Film

Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989)

Director: Wim Wenders

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

After the dizzy heights of Wings of Desire, Wenders came down to earth with this scribble-pad of a documentary, comprised of sundry video doodles and 16mm jottings. Invited by the Georges Pompidou Centre to make a film 'in the context of fashion', he overcame his initial scorn, and decided to fly from Berlin to Paris and Tokyo on the trail of clothes designer guru Yohji Yamamoto. There is footage of the black-clad genius of the cutting-shears spluttering about his love for cities from the roof of the Pompidou, circling and snipping in his Tokyo studio, and sitting with Buddha-like serenity amid the chaos of his Paris show. Through it all, Wenders drones on with a series of either banal or tenuous links and meditations on the similarities between film-making and clothes-designing, the suitability of video to the ephemerality of fashion, and how he had been aching to meet Yamamoto ever since purchasing one of his creations. The result has all the panache of a hastily-assembled jumble of out-takes from a Clothes' Show filler.

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