Wings of Desire: Three Years After

This blog is almost three years old, and although I don’t care to celebrate blog birthdays any more than I do my own, I will note that I uploaded the first post for (what was then) Coosa Creek Mambo on  January 1, 2007.  It was before I wrote with any regularity — the next post was February 25 — and before I moved the blog to the WordPress platform from the dark side (i.e., Blogspot).

The reason I mention it at all is because that first post — which I’ve ported over to the Creek’s present incarnation — featured Wim Wender’s 1987 Wings of Desire, comparing it to City of Angels, its calculated, heretical remake.  Looking back on the post, it is kind of embarrassing in it’s naiveté, but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt: after all, it was my first one.

Recently, I bought the new Criterion version on Blu-ray; it was the first time I’ve double-dipped on account of the new format, and I didn’t know if it would be worth it.  I have to say that my expectations were more than fulfilled: Wings looks spectacular, being the simultaneous beneficiary of one of Criterion’s digital restorations and the extra pixel power of the high-def format.  In addition, the transfer was supervised by Wenders himself, and in this case that’s a good thing: it is undoubtedly closer to his vision than ever, and as we’ve come to expect from Criterion, it looks as good as it ever will.

Its German title, Der Himmel über Berlin, translates as The Sky Over Berlin, and though it may be more descriptive than its American counterpart, it sounds like a documentary, or a manual on German air traffic control.  It certainly doesn’t describe Wenders’ original intent: he started out wanting to make a film about Berlin, a paean, a tone-poem to the place he grew up and where, no matter where he hangs his hat, he still calls home.

If that sounds corny, the film which results is anything but.  Wings of Desire is the movie that started my blogging, and the one that has pulled me back from the precipice of finishing it off.  It’s a highly personal film for me, and not because it’s about angels.  In fact, it’s really not about them . . . it’s about people, a people, actually, in a particular time and place.  It is hard for me to imagine a film more rooted in its geographic, social and temporal location: if it were filmed anywhere other than Berlin, at a time any other than three years before the fall of its infamous wall, it would not be the picture it is, nor would it have the power it wields.

Wenders shoots his city with architectural precision, all angles and straight lines.  Breathtaking helicopter shots — from an angelic P.O.V., though at one point the rotors are clearly visible — demonstrate its cold, Teutonic beauty.  Streets converge upon fountains and squares, cutting sharp angles to which the buildings conform as if poured into a mold.  The exquisite black and white cinematography — by the legendary Henri Alekan, lured by Wenders out of retirement — has been restored by Criterion to its original silvery luminosity.  It is, in a word, gorgeous.

The color segments — i.e., those from a human point of view — are equally fine, but they jar us in their gaudiness, their earthiness.  When it goes from gray-scale to full color, the effect is startling, it takes some time to adjust, as if we’ve walked suddenly from darkness into full sunlight.  It helps us to experience the angels’ dislocation, their attraction to the serene, detached existence of the watcher.

That’s what Wenders’ angels are: watchers, observers, recorders of human existence in all its warts and eventual decay.  They are drably-garbed witnesses to everything fascinating in the world, as well as everything that is not.  I guess there is kind of a punk sensibility about them, with their pony tails and long, belted coats . . . and this is underlined in the film by the presence of Nick Cave.  But truly: if they weren’t invisible to the human eye, would anybody see them in the first place?

Dommartin (left) and Ganz

Children do see them occasionally, and it begs the question:  is it because they notice more than we do, with our peripatetic “adult” concerns and insistence upon rationality?   Would the adults see them as well, if they weren’t so … adult?   In Wings of Desire, they are consumed by worry, beaten down by heartache.  This is the human condition in Wenders’ Berlin:  depressed, suicidal, and fraught.

Although the angels are observers, they are not dispassionate ones.   The concerns of humankind deeply affect them, though in different ways.  Damiel (Bruno Ganz) is open, almost vulnerable: concern for these people pours out of him.  When a child notices him — always curious, always unafraid — his face takes on a positively beatific cast.  Ganz’s performance buttresses the film, providing it’s central foundation.  He is the warm, beating heart of Wings of Desire.

Cassiel (Otto Sander) is more stoic, almost stone-faced, and it is a testament to Sander’s abilities as an actor that he conveys emotion through the world-weary mask.  He has seen a lot, and it has inured him so that it takes a lot to get him out of his protective shell.  All the pent-up frustration at being unable to really change things is contained in his grief in the face of a suicide he cannot stop.

The cast is rounded out by Solveig Dommartin, as a trapeze artist on the edge of poverty for whom Damiel  gives up his immortality, and Peter Falk, playing himself as an angel who took the “big fall” and landed in show biz.  Falk is a hoot, toying around with his image as Columbo, and Dommartin is absolutely haunting.  She makes one fully understand why an angel — or anybody else, for that matter — would shed his or her immortality for her.  [Although I promised myself that I wouldn't talk about the idiotic City of Angels, she is the absolute opposite of perky, successful physician Meg Ryan.  And Nicholas Cage as Damiel ... oy!]

Shooting began with no script, and with co-scenarist Peter Handke sending snippets of his thoughts to the crew on an almost daily basis.  The film was largely constructed on the fly, including the working out of the appearance and rules of the angel world.  In an interview, Wenders has said that his initial conception was that these are angels who are being punished by confinement to Berlin.  If that is still the back-story of the finished film, it is never explicitly stated, and it is richer for it, more universal:  this is how it works in Moscow, and in Taipei and Topeka.

Another conception of the director — you can read his original treatment for the film here – is that the past is never really gone from Berlin, that its Third Reich history haunts the city and its inhabitants in their daily lives.  This is beautifully realized in the film: we look out the windows  from moving cars, seeing not 1987 but the same streets forty-some-odd years before.  Nazi officers glance up at us, then back down again, incurious; they do not know we are from the future.  They are are like revenants, doomed to repeat the same actions over and over, doomed to make the same mistakes.

In one memorable sequence, we are riding through the streets with Falk and the invisible Cassiel; outside the windows the Nazi past is flowing by.  They are shooting some silly script about an American detective in Third Reich Berlin, and when we pull up to the set, it takes a few seconds to realize that we are not seeing the past anymore, but the present.  The assistant director’s bullhorn barks instructions; extras in Nazi garb bum cigarettes from those who wear the Star of David.  They laugh and joke with one another.  But the past is always crouched, waiting, just outside the gates.

The first two-thirds of Wings of Desire, the black-and-white part as the angels explore their world, is wonderful: fascinating, fulfilling and satisfying.  Although the final segment, after Damiel has taken the plunge, is satisfying enough, it leaves us — like Damiel?  — with a wistful desire for the serene world of the witness.  Engagement with the world is like that: it is fraught with danger and uncertainty, it is messy and crude.  Much easier to hole up in an ivory tower — or a church — and never venture out amongst the humans.

Sander (left) and Bois

At one point in the film, Homer (an aged poet played by Curt Bois) wanders through a wasteland next to the wall, looking for Potsdamer Platz, where he spent his youth.  It is not there, and the anguish in his voice as he describes the shops and restaurants is palpable.  I was in Berlin just two years after the wall came down, and looked for Marx and Lenin Platz in what was formerly East Berlin.  Though it was still on the map,  I could not find it, and while I did not grow up in the city, I fancy I felt a bit of Homer’s dislocation when he couldn’t find something solid, something memorable, that just wasn’t there.

Though I could write more about Wings of Desire (e.g., there is a film within a film; how does the filmic witness compare to the angelic one?), mercifully I will not;  this is too long already.  But it wouldn’t feel complete to me without at least taking a stab at why the film moves me so much.

In seminary, we are taught a method of care called a “ministry of presence,” where we do not try to fix things, but just be there with the members of our congregation.  It is this that the rabbis do in the Coens’ recent A Serious Man, where it is played for laughs  (or at least irony: I will have more to say about that soon).  We want our problems solved, we want solutions, but Wenders understands that sometimes it is enough to just be with another person, to listen to their stories, to let them know someone is there.  Though his angels are not seen, they can be felt, and they are at those times a comforting presence.

I am drawn to humanist drama — thus my love for Renoir, Truffaut and even Kurosawa, whose action films are never about war and bloodshed so much as human beings.  And Wings is first and foremost a humanistic vision, albeit one that is filtered through non-human eyes.

And in truth, that vision is akin to Christ’s, before it got all screwed up by his followers.  Contrary to what most of today’s “Christians” will tell you, the teacher from Palestine had his eyes set firmly on earth, where he taught his followers to feed the hungry, heal the sick and free the oppressed.  When I see an intensely humanist film such as Wings of Desire, I am overwhelmed with grief that the original vision has been lost, replaced by the mean, punitive version of the faith we now have.