Daily Inspiration Quote by Wim Wenders

A small elegy for a public argument that once kept cinema intellectually alive. When Wim Wenders notes that filmmakers and critics “wrote about each other and sometimes very harshly,” he’s not pining for cruelty; he’s mourning a feedback loop where art and interpretation shared the same bloodstream. In the postwar European film culture that shaped him, directors read criticism as a serious provocation, and critics treated films as positions in a larger debate about politics, modernity, and taste. The harshness was a sign of stakes.

The subtext is about attention, not etiquette. “This no longer exists” points to a media ecology where the critic’s role has thinned into consumer guidance, platform recaps, or influencer affect, while filmmakers increasingly route around criticism entirely, speaking directly to audiences through festivals, social media, and marketing. The old friction required a common arena: newspapers with authority, magazines that could sustain long-form argument, and a shared expectation that you’d be challenged rather than merely validated.

Wenders also implies a loss of reciprocity. Critics still write, but the writing rarely becomes an active ingredient in filmmaking culture; filmmakers may see reviews as noise, not dialogue. What disappears isn’t negativity but a kind of mutual regard: the assumption that criticism could injure you and still be worth reading, that a filmmaker could answer back in print and be taken seriously. It’s a portrait of a cultural conversation downgraded into parallel monologues.