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Notebook on Cities and Clothes
(Aufzeichnungen zu Kleidern und Städten)

Directed by Wim Wenders.
West Germany, 1989, DCP, color, 79 min.
German with English subtitles.
DCP source: Janus Films

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, 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 the artists’ respective crafts. Notebook was among Wenders’ 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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