Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989)
Dir. Wim Wenders
It's the result of one artist using his chosen art form (Wenders - film) to capture another artist at work on his (Yohji Yamamoto - fashion designer), being both a commentary on the image presented and on the method used to achieve that result. Like in Marker's work, narrated assumptions follow observations but are never unwelcome.
I'm not a follower of the fashion scene, so I didn't know anything about Yohji prior to watching. But it turned out that I did know his work: he designed costumes for Takeshi Kitano's Dolls (2002), which is a recommendation in itself.
He's a fascinating individual whose demeanour and sense of self is the opposite of what I expected them to be. I was wrongly expecting to see someone barking orders and stressing out over late deliveries. Instead, the serenity and inner-peace that we associate with Japanese masters is how Yohji appears.
On Wenders' side, he explores the different mediums that a recorded image can exist in, in a complementary way to how a designer might pick and choose fabrics to work with. He'll occasionally have more than one image onscreen at a time, celebrating how a single situation can be analysed from more than one direction or point in time (such as current or retrospectively).
It's not a documentary on the fashion industry, and there's no throwaway footage of glitzy press events, it's a glimpse into the mind of a quiet soul who has an intuitive understanding of why he does what he does. Yohji understands that his designs help people discover and accentuate their feelings of identity. It seems the beauty that's uncovered when a chosen garment and a sense of individualism are combined is a large part of what drives him.
I thought it peculiar that while Wenders is a German filmmaker and Yohji is a Japanese designer, the majority of the dialogue is in English.
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