Room 666 / Room 999

Studio: Janus Contemporaries

May 22, 2025 Web Exclusive By Mark Metzger Photography by The Criterion Collection

The first thing we see is a tree. Towering towards the sky, this darkly shaded cedar tree dominates the frame. After a minute of blood-red title credits and dissonant underscoring, the cut to this image suddenly makes it feel as though this cedar were the devil himself, looming over the Parisian freeway. But as the music fades away, lingering on the same image, this tree begins to lose this subjective ominousness as we hear Wim Wenders’ voiceover:

“At the side of the freeway, right at the entry to the Paris airport, stands a majestic tree that signals for years already my arrivals and departures from Europe. It’s a cedar from Lebanon that must be at least 150 years old. The last time I went by on my way to the festival in Cannes, the tree had a different message: it reminded me that it had seen the beginnings of photography and the entire history of cinema, which it might just as well survive. So I arrived to Cannes with the question that I asked my colleagues.”

The question: “Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?”

Over the next 40 minutes, Wenders has 15 of his fellow directors at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival privately answer the question in a hotel room, chambre 666. Stationed in a chair, filmmakers–including Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Steven Spielberg, and Michelangelo Antonioni–give their answers straight to the camera. But what may seem like a straightforward question unravels into a kaleidoscopic array of answers, turning Room 666 into a philosophical exercise in duality, subjectivity and perspective.

Every filmmaker comes at the question with a different definition of cinema. Godard and Herzog speak of cinema as an artistic aesthetic and are concerned about the rise of television; Antonioni and Hellman speak of it as a medium and are concerned with changing technologies. Seidelman and Simsolo speak of cinema as a type of storytelling that is reliant on passion, while Spielberg and Bagdadi speak of cinema as an economic industry that demands bigger productions and threatens artistic expression. And what does it even mean for an art form to die? Is it when people have stopped practicing it, or merely once it’s lost popularity? Morrissey says the novel has been dead a long time, and yet still we write them. At Cannes, we still watch films. And at home on my couch, I watch Room 666.

40 years later, Lubna Playoust continues Wenders’ exercise at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival with a new generation of filmmakers. Utilizing the same question and format, answers from 30 different filmmakers create a new mosaic, aptly titled Room 999. While it’s interesting to hear from new voices like Audrey Diwan and Joachim Trier, what’s most interesting is how the participants’ answers haven’t really changed much. The specifics may be different, but the general concerns are broadly the same. Packaged by Criterion as a set, Room 666 and Room 999 together become a compelling meditation on the nature of time–paradoxically progressive and static, linear and cyclical.

It’s fitting that Criterion released this box set on the opening day of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. While watching Room 666 / Room 999, it was hard not to think about the unknowable future of cinema in the context of today: the domination of streaming, skyrocketing production costs, advancing artificial intelligence and the threat of global tariffs.

Perhaps there’s always something threatening the future of cinema. That’s certainly been the case thus far, whether that be the advent of sound or the rise of streaming. You can even go as far back as Edison monopolizing patents. And yet, people have always found a way to keep making films.

Playoust begins Room 999 with a shot of the same cedar tree along the Parisian freeway, this time chopped down on the side of the road. Wenders posited that this cedar might have survived cinema, but it became diseased. Did we kill it? The symbolism looms heavy, and it’s tempting to interpret the metaphor at face value: so too will cinema perish. And yet, Room 666 and Room 999 remind us that there are many ways to make meaning–after all, cinema has now outlived the tree.

(www.criterion.com/boxsets/7975-room-666-room-999)

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