By the end of the 1970s, Wim Wenders had become a major figure of the New German Cinema. His celebrated “road trilogy”—Alice in the Cities (Alice in den Städten, 1974), Wrong Move (Falsche Bewegung, 1975), and Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit, 1976)—had assured him a spot alongside the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Volker Schlöndorff. Like other leading European filmmakers of the 1960s and ’70s, he was then lured to Hollywood, initially by Francis Ford Coppola, who produced his first English-language film, Hammett (1982). The production of that film was long and difficult, and at one point Wenders abandoned it entirely to work on what would become his first feature documentary, Lightning Over Water (aka Nick’s Film, 1980), which started as a collaboration with director Nicholas Ray, but turned into a documentary about Ray’s final days before succumbing to cancer. Wenders would spend the rest of his career alternating between fictional feature films and documentaries, many of which investigated the nature of cinema itself.

Such is the case with Room 666 (Chambre 666), which is built around a deceptively simple set-up: During the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wenders, who was there with Hammett, invited an array of filmmakers who were screening films at the festival to sit in front of a static 16mm camera in room 666 of Cannes’s Hotel Martinez and respond to the following prompt about the future of the cinema: “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?”

Television, a technology that had been around for more than three decades at that point, but was taking on more and more cultural prominence, especially in the era of made-for-television movies and the rapidly expanding home video market, was heavy on Wenders’s mind, which is why he had his interview subjects prominently flanked by a television on their left, its screen alight with whatever happened to be broadcasting at that moment while they spoke. Wenders does not appear in the film except as a stand-in for Turkish director Yilmaz Güney, who could not attend because he was in political hiding, but sent his written responses (he was supposed to be there to represent the film Yol, for which he wrote the screenplay and which took home that year’s Palm d’Or). Otherwise, there is no one in the room for each interview other than the subject him- or herself, which turns each sequence into a uniquely personal and direct conversation with the viewer. The range of filmmakers Wenders was able to get in front of his camera is impressive, as they represent a broad cross-section of international art film, Hollywood, and cult cinema: Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy), Maroun Bagdadi (Lebanon), Ana Carolina (Brazil), Mike De Leon (Philippines), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (West Germany), Jean-Luc Godard (France), Romain Goupil (France), Yilmaz Güney (Turkey), Monte Hellman (U.S.), Werner Herzog (West Germany), Robert Kramer (U.S.), Paul Morrissey (U.S.), Susan Seidelman (U.S.), Noël Simsolo (France), and Steven Spielberg (U.S.).

Although Wenders provided each person with the same question, each subject responds in a completely different way. Godard, who is the first on-screen, gives the lengthiest response, reading the entirety of Wenders’s prompt and then going off a uniquely Godardian riff on cinema while constantly looking back at a French Open tennis match on the TV screen next to him. Some are long, some are short. Some look at the future with great optimism (Antonioni, in particular, seems excited about the relationship between humanity and technology), while others see only loss and dread (Morrissey dourly declares that every artform is now dead). Spielberg, who had recently hit both highs (1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark) and lows (1979’s 1941), talks primarily about the difficulties of working within the Hollywood industry, and Herzog removes his shoes, declaring that such questions must be answered barefoot, before going off on a tangent that, with shocking accuracy, predicts how the Internet would come to be the center of even the most banal aspects of commerce (buying groceries).

As a time capsule, Room 666 is utterly essential, providing a unique and telling window into the thinking of major international filmmakers during a period of profound technological, industrial, and ideological transition. As a piece of pure cinema, it is disarming in its simplicity, so stripped of artifice or editorializing that we sometimes see the subjects walk up to the camera to turn it off. It is like sixteen miniature films on cinema, each one utterly unique and yet also inextricably intertwined.

Room 666 / Room 999 Blu-ray
This Blu-ray release includes both Room 666 (1982) and Room 999 (2023).
Aspect Ratio	1.33:1 (Room 666) / 1.47:1 (Room 999)
Audio	Multi-Language DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo (Room 666) Multi-Language DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround (Room 999)
Subtitles	English
Supplements	“Meet the Filmmakers” interview with director Lubna Playout Trailer
Distributor	Janus Contemporaries
Release Date	May 13, 2025
COMMENTS
Room 666 and Room 999 are paired on a single Blu-ray disc, which makes sense given that the former is only 45 minutes and the latter is only 89 minutes, which leaves plenty of room for encoding at a significant bitrate. Previously, Room 666 had only been available in Region 1 on DVD as part of Anchor Bay’s long out-of-print “Wim Wenders Collection Vol. 2” boxset, which was released back in 2006. Thus, this new edition from Janus Contemporaries should bring real joy to Wenders enthusiasts and all-around cineastes. Scanned in 2K from the original 16mm camera negative, Room 666 looks very good, with nice color, contrast, and lack of wear and tear. The smaller film format means that the image is not as sharp, but it is very much in keeping with the intended look. Room 999, on the other hand, was shot in high-definition digital, and I imagine that what we are seeing is direct digital port. The image is brighter because the room itself is much brighter (the more dour colors of the early ’80s interior design in Room 666 contrasts with the latter film’s livelier, more aquatic colors). Both films feature a DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, in 2.0 stereo for Room 666 and 5.1 surround for Room 999. Because the vast majority of the soundtrack for both films consists of the interviewees speaking, there isn’t much surround action to speak of, and all of the interviewees come through with good clarity. The supplements are pretty light, consisting only of a trailer and an illuminating 15-minute interview with Room 999 director Lubna Playout.

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