I honestly don't remember why I decided to put this on my Netflix queue or how I stumbled across it in the first place, but last night I watched Room 666. The film is still a revelation over thirty years on. Despite its horror flick-style name, the 45-minute documentary was shot during the 1982 Cannes Film Festival by filmmaker, Wim Wenders. Wenders took advantage of the assembled pool of directorial talent gathered in southern France that year to get some of the world's greatest auteurs to talk on camera about the state and craft of cinema.
Each given one reel and 11 minutes to answer the question, "What's the future of cinema?," Jean-Luc Godard (pictured above), Paul Morrissey, Mike De Leon, Monte Hellman, Romain Goupil, Susan Seidelman, Noel Simsolo, RW Fassbinder, Werner Herzog (who can't speak about this, apparently, without first taking off his shoes and socks), Robert Kramer, Ana Carolina, Mahroun Bagdadi, Steven Spielberg (pictured below), Michelangelo Antonioni and Yilmaz Güney (a Turkish filmmaker on his government's shit list, thus only heard through a voice recording) expound on a subject very dear to their hearts.
Each filmmaker enters the hotel room and self-crews him/herself, both shooting and recording his or her thoughts, each wearing the provided sound recorder like a chic purse slung over one shoulder, as they sit, stand, walk around, smoke, gaze out the window, and hold forth. Some are more comfortable than others performing this solo exercise; some only last about two minutes before turning off the equipment, having said all they need to say, tersely, briefly, over and out.
Spielberg is positively prescient in his thoughts and formulations about the landscape and what it portends (he could just as well be speaking about today's climate) and Antonioni riffs on the idea of nine forms of the representation of reality brilliantly, lucidly and candidly. I highly recommend watching this now--it's fascinating. Hopefully, someone will be inspired to do an updated version from Cannes this year. Maybe even Wenders will do the set-up again? Would be interesting.
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