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Notebook on Cities and Clothes

Screening on Film
Directed by Wim Wenders.
Germany, 1989, video, color, 79 min.

As its title suggests, Notebook on Cities and Clothes is more a gathering of ruminations than a documentary. Commissioned by the Centre Pompidou to document Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, director Wenders created a film essay that goes far beyond fashion as it explores the analogies between designing clothes and assembling a movie. The work is a poetic kaleidoscope of two artists, the designer and the director, and of two metropolises, Tokyo and Paris, whose architecture of light and astonishing perspectives mediate their respective crafts. Notebook was among Wenders’s first experiments in video, and the diaristic immediacy of the digital form became an important tool in the filmmaker’s subsequent feature work.

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Frames of Mind

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2018 Norton Lectures in Cinema
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Rosine Mbakam, 2025 McMillan-Stewart Fellow