Politics & Power Quote by Wim Wenders

Wenders is doing a neat rhetorical feint here: he praises French cinema just enough to make the real target impossible to dismiss. The line reads like diplomacy, but it lands like an indictment. By insisting the movies are "very credible" and France remains "one of the greatest nations" of world cinema, he removes the easy scapegoat (lazy filmmaking) and shifts blame to the ecosystem that tells audiences what theyre seeing and why it matters.

The loaded word is "decay". He is not talking about critics being wrong on a few titles; he is describing a collapse of a public language around film. For a director who came up in the postwar European art-cinema tradition, criticism wasnt just reviews and star ratings. It was the infrastructure of seriousness: magazines, festivals, cine-clubs, arguments, and shared reference points that made a national cinema legible to itself and exportable to the world. If that interpretive layer rots, even great movies arrive as isolated objects, easily drowned by marketing, streaming churn, and the algorithmic flattening of taste.

There is also a quiet anxiety about power. France is one of the last places that treats cinema as a cultural pillar, yet even there, Wenders suggests, the conversation has thinned out. The subtext: when criticism weakens, the market becomes the critic, and "credible" work risks being applauded politely while becoming culturally weightless.