My review was written in July 1984 after watching the film at a Manhattan screening room.
Filmed at the Cannes Film Festival in 192, and shown in a shorter version on French tv that year, Wim Wenders' "Room 666" is an informative and often funny cinematic stunt. Pic is scheduled for release later this year in tandem with a longer docu by Wenders about Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, tentatively titled "Tokyo".
Wenders' concept, simple yet novel, was to present a written list of questions on the future of cinema and its relationship to tv technology to a large number of film directors attending the Cannes Fest, admit them one by one to a hotel room, containing a tape recorder and a pre-set 16mm camera holding one reel of film. With identical compositional framing, each participant is seated in a chair by a window, with a tv set playing next to him, its sound turned off, and permitted complete freedom (other than the time constraint imposed by the single film reel) to present a monolog on camera.
Wenders edited the results, comically choking off the dullards with a sudden blackout (minimalist filmmaking's equivalent to vaudeville tradition's "Get the hook!") and adding a brief, poetic framing story to put everything into context: a shot of an aged cedar standing by the highway, a tree old enough to have seen the entire history of photography, and cinema as well.
Stars of this format emerge as Jean-Luc Godard and Steven Spielberg, each one arguably the key director of, respectively, the '60s and the current decade. Godard addresses with both provocative insight and consierable background the issue of technological change, noting how tv esthetics are replacing cinematic standards. Stating that advertising-supported tv has adopted the representational and editing methods of Sergei Eisentstein's classic "Potemkin", he notes that one-minute "Potemkin"-style commercials work at that length because if they were longer they would face the problem of having to tell the truth about the product involved.
Addressing the tendency toward super-production films and tv miniseries, he notes that in the U. S. the trend to make just one important film, in which the title is the key, not the content. The idea, per Godard, is to shoot less film but release more of it (e.g.ll, lthe miniserires version) than in the past.
Spielberg begins his discourse with some self-serving analysis of how the inflation of film budgets has affected him since the "Jaws" days, but segues into several pointed and valuable observations concerning the trends for studio heads to approve only pictures made "to please everybody", leaving no room for personal films. His segment is definitely an interesting one and takes "Room 666" out of the esoteric territory earmarked by most of the other helmers, each speaking for the most part in his or her native tongue (with English subtitles).
Werner Herzog is the only subject to direct himself actively, turning off the nearby tv set, taking off his shoes and socks, and even dramatically ending his spot by placing a couch pillow over the camera lens. He has no fear of tv, which he compaes to a jukebox: "tv never absorbs you like a movie; you can't turn off the cinema" is the subtilted translation. The late Rainer Werner Fassbinder, looking and sounding weary, defends personal and national-identity cinema against the current trend towards sensationalism in films.
Other speakers often resemble their film output, with Michelangelo Antonioni pacing around the room and asking numerous unanswerable questions, repeatedly stressing what he doesn't know; Monte Hellman proving to be as laconic as one of his pictures; and Paul Morrissey, acting glib yet sincere in his favoring of tv ovr filmmaking since the "intrusion of the director does not exist on tv" and because tv stresses people and characters.
Unfortunately, the third-world directors on view seem hung up with their own parochial issues and do not address Wenders' philosophical questions. The two women included, New York's Susan Seidelman and Brazil's Ana Carolina, seem a bit flustered and inarticulate, adding little to the discourse.
Minimalist in desing Wenders' experimenal concept works and whets one's appetite for similar projects with other subjects. Failing to obtain the righs to use Bernard Herrmann's soundtrack music from "North by Northwest" in the background (reportedly they would have costg more than the filming did), he opted for out-tracks by Jurgen Knieper, leftover from his scoes of other Wenders features. They add a note of melancholy to link "Room 666" with the director's more familiar fictional odysseys.
