Director: Wim Wenders
Year Released: 1982
Rating: 2.5
Wenders invited several prominent and 'indie' filmmakers to a hotel room during the 1982 Cannes Film Festival to talk about their views on the future of movies/moviemaking. Some appear flippant and dismissive (Paul Morrissey's response is particularly stupid) while others predict that the cinema will be going in wild, unexpected directions (Herzog's statements are eerily prescient, predicting the democratization of filmmaking with the advancement of technology). It's easy to look back twenty five years ago and criticize, knowing where we've 'come' with the medium, but I think it's unhealthy and unproductive to ever think of something as being "dead" like some predict here (Godard seems uneasy about television): art forms (music, 'painting,' writing) don't exactly 'die' but are rather 'recreated' or morph into different, but not entirely dissimilar, forms. The only thing that 'dies' is an individual's expectation that something can remain the exact same for years and years and never evolve. Or perhaps Fassbinder, smoking his cigarette and choosing his words carefully, has the right idea: the question of the Future of Cinema is one that cannot be answered with definite terms, and should most likely be passed over in silence.
