Five shots, each dyed a different colour. A man runs with a gun. As the stranger approaches the seeming resolution of his Sisyphean fate, his stride loses trajectory. The longer and more keenly we observe the shooter, the more it seems that each movement causes him pain. As he stumbles and falls on a war-ravaged street, we’re left inadvertently wondering: is he wounded?

Wenders’ first short film Schauplätze (1967) was lost, but two shots survived and became the visual motifs for his second short film, Same Player Shoots Again. In the director’s own words, they form some kind of prelude to his student work at the University of Television and Film Munich. The rest of the experimental film consists of a three-minute shot of the shooter, repeated five times. It was originally shot in black and white, then repeated five times, dyed in a different colour each time, “just like five balls in a pinball machine”.