In Cannes, where he was presenting Hammett, Wenders asked several of his colleagues to sit in front of a film camera, alone in their hotel room, and comment on the words he had written on a piece of paper: “More and more films look they’ve been made for television in terms of lighting, framing, and pacing. It seems that for the greater part of the world, television aesthetics have completely replaced movie aesthetics. A great number of films refer to other movies instead of referring to any reality outside itself. Fewer movies are made. The cinema, is it a language about to get lost, an art about to die? Wenders himself appears to introduce the recorded statement of the Turkish filmmaker Yilmaz Güney, who was in hiding for political reasons.
Chambre 666 deals primarily with the death of the language of cinema as it relates to film, of the aesthetic of cinema which is different from the aesthetic of video. An entire generation that now goes to the cinema has already lost this language, it has lost the sensibility for it. They are deeply affected by it because the cinema of today tends increasingly to sensationalise. For me, this represents the death of cinema. Something different will come to life: and, maybe, it will still be called cinema.

 Wim Wenders, 1984