As an architect I find it truly interesting to read cities and architecture through films, and this is why I went to see the latest film by one of my favourite directors Wim Wenders: Perfect Days. In Wenders’ cinema, his gaze over the city is always the protagonist. He possesses the remarkable ability to make the space of the photographic image the central focus of his filmmaking. It is not only the story that is important to him, but the time and space in which the story takes shape almost by chance.
The first book of photography that I bought in 1991 was a book of his titled “Once”, which used the images as annotations to reveal the poetics of his films. It is a book of sequences. In every second image the editing begins, the story announced in the first image starts to unfold, its sense of space moves in the direction that is its own, foreshadowing a very particular sense of time and place.
