the film was shot: Robby Müller used no filters and kept the light each location already had, so the tubes in a clinic, a gas station or a phone booth reach the screen green. And the film ends on a piece of physics you can check with a lamp and a window at night. A one-way mirror only works while one side is brighter. Switch the light and it flips.
Robby Müller’s light in Paris, Texas
Müller, a Dutch cinematographer, had shot Wenders’s early films from Summer in the City on. After Paris, Texas won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1984, he talked to Barbara Scharres for the February 1985 issue of American Cinematographer, and he didn’t want to talk about equipment. Interviewers kept asking him which filters he had used, and he finally offered one of them a bet: “the first person who can name more than one filter I used gets $1,000.”
“It was just working with light, that’s all, no filters. It’s not that I’m against it in principle, but in this special film and in lots that I did I found other solutions.”
Robby Müller, American Cinematographer, February 1985
His rule on location was to keep the light he found there. “I tend to very much respect the light that is already there on the location,” he said, and you choose a location “whether you’re conscious of it or not, because you have a certain light there.” In the bar at the start, where Travis comes in out of the glare, Müller left the room dark on purpose: “if I start lighting up the whole bar it loses a lot of its character.” American Cinematographer described what that gives you, “the extreme, cool blackness of the interior, the thin, bright neon of a beer sign and the savage whiteness pouring through the screen door in the background.”
Wenders had scouted the locations first, with a medium-format camera and colour negative film, and he told Michael Almereyda in 2024 what the trip was for: “I wanted to get ready for the West and understand its light and not be afraid of its primary Kodachrome colors.”
The Paris, Texas colour palette: red against green
Sample six frames in story order and the palette splits cleanly. The reds sit on people, Travis’s cap and Jane’s pink sweater. The greens sit on the places in between, a clinic, an ice machine, a payphone, a car park at the end of the day.
Travis walks out of the desert
The doctor’s room in Terlingua
An ice machine at night, the sky still red
Hunter on a payphone at night
Jane in the pink sweater
The car park at dusk, near the end
The six key colours
The greens aren’t all one green. The doctor’s room in Terlingua is close to leaf green, and by the ice machine at night the green has drifted toward blue-green. On a screen’s colour circle the opposite of red is cyan, so the further the greens lean toward blue, the more directly they face the reds, and the ice machine’s green sits almost straight across from Jane’s sweater.
What that does to the eye had a name long before film. Michel Eugène Chevreul, who ran the dye works at the Gobelins tapestry manufactory in Paris, published it in 1839, and in Charles Martel’s English translation his law reads: “In the case where the eye sees at the same time two contiguous colours, they will appear as dissimilar as possible, both in their optical composition and in the height of their tone.” Put red against green and each one pushes the other further away. On Chevreul’s own colour circle they sit straight across from each other.
Why fluorescent light looks green on film
A room that looks white to the people in it can come out green on film for a plain physical reason. A fluorescent tube is mercury vapour in a glass tube with a coating inside: electricity makes the mercury give off ultraviolet, and the ultraviolet makes the coating glow. Mercury also gives off a few sharp visible lines of its own, the strongest at 405, 436 and 546 nanometres, the last of them a vivid green. The halophosphate coating of ordinary tubes before the 1990s glows mostly yellow and blue, and mercury’s green line still stands up through it. To the eye, with nothing to compare it with, the mix looks white.
Your eye corrects for it. Walk into a room lit by tubes and within moments the walls look white again, an adjustment called chromatic adaptation, the same one that keeps a red apple red at noon and by a fire. Colour film doesn’t adjust. It’s balanced for one kind of light, and anything else lands on it with a cast. Kodak’s data sheet for Gold 200, one of its daylight colour films, gives the cure for Cool White tubes: a 30M filter and two thirds of a stop more exposure. M is magenta, the colour that holds green back.
Müller said he used no filters on Paris, Texas and kept the light that was already there, so any tube in front of his camera, in a clinic, a gas station or a phone booth, reached the negative with its green in it. The negative is not the end of it. Kodak gives its filters as the way to get good colour “without special printing”, because a cast on colour negative can be partly corrected at the lab when the film is printed. The greens in Paris, Texas were kept twice: once in front of the lens, and again when the prints were made.
The empty lot in Paris, Texas
For the first part of the film Travis doesn’t speak. His brother Walt drives out from Los Angeles to fetch him from the clinic in Terlingua, and he’s already gone, walking again, miles down the road. When he finally talks, what he brings out is the photograph: a vacant lot he bought in Paris, Texas, the town where he believes his parents conceived him, where he meant to build a house and live with his family. Paris is in the title, and the film never goes there. Wenders opened it in a stretch of desert called the Devil’s Graveyard instead. He had wanted a bigger route, through California and up to Alaska, and in 2023, in El País, he remembered Sam Shepard talking him out of it: “You can find all of America in one state: Texas.”
A lot is a home with the house taken out, and all Travis has of it is a photograph. Welsh has a word for that kind of homesickness, hiraeth: longing for a home you cannot return to, or that perhaps never was. Travis’s place never had a memory to match.
His brother has the other kind of picture. Walt shows Hunter, the boy he and his wife Anne have adopted, home movies of Travis and Jane, the family as it looked before it came apart.
The one-way mirror in Paris, Texas: who sees whom
Travis and Hunter find Jane in Houston. She works in a peep-show club, where each customer sits on one side of a one-way mirror and talks to the woman on the other side by telephone. American Cinematographer describes the booth exactly: a “tiny, near-dark cubicle” with “a shaded desk lamp on a shelf beneath the glass”. When the woman comes in and flips her light switch, the glass becomes a window, and as the magazine put it, “he sees her but she sees only herself in a mirror.”
The physics is simpler than it looks. The glass carries a coat of metal so thin it reflects some light and lets the rest through, and the light always passes equally in both directions. The trick is only brightness. On the lit side the room’s own reflection drowns out the faint light from the dark side, so it’s a mirror. On the dark side the light from the bright room swamps the dim reflection, so it’s a window. Pick a light below and watch who wins.
Emil Bloch patented his “transparent mirror” in 1903 for advertising, a glass that stays “opaque on its face under ordinary light conditions, but transparent when a strong light is dashed in the rear.” On Paris, Texas it was suggested that Müller fake the booth with plain glass. He told American Cinematographer he never considered it, and that it was actually easier to use the real thing. Nastassja Kinski, who plays Jane, has said that in those scenes she could see no one, only the mirror, and that it gave her a real feeling of solitude.
On his second visit Travis turns his chair away from the glass and tells her a story on the phone, about a man and a younger woman who fell in love, married and had a child, about drinking, a cowbell tied to her foot, and a fire. He tells it with his back to her. Shepard had moved on to other work by then, and L. M. Kit Carson remembered how the speech arrived. Wenders called Shepard and told him what he wanted, and “Shepard wrote it down, dictated it over the phone” to a secretary. They shot all day, and Harry Dean Stanton did it in one go at the end of it.
The ending of Paris, Texas explained: she turns off her light
Partway through the story Jane realises who is talking. American Cinematographer describes what she does next: “Jane turns off her ceiling light in order to try to see Travis’s face. At that point the mirror effect reverses and she sees him illuminated by the lamp while he sees his own reflection.” She can only see him by giving up her own light, and when she does, the glass hands the mirror to him.
Partway along the slider the light on both sides is even, and the glass shows both faces in one place. Robert Kolker and Peter Beicken point out that Travis and Jane never touch at the end, and that the nearest they come is their faces merging in the glass. Müller said the whole scene depended on getting the levels right. “It’s the subtleties that are the most difficult things,” he said, and he compared it to playing the piano: “what makes you a good player is the graduation in volume. It’s not finding the notes in the right order, it’s how you touch them.”
They had no room to try again. “There was not enough time, not enough money and we only had enough negative to complete the scene and no money to buy more,” Müller said. “The last shot was also our last roll.” Kinski got through it without a flaw, with a crew member in the bar next door on a walkie-talkie, calling the gap in the jukebox.
Then Travis tells her where Hunter is, a hotel room in Houston, and gives her the number. Jane goes up to her son. Travis watches from the car park and drives off, and the car park around him is green again under the last of the dusk. He brings the family back together and doesn’t stay in it.
The XPRMTS print that belongs beside this film is The Burning Revelation. A man in red, down in the fire, reaches up toward a pale winged woman who lifts away from him into a deep blue sky, and in the poem that goes with it he realises “that she was wearing the perfect disguise”. It is the booth seen from Travis’s chair: red on him, a cooler light on her, and a reach that never closes.
Frequently asked questions
Who was the cinematographer of Paris, Texas?
Robby Müller, the Dutch director of photography who shot most of Wenders’s early films and later worked with Jim Jarmusch and Lars von Trier. He said he shot it without filters.
Why is Paris, Texas so green?
A fluorescent tube carries mercury’s green line at 546 nanometres, and daylight colour film records its light green unless a magenta filter holds the green back. Müller said he used no filters and kept the light each location already had, and the green was left in when the film was printed, where a lab can correct part of a cast.
How does the one-way mirror work in Paris, Texas?
The glass reflects part of the light and passes the rest, equally in both directions. Jane’s room is lit and the customer’s booth is dark, so she sees her own reflection and he sees through. When Jane turns off her ceiling light and his lamp is on, it reverses: she sees Travis, and he sees himself.
Did Paris, Texas win the Palme d’Or?
Yes, at Cannes in May 1984, with a screenplay by Sam Shepard, adapted by L. M. Kit Carson, and a slide-guitar score by Ry Cooder.
Read next
- Why Nighthawks feels lonely, the diner with no door and the light of 1942.
- The neon of Fallen Angels and Chungking Express, Wong Kar-wai’s night colour.
- Martin Scorsese’s red, the other red of American cinema.
- Why Death Stranding looks like Iceland, another man walking a long empty land, and the painters who got there first.
References
- Barbara Scharres, “Robby Müller and Paris, Texas”, American Cinematographer, February 1985, republished by the ASC, 10 March 2023: theasc.com
- Wim Wenders in conversation with Michael Almereyda, “I Need Places to Tell a Story”, Interview, 14 February 2024: interviewmagazine.com
- Gregorio Belinchón, “Forty years on from Paris, Texas: Wim Wenders tells the story of the making of his masterpiece”, El País, 13 May 2023: elpais.com
- Robert Phillip Kolker and Peter Beicken, The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 134; Nastassja Kinski in the Criterion Collection booklet for Paris, Texas, 2009, p. 24.
- Michel Eugène Chevreul, De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs, Paris, 1839; quoted from The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, translated by Charles Martel, Bohn, London, 1860, paragraph 16: archive.org
- National Institute of Standards and Technology, Handbook of Basic Atomic Spectroscopic Data, “Strong Lines of Mercury”: physics.nist.gov
- Kodak Alaris, KODAK GOLD 200 Film, technical data E-7022, June 2023, “Fluorescent and High-Intensity Discharge Lamps”: kodakprofessional.com
- Emil Bloch, “Transparent mirror”, US Patent 720,877, filed 26 September 1902, issued 17 February 1903: patents.google.com
- Wikipedia, “Paris, Texas (film)”, “One-way mirror”, “Fluorescent lamp”, “Chromatic adaptation” and “Michel Eugène Chevreul”, consulted November 2026.
- Images: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-DIG-fsac-1a34721 and 1a34725, no known restrictions on publication; Chevreul’s plate from the Science History Institute via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. The colours in “Red against green” were sampled from frames of the film for this essay.