Chambre 666

Chambre 666 (1982) is a fascinating time capsule of a film. During the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders, a visionary in his own right, set up a static camera in room 666 of the Hotel Martinez and invited a who's who of filmmaking - Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Maroun Bagdadi, Steven Spielberg, Michelangelo Antonioni, and even Yilmaz Güney (via voice message) - to ponder the future of cinema.

Wenders presented each director with a list of questions, most notably, "Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?" Each had one 16mm reel (roughly 11 minutes) to respond. The result is a captivating montage of insights, anxieties, and predictions from some of the most influential figures in film history.

This exercise should be repeated every decade, I think. And every ten years, the participants should be confronted with their previous responses, their reactions captured on film.

We're witnessing some of the greatest minds of our time grappling with the future of their art form, and it's a truly bizarre feeling. It's like a time capsule, a glimpse into the past that forces us to reflect on the present.

Wim Wenders, you genius.