Kehr Capsule of the Week: Room 666 (1982)

During the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders induced a number of filmmakers to come to room 666 of the Carlton Hotel, where they found a video camera and a questionnaire inviting them to comment on the future of the cinema. The results of Wenders’s stunt are thoroughly fascinating: as each director finds himself alone in a room, facing the blank stare of the tool of his trade, he instantly invents a little fiction about himself, ranging from Jean-Luc Godard‘s impersonation of the weary cynic and Werner Herzog‘s dazzling star turn as the great iconoclast to Steven Spielberg‘s absolutely chilling impression of the smug, condescending Hollywood mogul. Among the other auto-interviewees are Paul Morrissey, Mike De Leon, Monte Hellman, Romain Goupil, Susan Seidelman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Robert Kramer, Ana Carolina, Mahoud Dagbadi, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Yilmaz Guney.