Room 666 / Room 999
Studio: Janus Contemporaries
Might 22, 2025
Internet Unique
Images by The Criterion Assortment
The very first thing we see is a tree. Towering in direction of the sky, this darkly shaded cedar tree dominates the body. After a minute of blood-red title credit and dissonant underscoring, the lower to this picture all of the sudden makes it really feel as if this cedar have been the satan himself, looming over the Parisian freeway. However because the music fades away, lingering on the identical picture, this tree begins to lose this subjective ominousness as we hear Wim Wenders’ voiceover:
“Along side the freeway, proper on the entry to the Paris airport, stands an impressive tree that alerts for years already my arrivals and departures from Europe. It’s a cedar from Lebanon that should be a minimum of 150 years outdated. The final time I glided by on my strategy to the competition in Cannes, the tree had a distinct message: it jogged my memory that it had seen the beginnings of images and the complete historical past of cinema, which it’d simply as properly survive. So I arrived to Cannes with the query that I requested my colleagues.”
The query: “Is cinema a language about to get misplaced, an artwork about to die?”
Over the subsequent 40 minutes, Wenders has 15 of his fellow administrators on the 1982 Cannes Movie Pageant privately reply the query in a resort room, chambre 666. Stationed in a chair, filmmakers–together with Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Steven Spielberg, and Michelangelo Antonioni–give their solutions straight to the digital camera. However what might appear to be an easy query unravels right into a kaleidoscopic array of solutions, turning Room 666 right into a philosophical train in duality, subjectivity and perspective.
Each filmmaker comes on the query with a distinct definition of cinema. Godard and Herzog communicate of cinema as an inventive aesthetic and are involved concerning the rise of tv; Antonioni and Hellman communicate of it as a medium and are involved with altering applied sciences. Seidelman and Simsolo communicate of cinema as a kind of storytelling that’s reliant on ardour, whereas Spielberg and Bagdadi communicate of cinema as an financial business that calls for larger productions and threatens inventive expression. And what does it even imply for an artwork kind to die? Is it when folks have stopped training it, or merely as soon as it’s misplaced recognition? Morrissey says the novel has been useless a very long time, and but nonetheless we write them. At Cannes, we nonetheless watch movies. And at residence on my sofa, I watch Room 666.
40 years later, Lubna Playoust continues Wenders’ train on the 2022 Cannes Movie Pageant with a brand new era of filmmakers. Using the identical query and format, solutions from 30 completely different filmmakers create a brand new mosaic, aptly titled Room 999. Whereas it’s attention-grabbing to listen to from new voices like Audrey Diwan and Joachim Trier, what’s most attention-grabbing is how the members’ solutions haven’t actually modified a lot. The specifics could also be completely different, however the common issues are broadly the identical. Packaged by Criterion as a set, Room 666 and Room 999 collectively turn into a compelling meditation on the character of time–paradoxically progressive and static, linear and cyclical.
It’s becoming that Criterion launched this field set on the opening day of the 2025 Cannes Movie Pageant. Whereas watching Room 666 / Room 999, it was laborious not to consider the unknowable way forward for cinema within the context of immediately: the domination of streaming, skyrocketing manufacturing prices, advancing synthetic intelligence and the specter of international tariffs.
Maybe there’s at all times one thing threatening the way forward for cinema. That’s definitely been the case up to now, whether or not that be the arrival of sound or the rise of streaming. You possibly can even go way back to Edison monopolizing patents. And but, folks have at all times discovered a strategy to preserve making movies.
Playoust begins Room 999 with a shot of the identical cedar tree alongside the Parisian freeway, this time chopped down on the facet of the street. Wenders posited that this cedar may need survived cinema, however it turned diseased. Did we kill it? The symbolism looms heavy, and it’s tempting to interpret the metaphor at face worth: so too will cinema perish. And but, Room 666 and Room 999 remind us that there are numerous methods to make which means–in any case, cinema has now outlived the tree.
