Why am I me, and why not you? ✵ Wings of Desire - ANGELS AND MONSTERS ✵ 1975–1991 - The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

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IN CONTEXT

GENRE

New German Cinema

DIRECTOR

Wim Wenders

WRITERS

Wim Wenders, Peter Handke, Richard Reitinger

STARS

Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin, Otto Sander, Curt Bois, Peter Falk

BEFORE

1953 Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story shows everyday life as a struggle of quiet desperation.

1972 Andrei Tarkovsky meditates on existence with Solaris, a slow-paced science-fiction movie.

AFTER

1993 Wenders’ sequel to Wings of Desire is Faraway, So Close!

Inspired by the visionary poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and scripted by the playwright Peter Handke, Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin) is both a moving allegory of Berlin—just two years before the fall of the Wall—and a poignant study of the need for love and what it means to be human. It is the story of an angel, tired of his immortal life of care, who falls in love with a circus trapeze artist—and of another, played by Peter Falk, who has already found contentment by crossing over.

"Film is a very, very powerful medium. It can either confirm the idea that things are wonderful the way they are, or it can reinforce the conception that things can be changed."

Wim Wenders

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The angels Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) are an invisible presence in people’s lives.

Watching from on high

At the beginning of the movie two angels, Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander), gaze down at the city of Berlin from on high, gliding through the air or poised atop the city’s great monuments. They are there to listen and observe, as they have done since long before the city was built. Their role is to give people hope, or the intuition that they are not alone. However, they are unable to intervene directly—and they are unable to experience anything physically themselves.

The movie unfolds at a measured pace. It is patient, like the angels themselves as they listen in on human thoughts, fears, and dreams, almost as if they were listening to snatches from different radio stations while turning the dial—parents worried about their son, the memories of a Holocaust victim. The angels may sometimes be sensed, but only children can actually see them.

“To draw all the demons of the earth from passers-by and to chase them out into the world. To be a savage.”

Marion / Wings of Desire

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The movie poster shows the angel Damiel perched high above Berlin at the top of the Victory Statue. The movie’s sweeping shots give an angel’s-eye view of the city.

Why am I here?

At the start of the movie is a poem, written by Handke, which explains why. “When the child was a child, it didn’t know it was a child. Everything was full of life, and all life was one.” Later in the movie, the poem continues, “When the child was a child, it was the time of the following questions: Why am I me and why not you? Why am I here and why not there?”

The angels, who know the answers to these questions, are somehow bereft. They might know and see everything as they gaze down from on high—as the movie shows with its dizzying aerial shots. But they feel nothing of the simple sensual pleasures of being human, the joy in the mundane—a division shown cinematically by shooting every scene with the angels in black and white. In an improvised scene, Peter Falk tries on various hats with a costume director, a simple act that captures the pleasure in everyday experiments with identity that are beyond the angels.

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Physical and metaphysical themes of duality are explored within the movie. Self-reflective and alone, Marion is the earthly equivalent of the angel Damiel.

"The film is like music or a landscape: It clears a space in my mind, and in that space I can consider questions."

Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times, 1998

Separations

Wings of Desire is about dualities and separations. Set in a city divided artificially by the Berlin Wall, the spiritual is separated from the sensual, as the heavenly from the mundane, men from women, adults from children. Above all, the movie is about how we are all separated from each other, and a deep sense of loneliness runs through it.

When the angel Damiel begins to fall for the beautiful but lonely trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin), we sense that they should be together. The process is slow, and in the end Damiel must finally choose whether or not to give up his immortal status in order to experience a physical love for this woman. The viewer is encouraged to believe that this is the right decision, because Peter Falk, an angel who crossed over long ago, is a living testament of contentment. In crossing over, he has not lost his spiritual side but reunites the spiritual with the material, the child with the adult. He can still sense the presence of the angels, saying “I can’t see you, but I know you’re here.”

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Marion is a trapeze artist at a failing circus. She lives in a trailer, and leads a lonely existence dancing on her own and wandering the streets of Berlin.

Finish vs spontaneity

The parts of Damiel and Cassiel were scripted by Peter Handke, since Wenders felt the angels should speak in elevated language, but Peter Falk’s part is almost entirely improvised. Falk plays a version of himself, an American actor who is in Berlin to make a movie about its Nazi past. The children in the streets call him “Columbo,” after the TV detective in the series that had made Falk a famous screen presence.

At one point, Wenders noticed Falk making sketches of extras. He decided to incorporate this into the movie, and had Falk improvise a voice-over, which gains resonance from its roughness: “These people are extras, extra people,” says Falk. “Extras are so patient.” The contrast between the refined, rehearsed script of the angels and the rough spontaneity and mundanity of the scenes with Falk represents the two halves of human life that need to come together.

Wenders dedicated his movie to three “filmmaking angels,” directors whose work inspired him. The first is Yasujiro Ozu, who showed how to depict the quiet desperation of the mundane. The second, François Truffaut, demonstrated how to film the reality of children as a profound experience. The third, Andrei Tarkovsky, created slow-paced meditations full of spiritual yearning. Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote that “Physical pleasure… is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing.” Falk’s joy in the simple experience of tasting coffee is spiritual and drives home the idea that to have experience at all is a wonder of being alive.

“The whole place is full of those who are dreaming the same dream.”

Cassiel / Wings of Desire

WIM WENDERS Director

Born in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1945, Wim Wenders is known for his lush, lyrical filmmaking. He studied medicine and philosophy at university before dropping out to become a painter. However, cinema became his focus and he enrolled in the University of Television and Film Munich (HFF). Wenders soon became one of the leading lights of the New German Cinema movement. The director first came to prominence with his feature The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty Kick, based on a novel by Peter Handke. The English-language Paris, Texas, with a screenplay by Sam Shepard, brought him international fame. He has also made documentaries, the most successful of which was Buena Vista Social Club, about a group of aging musicians in Havana, Cuba.

Key movies

1972 The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty Kick

1984 Paris, Texas

1987 Wings of Desire

1999 Buena Vista Social Club

What else to watch: La Belle et la Bête (1946) ✵ It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) ✵ Andrei Rublev (1966) ✵ Alice in the Cities (1974) ✵ The American Friend (1977) ✵ The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979)