"There's always this desire for fiction in everything one sees, and a desire for a documentary too, so it can be preserved."-Wim WendersCinema began in the city: workers leaving a factory, a train entering the station. It was as though the apparatus of film was oddly akin to the modern urban landscape. Gloor-Fadel's elegant essay Berlin-Cinéma returns to this primal cinematic locale, meditating on the intimate entangling of the two. Her conduit for this passage is director Wim Wenders, who wanders about Berlin dreamily lamenting its strangeness-a city, in his eyes, bent on filling the "gaps," the blanks between histories, private and otherwise; a city of contradictions, ephemera beside permanence. Like architecture, cinema envelops space and composition and the movement through them, and with both time is arrested-this we are told by Jean Nouvel, the brilliant French architect who often accompanies Wenders on his inspired walks. Godard too, though shyly hidden in voice-over, muses on history as it courses through the filmed image. Rendered in exquisite black and white with short dalliances into color, Berlin-Cinéma is a fascinating contemplation of those two great habitations of the twentieth century, cinema and the city.-Steve Seid