Il Cinema Ritrovato has already shown some episodes of this documentary series (David Lynch and Marco Bellocchio in 2024), which aims to examine a filmmaker’s first piece of work, the original or first image, the “master image”, if you like, that prefigures those to come. In this documentary devoted to Wim Wenders, the starting point will be Summer in the City, to be shown in its restored version in this year’s festival. The director of this documentary invites us into a calm, fascinating conversation, a masterclass in another guise in which we are told confidentially that the very beginning of Wim Wenders’ filmmaking journey was the window of his family apartment. His view from the window gives us a glimpse into his films: wide shots, urban landscapes, framing the world with a fixed camera. This method of not going out into the world but waiting for it instead, trusting it to reveal itself, of believing that reality, freed from itself within a frame, has something to offer would be the guiding principle of his entire body of work. For Wenders, movement is the very essence of the seventh art, far more than the story itself. The continuity of the work is there; it is profound, obstinate, implacable, as if a life of filmmaking had been no more that the deployment of that child’s gaze.

Bruno Deloye