Place, and the Photography of Wim Wenders

“All my films start with places- cities, deserts. But then in the process of filmmaking, these places step into the background. The characters and stories become paramount, and finally the only parameter of the movie is the truth of that story, and the truth of the characters overriding everything else. With photography I can reverse the process, and I can leave these places up front. They are what the pictures are about.” – Wim Wenders

Commissioned by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris to create a film about fashion, Wim Wenders delivered Notebooks on Cities and Clothes, an idiosyncratic film/video essay on identity, the medium(s) of cinema, and the designs of Yohji Yamamoto. Pondering the present, Wenders, a true global citizen, finds a bilingual metaphor to describe this most transient of art forms. “It seemed to me that Yohji expressed himself in two languages simultaneously,” he says in German-accented English. “He played two instruments at the same time: the fluid and the solid, the fleeting and the permanent, the fugitive and the stable.”
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