Movie Night: Wings of Desire
Wings of Desire is a 1987 movie directed by Wim Wenders and written by Peter Handke and Richard Reitlinger.
It concerns two angels who testify and observe the inhabitants of City of Berlin before the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
The angels convene in the Public Library of West Berlin which is a sort of cathedral of human thought both written in its books and generated in its visitors' minds. The angels are unseen by humans except for children and perhaps madmen. The angels wander and listen to the thoughts, which they can detect, of humans. The angels are the collectors and maybe receptacles (though not accessible to humans as the books of the Public Library are) of the human subconscious. They wander the city and collect the oddities of human life and thought in small notebooks that they carry. They share their observations and collections with each other and then go out to collect more. They have no abilities to intervene in any human activities although they can comfort the dying or the living humans with a touch. They have no real consciousness of their own, they must feed on the human experience of life. When the film presents the angel viewpoint, it does it in black and white photography to show just how limited and dependent upon humanity angles are.
There is a lovely film sequence in the Berlin subway as the camera pans down a row of people sitting in their subway seats wringing their hands with anxiety or otherwise fiddling with their hands. The shot ends with one of the two angels, Damiel, sitting next to a passenger and touching the passenger's shoulder with his hand to comfort the man who is in despair. Human hands create human life. Angel hands draw from the humans, but can give back only comfort or solace.
The Public Library that is the Angel's Cathedral where they testify to human life has an angel choir singing in the background while cleaning ladies run their vacuums. It's the mingling of the sublime and the mundane. The untouched holy and the cleansing of the profane.
Another angel, Cassiel, follows an old man around the Public Library. The old man plays with a Constellation toy in the Globes of Earth and Geography section and looks through a picture book of people and things in Berlin before the war (WWII and WWI) and thinks about the stories of that past hat he cherishes in his brain and shares with his angel. There are news film reels of Berlin and its wars interspersed in the film (and some of them are horribly graphic) like the back story of Berlin. Cassiel and the old man wander the vacant lots of Berlin looking for old places that disappeared in the wars and were never replaced. When the old man dies, those places will be lost again with the passing of his memories. Human loss makes the angels profoundly sad.
The angel, Damiel, yearns for something more than just a brush with humanity. He wants to be human. He falls in love with a trapezee artist and renounces his alienation or anglicization from humanity to become human. He wants to live in color and with all of human sensation and emotion.
In the course of the movie, a young man, climbs to the top of a building in Berlin and after meditating on his despair with Cassiel in silent and unseen attendance, jumps from that building to his death. Cassiel can't save him and mourns. But when Damiel chooses to become human, Cassiel attends his transformation to human. Cassiel mourns that loss and metamorphosis too. My movie companion, brijeana , and I speculated that for every angel who chooses to become human, a human must die and transcend her human existence. All is equal in the universe.
The actor who played Damiel had a great face. His crows feet around his eyes when he finally smiled were like angel wings.
The acrobat love of Damiel is lit to looks like Lillian Gish.
She has a glow of the other world about her. What an angel considers the "other world", the human world. It's a lovely twist of the usual conceit of the glow and halos of angels from the human viewpoint. Now we see the shine of humanity in her.
Indeed with the city of Berlin as a character in this movie, I was reminded by the photography and the silent sequences of Fritz Lang's 1927 Silent Classic, Metropolis. Sixty years separate the films, but both explore the city.
This is from Metropolis. I couldn't find any screen shots from Wings of Desire that I could use here. But both films match shots of the city.
And both films "testify" to humanistic creeds.
Peter Falk is also in the movie, but I won't spoil his story except to give you this hint. Look at his eyes when he smiles.
In his commentary, Mr. Wenders says that he made this film after spending eight years in the US. He felt, like his angels, that he had become disconnected from his own self and culture, he is a native of Berlin. Like his angel, Damiel, Mr. Wenders wanted to re-connect through his experience of making this movie.
Mr. Wenders asked his fellow filmmaker and writer, Peter Handke, to write him seven or eight monologues about life and Berlin, and Mr. Wenders would film them. Parts of this movie are like an old silent film, and then parts of this movie are nothing but talk (the monologues). It is an interesting mixture.
This is a good movie to watch if you are in a contemplative mood. It is certainly different from most other movies and is a very personal point of view from Mr. Wenders. Personal movies are so much more compelling. I like to know what a director is thinking.