Notebook on Cities and Clothes

Mar 24, 2016

(Wim Wenders, West Germany/France, 1989, DCP, 81 min)

Co-presented with SIFF

This “diary film,” as Wenders calls it, investigates the similarities of filmmaking craft to that of the Tokyo-based fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, who, in the early 1980s, shocked and revolutionized the fashion world. Wenders shot the film mainly on his own, as a one-man crew. During the production, which stretched over a year, Yamamoto and Wenders became friends. Excerpt from Wenders’s narration of the film:
“Fashion. I got nothing to do with that. At least that was my reaction when the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris asked me if I would like to make a short film about a fashion designer . . . The world of fashion. I am interested in the world, not in fashion. But maybe my judgment was premature. Why shouldn’t I try to approach the topic without prejudices? Why not look at fashion like any other industry, the film industry, for example? . . . Filmmaking . . . should sometimes just be a way of life. Like going for a walk, reading a newspaper, writing something down, driving a car, or making this film. From day to day it writes itself, driven by the curiosity for the topic.”

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