Wings of desire
Director: Wim Wenders, 1987.
Original title: Der Himmel über Berlin
Main actors:
Bruno Ganz: Damiel
Solveig Dommartin: Marion
Otto Sander: Cassiel
Curt Bois: Homer
Peter Falk: Himself
production: Anatole Dauman and Wim Wenders; the production companies are: Road Movies, Filmproduktion, Argos Films e Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln.
“Als das Kind Kind war, ging es mit hängenden Armen, wollte der Bach sei ein Fluß, der Fluß sei ein Strom, und diese Pfütze das Meer. Als das Kind Kind war, wußte es nicht, daß es Kind war, alles war ihm beseelt, und alle Seelen waren eins.
Als das Kind Kind war, hatte es von nichts eine Meinung, hatte keine Gewohnheit, saß oft im Schneidersitz, lief aus dem Stand, hatte einen Wirbel im Haar und machte kein Gesicht beim fotografieren.”[1]
From the Noumenon to the Phenomenon, leaving behind his timeless wings and flying with the Wings of Desire. This is the story of Damiel, Bruno Ganz, the angel protagonist of the film, set in a city divided and wounded by war. In this metaphysical journey, masterpiece of Wim Wenders, the viewer will observe, alongside with the angels, a universe in pain and dominated by desire, that will narrate its suffering to us.
The director, back from the US, re-embraces his roots and thanks to the scandalous revolutionary power of his past - paraphrasing Pier Paolo Pasolini’s words - gives birth to a film that essentially delves the pureness of the human soul. This is similar to other films he made like Paris Texas, where the protagonist Travis tries to put an end to his distress through this search of pureness.
Plato in his Myth of Er at the end of the Republic, explains how free will is linked intrinsically to the soul, many themes of this myth can be found in Wings of Desire, in fact, the analysis of so mentioned themes increases the meaning of the film.
The essence of the angles, timeless beings invisible to human eyes and incapable of understanding what it means to be alive, is brilliantly represented by the director’s use of black and white; that puts them in a metaphysical situation similar to the one described by Plato for the souls.
The substantial difference between the myth and the film can be found in their nature: in Plato’s myth they journey and live for nine hundred years in the heavens, instead in the film they observe men, they basically are the witnesses of history[2]. The director uses the medium shot of Damiel at the beginning of the film, he is at the top of the Gedächtniskirche in ruins - symbol of a city raped by war, with the wings of desire on his back - to show how much he wants to be human. Damiel’s love for human suffering creates a visceral response in the viewer that makes him sympathises with the angel. All of this is explained by Damiel himself in the dialogue he has with Cassiel in the Cabriolet:
“I would like to feel a weight on me that could somehow bond me to this earth, I would like to say now, not forever, to suppose instead that to know always everything, to be thrilled by evil”[3].
The myth of Er is perfect for this film because it is not just conceptually linked to the film, but also thematically. Damiel’s tendency to escapism, it’s neither unique nor rare: Peter Falk was an angel himself, and based on what he said there are others like him. Marion in her final Monologue says:
“I don’t know if there is an end, but there must be a decision, it’s necessary that you decide, decide!”
This can only link with the theme of free will and the Platonic ideology of it being the origin of destiny. Indeed, in the myth of Er, the souls once completed their millenary journey[4], they have to choose their destiny, namely the type of life they will have. Although they have experienced the Good itself, the vast majority of them doesn’t make the right choice because they have forgotten the suffering of life.
Damiel in the film uses his free will to renounce to his knowledge on the essence of things. Damiel, the moment before becoming human, is shown to us in a medium shot, held by the arms of the suffering Cassiel. The scene takes place in the space between the two walls, marking the passage from the Noumenon to the Phenomenon.
The film manages to penetrate inside the spectator, who goes back to childhood and lets himself be amazed by what he sees once again. From the elegant and fluent camera movements in the sky, to the angelic dance of the trapeze artist, we can only surrender to the amazement. The old poet Homer says: “If I give up now, humanity will have lost its poet and with him it’s childhood”, Homer is the one who allows us, through his narrating, to become children again. Like the real Homer asks for divine help from his muse, he wants to tell the tale of “the ancient child”, namely the Humanity still pure and yet to be corrupted. The passage from purity to corruption is emphasised many times and it also seems to be the main worry of the angels, who suffer because of it.
“[When the child was a child] It had visualized a clear image of Paradise, and now can at most guess, could not conceive of nothingness, and shudders today at the thought”.
Corruption is the main cause of man’s misery and suffering. The shot through bars of the actors in the Holocaust set depicts this corruption as man’s personal cage. The director uses the thoughts of Peter Falk to tell us the story of a long suffering world awaiting for redemption: “Yellow star means death. Why did they pick yellow? Sunflowers. Van Gogh killed himself”. Or mind travels a journey through art and time and brings us to Van Gogh’s sunflowers allowing us to feel the Christian suffering of men and of the whole create.
The polar opposite of the corruption is the pureness of the children, this theme is a fixed point of Wenders’ narrative vital to the story. The metaphysic of the film, constructed by the dialogues of Peter Handke, is the heart of the director’s work and, linking back to what we were talking about, it revolves round the pureness of children. Thanks to it they are able to see the angels, while the adults cannot. For instance, in the airplane scene a shot reverse shot between Damiel and a little girl makes this mechanic very clear from the beginning. This main difference between children and adults resides in imagination and in their curiosity, very similar to Aristotle’s philosophical thauma. This theme is shown at the beginning of the film, while various everyday life images of a little girl are shown to us, Daniel’s voiceover recites Handke’s Song of Childhood:
When the child was a child,
It was the time for these questions:
Why am I me, and why not you?
Why am I here, and why not there?
When did time begin, and where does space end?
Is life under the sun not just a dream?
Is what I see and hear and smell
not just an illusion of a world before the world?
Given the facts of evil and people.
does evil really exist?
How can it be that I, who I am,
didn’t exist before I came to be,
and that, someday, I, who I am,
will no longer be who I am?
Curiosity and the desire for amazement drives children to ask themselves existential questions and to doubt the essence of reality, a very Platonic perspective indeed. When humankind loses its pureness wars begin. Man is so obsessed with them that it is impossible for him to think about anything else, as the old poet Homer says: “What is wrong with peace that its inspiration doesn't endure…”. When, later in the film, we will look at the short films made by the American soldiers of a Berlin reduced to rubble, we will then remember the words of Homer and we will finally understand the extent of human corruption.
Homer is always looking for his Postdamer Platz, even knowing it has been destroyed; his search for the Postdamer Platz is stressed because the square is so much more than a simple square, it is the concept of a free and pacific Berlin. The director decides to represent this metaphysical research with a medium shot of the old man, fallen asleep on a chair, surrounded by a sea of grass that is now what is left of the square. Now that the concept itself of peace has been badly shaken, Homer does not recognise his city anymore, nor his fellow citizens, who are describes as independent states that need a password to open their hearts to others. For this reason, the poet looks for peace in the past.
“Only the most ancient trails lead far away”, says Damiel to Cassiel.
After Damiel, the most important character is, without any doubt, Marion, the trapeze artist, main drive of Damiel’s desire to become human. Both Marion and Peter Falk showcase their bodies for work and by doing so they result as very attractive to the angel who longs to be seen by humans. Peter Falk will give the final push to Damiel, but the real drive is the angel’s desire for Marion. This is because he falls in love with her and as an angel falls from heaven, he falls for her. Marion says: “Lack of love makes us incapable”. Solveig Dommartin, Marion in the film, was Wender’s lover in real life, for this reason she not only represents a tangible love to us and Damiel but also to the director himself.
Cassiel also desires to be human and Peter Falk confronts him as well, but with no success because he could not fall in love with anyone. Later in the film, after Damiel became human, when Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play in an underground club, Cassiel is shown to suffer from this lack of love.
Henri Alekan’s photography perfectly connotes Cassiel’s suffering, he is shot in a thigh shot while leaning back a wall. A beautiful multiplicity of shadows is created by the use of lighting and represents his internal conflict, caused by the duality of his nature: He wants to become human, but at the same time he finds it difficult because of his angelic nature and his lack of love.
Marion is also suffering; her suffering brings her to the decision to train on the trapeze, without the safety net, to fight “the disease of time”. Marion’s existentialist pain is almost suicidal; this existentialist crisis, reflects post-war Berlin, but Modern society as well, which is “too aware to be sad” because oppressed by time. Marion’s suffering is mirrored by her acrobatic dance, elegant and angelic. She is so angelic that Damiel, an actual angel, falls in love with her and for the first time in the film he is able to see reality in full colour; vivid and full of emotions, different from the boring and never-changing monochromatic reality he was used to.
Marion’s final monologue, sensible and deep, reveals to us the meaning of her meeting with Damiel. The extreme close up of her face is hypnotic and all-absorbing, it finds great power in the use of the vivid red lipstick, symbolic iconography of an ardent passion.
Marion’s loneliness is key to the understanding of her character. She always felt lonely, but at the same time she wanted someone she could be alone with. “Loneliness means I'm finally whole" this unitary vison of the universe is very similar to Parmenides view of the world in its essence, but also Christian in its view on loss and reunion: “We two are now more than us two. We incarnate something. We're representing the people now” and also “There's no greater story than ours, that of man and woman”. The separation of man and woman , described in the bible, is the key that allows us to finally understand that love is just desire, of the man and of the woman to reunite[5].
The “people” Marion talks about is an important theme of the film as it represents humanity, together with the square. In this case a humanity burning for the desire to reunite. By going back to be a whole, mankind will be able to find the peace the old Homer was looking for in his Postdamer Platz.
[1] When the child was a child it walked with its arms swinging, wanted the brook to be a river, the river to be a torrent, and this puddle to be the sea. When the child was a child, it didn’t know that it was a child, to it, everything had a soul, and all souls were one.
When the child was a child, it had no opinion about anything, had no habits, it often sat cross-legged, took off running, had a cowlick in its hair, and made no faces when photographed.
[2] “A painting by Klee 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress”, W. Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-1940, translated by Edmund Jephcott and Others, edited by H. Eiland and M.W. Jennings, Harvard University Press, 2006.
[3] All the quotes are my translation, unless I say otherwise.
[4] Its 900 years in the sky and 100 on earth
[5] The same idea is argued in Plato’s Symposium by Aristophanes through the myth of the androgynous. The myth says that in origin man was composed by two bodies united together, the Gods to punish an act of hubris, arrogance, divided them in two. From the moment of that division humans always looks for another half to reunite with, Symposium 189 D-193 E.
