At first, as German filmmaker Wim Wenders explains in voiceover in this 1989 personal documentary, he couldn’t connect with the commission being offered to him by Paris’s Centre Pompidou: to shoot a movie of his choice about fashion. He didn’t care about fashion. But then he found a subject to his liking: Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto, who was preparing a new show to be revealed on a walkway at the Louvre. So Wenders took his video camera to Tokyo, where he alternated between arresting architectural shots of the city and excruciatingly boring visits with Yamamoto in the designer’s studio. Yamamoto is a pensive little man with a sculpted face and painterly eyebrows, but he is hardly a guru, which is how Wenders treats him. Whenever Wenders isn’t bowing and scraping before his Japanese mentor, he’s forcing strained analogies between fashion and filmmaking: the night before a fashion show has "the mood of an editing room before the final cut." Not really, Wim. Notebooks on Cities and Clothes is an unneeded afterthought to Wenders’s wondrous 1985 take on Japan, Tokyo-Ga.