Wings of Desire

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Wings of Desire
Directed by Wim Wenders
Produced by Wim Wenders
Anatole Dauman
Written by Wim Wenders
Peter Handke
Starring Bruno Ganz
Solveig Dommartin
Otto Sander
Curt Bois
Peter Falk
Music by Jürgen Knieper
Distributed by MGM (US only)
Release date(s) 23 September 1987
Running time 127 min.
Language German, English and French
Budget € 2,500,000
IMDb profile
Building Angel by Jean Nouvel, an angel from the film observes the people of Prague-Smíchov district.
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Building Angel by Jean Nouvel, an angel from the film observes the people of Prague-Smíchov district.

Wings of Desire is the English title of Der Himmel über Berlin (trans. The Sky over Berlin or Heaven over Berlin), a 1987 film by the German-born director Wim Wenders. Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry partially inspired the movie; Wenders claimed angels seemed to dwell in Rilke's poetry. The director also employed Peter Handke, who wrote much of the dialogue, the poetic narrations, and the film's recurring poem "Song of Childhood."

Contents

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Set in Berlin in the late 1980s, toward the end of the Cold War, it follows two angels, Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander), as they roam the city, unseen and unheard by the people, observing and listening to the diverse thoughts of Berliners: a pregnant woman, a painter, a broken man who thinks his girlfriend no longer loves him. Their raison d'etre is not that of the stereotypical angel, but as Cassiel says, to "assemble, testify, preserve" reality. In addition to the story of two angels, the film also is a meditation on Berlin's past, present, and future. Damiel and Cassiel have always existed as angels; they existed in Berlin before it was a city, and in fact before there were even any humans.

Among the Berliners they encounter in their meanderings is an old man named Homer (Curt Bois), who, unlike the Greek poet of war Homer, dreams of an "epic of peace". The angel Cassiel follows the old man as he looks for the Potsdamer Platz in an open field, where all he finds is the graffiti-covered Berlin Wall.

Although Damiel and Cassiel are pure observers, invisible to all but children, and incapable of any physical interaction with our world, one of the angels, Damiel (Bruno Ganz), begins to fall in love with a circus trapeze artist named Marion (Solveig Dommartin), who is talented, lovely, but profoundly lonely. Marion lives alone in a trailer, dances alone to the live music of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and drifts through the city.

A subpart of the film follows Peter Falk, cast as himself, who has arrived in Berlin to make a film about Berlin's Nazi past. As the movie progresses, it turns out that Peter Falk was also once an angel, who renounced his immortality to become a mortal participant in the world after he grew tired of always observing and never experiencing.

Eventually, Damiel too longs for physicality, and to become human. When he sheds his immortal existence, he experiences life for the first time: he bleeds, sees colors for the first time (the movie before then is filmed in a sepia tinted monochrome, except for brief moments when the angels are not present), tastes food, drinks coffee. Meanwhile, Cassiel inadvertantly taps into the mind of a young man just before he commits suicide by jumping off a building; Cassiel tries to save the young man but is unable to do so, and he is left haunted and tormented by the experience. Eventually Damiel meets the trapeze artist Marion at a bar, and they greet each other with familiarity as if they had long known each other. In the end, Damiel is united with the woman he had desired for so long.

The story is continued in Wenders' 1993 sequel, In weiter Ferne, so nah! (Faraway, So Close!.)

[edit] Cinematography

The movie, shot by cinematographer Henri Alekan, who famously worked on Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête, shows the angels' sepia-tinted monochromatic point of view and switches to color to show the human beings' point of view. During filming, Wenders and Alekan used a silk stocking that belonged to the latter's grandmother as a filter for the monochromatic sequences.

The shift from monochrome to color, to distinguish the angels' reality from the mortals', was first used in A Matter of Life and Death by Powell & Pressburger in 1946.

[edit] Awards

The film won the prize for Best Direction at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival

[edit] American remake

In 1998 an American remake called City of Angels was made. The setting was Los Angeles and starred Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage. Aside from the basic premise of angels watching humans and a love story the two films bear little relation.

[edit] Theatrical adaptation

In 2006, the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge and Toneelgroep Amsterdam presented a stage adaptation of the movie, created by Gideon Lester and Dirkje Houtman and directed by Ola Mafaalani.

[edit] External links

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