four big books

Four Big Books is the title of a course I’ll be teaching this coming term — my last as a university professor! What follows is an outline of what I’ll be saying to my student on the first day of class. • • • • • Back in 1982, at the Cannes Film Festival, the German film director Wim Wenders brought other filmmakers, one by one, to a hotel room so that he might film them answering a series of questions he had written, all of which gathered like iron shavings around a single magnetic question: Is cinema dying? The resulting film, Room 666, is generally fascinating, but now seems an exercise from another world, since the primary threat to cinema then was television. Things have changed. Forty years later Lubna Playoust repeated the exercise, with many more filmmakers and Wenders himself: thus Room 999. One of the most interesting reflections in Room 999 comes from the French filmmaker and writer Audrey Diwan. Diwan is the mother of teenage children who (she suggests) spend a lot of time…