Audio By Carbonatix
What is fashion? Is it a craft devised to reflect the times, an enduring art, or an agent of change? Is there a parallel existence between Western and Eastern cultures that clothes can represent, address, and resolve? Are high fashion and film comparable artistic means? If so, are they suited to encapsule the identities of cities and their inhabitants? Despite their reliance on style and form, are they amorphous? These are some of the questions – there are others – posed and pondered by Wim Wenders in his 1989 documentary, Notebook on Cities and Clothes, currently playing at the Alliance Film/Video Project on Miami Beach. It’s unlike anything Wenders, who directed Wings of Desire and Until the End of the World, has done before. And the better for it.
There are more questions here than answers. Notebook is ostensibly a profile – or a tribute, perhaps – to Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, whose dual career in Japan and Europe Wenders follows using both 35-millimeter film and video cameras. This is one of the points of reference aimed at in the film: in the same manner a designer can alter the identity, perceived or real, of a woman by choice of material or change of style, thus is the picture of Yamamoto’s coutouristic world similarly altered through the director’s deliberately virtuosic camera angles, video superimpositions onto film, and editing cuts.
Wenders is a discreet interlocutor, saving his own observations for voice-over narration. Yamamoto, conversely, is a quietly compelling subject, alternately humorous and intense, subtle, proceeding cautiously in his musings with the patience of a trained student of philosophy. One of the most affecting moments comes when Yamamoto, looking wearily over the Paris urban landscape, says he is not much interested in the future, only the present. That, he insists, is the window through which our past and future selves are reconciled.
One of Notebook’s keenest and most successful contrivances has Yamamoto speaking Japanese while in Paris, then English when he’s in Tokyo. (That may be the modus vivendi of the post-America culture.) Wenders’s own narration is in English: it’s an introspective, slightly self-indulgent locution, and you might initially conclude his line of questioning is both didactic and portentous, indeed unbearably German. This would be a mistake. Notebook on Cities and Clothes is thoughtful and creative, a documentary whose sense of purpose, admittedly a bit muddled at first as Wenders literally spells out his troubles with the nature of fashion, grows with every passing sequence. The success is cumulative, and in Wenders’s multifarious inquiry, patience is indulged but handsomely repaid.
The film also is a commentary on the shifting faces of cities where we live. In Wenders’s view, Paris and Tokyo are often indistinguishable from each other – same high-rises, same expressways, same billboards. This is not a rash generalization; obviously, they’re not the same superficially. But in essence both exhibit the same thing – unquenchable human vitality. This is a valuable cultural position, and it is fitting that Notebook should be playing on South Beach, the site where, night by night, so many pitiful fools ravage their minds, or what’s left of them, in Clubland – and call that culture.
Goethe’s Faust mentions das Ding an sich, or the thing in itself. It could be said that Wenders yearns for a similarly fundamental truth in his evaluation of fashion, cinema, and the two cities where, under his close supervision, they briefly commingle. As his personal vision symbiotically merges with Yamamoto’s at the end to reach a fitting apotheosis, that elusive “thing” is so close you can almost touch it.
NOTEBOOK ON CITIES AND CLOTHES
Directed by Wim Wenders.
Unrated.
