Politics & Power Quote by Wim Wenders

"In this age of consumerism film criticism all over the world - in America first but also in Europe - has become something that caters for the movie industry instead of being a counterbalance"

Wim Wenders, Director

About this Quote

Wim Wenders is calling out a quiet betrayal: criticism that used to irritate the industry now functions like its customer service desk. The barb lands because he frames the shift as structural, not moral. It is "in this age of consumerism" that criticism gets domesticated. Consumer culture doesn’t just sell movies; it sells a way of talking about movies, one optimized for hype, access, and repeatable takes rather than friction or judgment.

His phrasing is carefully global and hierarchical: "in America first but also in Europe". That isn’t casual anti-Hollywood throat-clearing. It’s a diagnosis of how media models travel. The American entertainment press, built around studios, stars, and opening-weekend performance, becomes a template; European criticism, once more willing to treat cinema as art, starts absorbing the same incentive structure. When Wenders says criticism "caters", he’s pointing at the economics of attention: reviews timed to embargoes, interviews traded for coverage, festivals treated as marketing funnels, and critics nudged into being brand amplifiers.

The key word is "counterbalance". He’s not asking for snobbery; he’s arguing for an ecosystem where someone is allowed to be inconvenient. Wenders came up in the New German Cinema era, when filmmakers fought both commercial norms and cultural amnesia. From that vantage, criticism isn’t decoration around the product, it’s part of the public sphere - a mechanism that can slow the churn, insist on standards, and protect movies from being reduced to content. His warning isn’t nostalgic; it’s about power: when criticism stops pushing back, the industry sets the terms of taste.

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Wim Wenders (born August 14, 1945) is a Director from Germany.

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