Paris, three young actors – Gérard Dépardieu, Hélène Viard, Francis Merle – and Agnès Varda’s cinécriture: the perfect ingredients for making a film. Considered too controversial even for auteur cinema of the mid-1960s, only a few screen tests remain of the film, which arepresented today in a restored version. The play on words of the title transforms its meaning of an English Christmas tale into Christmas Carole. In addition to being in line with Varda’s use of alienation techniques, it immediately shifts the perspective from Dickens’ didactic story to a contemporary moral fable in which the lights and shopping frenzy trigger the reflections of a young ‘situationist’ raisonneur,played by a formidable Dépardieu, on consumer society. On the cusp of 1968 and driven by ideals, young people born at the end of World War II reject the god of money, praise free love and women’s freedom. Shortly afterwards, the unstoppable Varda took off for the US, where she continued her investigation into contemporary conflicts combining documentary and fiction, with films such as Black Panthers, 1968, and Lions, Love… (and Lies), 1969.

Anna Masecchia

With her 16mm camera in hand, the optical prosthesis of a 20th-century flâneuse, Agnès Varda filmed 42nd Street in 1967, shooting a crowdof passersby to the beat of The Doors. Pier Paolo Pasolini is with her, getting lost in the lights, bodies, faces and chaos of a crowded and multicultural New York. Opening in soft focus and closing on Pasolini’s blurred face, the images shot in a direct style and without audio are merged with a dense dialogue between the two artists and intellectuals, which was recorded later. Prompted by Varda, Pasolini reflects on the relationship between reality and fiction, the Christian figurative tradition and the function of audiovisual language in contemporary society. All of which is enhanced by the audio-visual décalage that simultaneously reveals the camera as a device while emphasising the real and political information of the images, which emerges from the background and comes into the foreground. In a matter of minutes,Varda’s art captures Pasolini talking about himself and the essence of cinema as a whole, which for both is an expression of reality itself.

Anna Masecchia

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