Like last year's model, Wim Wenders quietly slipped out of fashion soon after Wings of Desire made him out to be invincible. You can argue whys and wherefores until the cows get back, but the fact remains that this particular vision of contemporary film - tagged by one wag "Ain't kids mysterious? Put another record on" - is out of favour for the foreseeable. Mind, half Wenders' trouble is that he's never played shy and retiring; Aki Kaurismaki he is not.

The Act of Seeing, his third book, is subtitled 'Essays and Conversations' with good reason. The majority of its pages are made up of interviews conducted around 1990, and bolstered with various public addresses and scribblings to bring things slightly more up to date. Chronologically then, we are concerned with ill-starred globe-trotter Until The End of The World.

And such a format does rather allow for some tedious repetition. If we hear him explain to an interrogator once that his new film is an epic SF movie about seeing, we hear it a dozen times. Likewise, shooting is Wenders' least favourite part of the process. So there. Some judicious editing is in order.

It could be Michael Hoffman's translation or simply that Wenders' brings out the worst in people, but some of the (straight-faced) questioning he's offered will make you gag: "Tell me something about the relationship between your films and your life. Are the films...a coming to terms with things in your life, or more a sort of projection or blueprint?" To his credit, Wenders doesn't laugh.

But lest we despair it has to be said that there are also some informative passages. He prefigures his new picture by explaining the absence of both violence and sex from his work: "I think those are both things that can do a lot of damage...every war film is pro-war." And rare emotion surfaces over "absurd" horror movies: "Films are there to take away fear, and create peace and serenity...I don't believe people make horror films for any other reason than making money." (Where that leaves the Meg Ryan remake of Wings we can but guess.)

Wenders has long been concerned with cinema in general and European cinema in particular, and here again proselytes on behalf of legal restrictions to keep those dastardly Yanks off of our screens. His motives are laudable, methods less so. On the other hand, his attack on cinema placating the small screen by dumbing-down is one never made too often. "Television," he writes, "has eliminated the long-shot...replaced it with the tedium of close-ups." And his almost throw-away comment on length - "Most films nowadays should be an hour at most... None of us is up to making a film that lasts for an hour and a half" - is right on the money.

But ultimately, given we've since seen Faraway, So Close! and that his new work has been flagged as a partial return to form by festival goers, this book - with neither index nor filmography, incidentally - feels hideously out-of-date. For lovers of the seriously undervalued Until The End it provides some provocative reading (and yet more evidence that a five hour cut is long overdue) but as a way of blazing the trail for The End of Violence it makes for a curious exhibit indeed.