WINGS OF DESIRE
(Der Himmel über Berlin)

PARTS: ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN
NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY

The "angels view" portions of Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire portrayed in black-and-white -- certainly the first 25 minutes, and then in the diminishing scenes thereafter -- deliberately invoke in the viewer a set of specific responses. These responses -- the "angelic" state of mind -- lay the foundation for the transformation in the film that Damiel (and Marion) participate in. The film prepares the viewer for an analogous transformation, and makes an invitation for the viewer to choose to participate.

In Orson Welles' planned opening to his aborted first-person Heart of Darkness, he asserts that "eye" = "I." Wenders' film shares with Welles' vision a trait perhaps most thoroughly explored in science fiction cinema. The close up of the eye at the beginning of Wings serves to foreground the role of perception -- of a vision about vision -- that comprises one of the films major tools. The shot echoes similar shots at the end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and at the beginning of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. In his eponymous book about Blade Runner, Scott Bukatman could be speaking about Wings of Desire when he writes, "Cinematic movement becomes an essential mode of comprehension: the camera often takes on a subjective, first-person point of view when encountering such strange environments."

As described in discussions with the filmmakers -- in particular with Henri Alekan -- it is apparent that, beyond the "textual" evidence in the film itself, Wenders went to great effort to cast the viewer into sharing the angels' point of view. The result of this effort is to remove the viewer from "reality" in a number of manners or to reshape reality as the Delany quotation above describes.

First, the traditional perception of color photography being "more realistic" than black-and-white photography works to take a contemporary viewer out of their complacency with regard to experiencing the film. Any film not shot in color is something new or different. This sense of the new or different disarms the viewer through thwarted expectations -- and is thus part of the foundation of the viewer's eventual mesmerization. For the first segment of the film -- until we meet Marion at the Circus Alekan -- the viewer lives within the monochrome world of the angels.

Second, save for a few short shot-reverse-shot episodes that establish the cosmological place of the angels in Wender's world view, the entire statement of the angel's point of view proceeds with little classical (Hollywood) cinematic technique. The key exceptions serve to highlight the rule. For example, there are five situations in which children and Damiel are shown to share in a shot-reverse-shot encounter. (These are: the children walking across the street and on the bus looking up at Damiel on the ruins of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche [memorial church], at the beginning of the film; the child in the airplane, drawing; the youngster with leg braces; and the child reading in the Scharoun Building of the Staatsbibliothek [State Library]). These sparse interludes draw attention to the absence of such constructions occurring on a regular basis elsewhere during the "angelic" portions of the film. Sometimes the viewer sees the angels as if she is a child in the film's diagetic space. Often the viewer sees the angelic world as if from the point of view of another angel.

The fragmentary nature of the narrative takes the viewer through three stages during the "angelic phase" of the film. This is the third technique Wenders employs to destabilize the viewer accustomed to classical narrative. There is the expectation that the narrative of the film, as with any newly encountered film, will not necessarily be clear at the outset. Then, there is the confusion when, even after a half an hour, the narrative does not seem to appear. Finally, there is the acceptance of this mode of (non-narrative) cinematic expression. There may also be a rejection of the film's experience, at any point, effectively ending meaningful engagement on the part of the viewer. This would remove the viewer from the processes and experiences described here.

A critical transition occurs when Wenders elicits in the viewer the state of accepting the lack of a narrative structure. This state makes the viewer more of a tabula rasa -- or, more appropriately for the film's conceits, more child-like -- than when the viewer walked into the theater. The viewer likely greets the film with some narrative expectation, which Wenders subverts. Wenders and Handke will describe some analogs to these stages of transformation through both the content and the placement of the film's recurring poem, which I will explore later.

The desire to turn the viewer into a child resonates with the way children are privileged in the film. Children are given privileged positions in the world of the film. They are the only people who can readily perceive the angels and the few key exceptions to this trope re-enforce the sentiment behind it. Adults who are themselves fallen angels can sense the presence of an angel in their midst, as Falk demonstrates twice at the coffee stand. A fallen angel is, in many ways, essentially a child in the world. Marion can see an angel, but only in her dreams. For an adult, the dream state is where the lucidity and creativity of childhood are arguably most likely to manifest themselves.

Childhood is given primacy in other, formal manners. In particular, the framing of the film within the poem about childhood, being written by Damiel, emphasizes both an underscoring of a focus on the psychic state of childhood by both the angel and the filmmaker. Finding the attitude of an angel in the filmmaker seems even more justified since the film is dedicated to what Wenders calls three fallen angels, the filmmakers Tarkovsky, Truffaut, Ozu. In conversation with Taja Gut, Wenders spoke of the centrality of the child's mode of perception in his work (see the Notes section for information about this and all other quotations):

In this respect, Ruth Perlmutter notes that "Wenders shares [with Tarkovsky, Truffaut, and Ozu] a pedagogical stance towards cinema -- as a consciousness-vehicle, as a transcendent force of romanticism, as a medium in love with human-'kind,' especially children, because of their innocence." The "consciousness-vehicle" stance she attributes to Wenders is borne out by the progression in Wings, beginning with the destabilization (or manipulation) I have described. First, the slate is wiped clean. Then, it is filled with an alternative set of ideas.

The fourth technique Wenders uses to manipulate the viewer during the angelic portion of Wings breaks down the viewer's expectation of a distinction between narrative and non-fiction film. By subverting this distinction distinction, Wenders increases the potential vectors of influence his work can traverse. The non-fiction stance -- while an unexpected means utilized by Wenders in his creation of the transformative experience in Wings -- is not unprecedented in cinema. Two classic examples from the late 1920s come to mind: Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera and Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a [Great] City). Wenders screened three particular films for the for cast and crew, prior to beginning shooting on Wings, including Ruttman's film. The tradition stretches further back (to Louis Lumière's works) and forward to the decade of Wings (such as Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi) and beyond (e.g., Jon Jost's London Brief).

Besides being intellectually steeped both in essay films and in narrative, Wenders has made both sorts of films for years. The 1980 essay, Lightning Over Water, preceded the 1982 feature, Hammett. The 1982 essay, Reverse Angle, preceded the 1984 feature, Paris, Texas. The 1985 essay, Tokyo-Ga, preceded the 1987 feature, Wings of Desire. The 1989 essay, Notebooks on Cities and Clothes, preceded the 1991 feature, Until the End of the World. In many of these pairings one can see something of an artist engaged in "studies" (via essay films) to move away from one large project (a feature film) and toward another large project (the following feature film). In Wenders' work, the two kinds of exposition interpenetrate. Reverse Angle was a response to troubles surrounding Hammett (Wenders would not conform to the Hollywood methods dictated to him). Tokyo-Ga laid some of the stylistic foundations of Wings of Desire. In conversation with Reinhold Rauh, Wenders said, "If I hadn't made Tokyo-Ga after Paris, Texas, then I wouldn't have dared to do that thing with voices in Wings of Desire."

Wenders' first film already contains indications that he was moving in the direction of mixing non-narrative films (images) and feature films (narratives) that reached its apex in his work in Wings.

The sense of a viewer taking unrelated images and seeking to create a narrative out of them rhymes with the process Wenders' imposes on the viewer of Wings of Desire during the film's early angelic sequences. While this aspect of filmmaking may have troubled Wenders for years (the quotation above is from a speech he made in 1982), by the time of Wings he is using this "problem" towards constructive and instrumental ends -- the destabilizing and then transformative processes in Wings of Desire.

Although not cited by Wenders, Fritz Lang's film about Wiemar Berlin, M, is arguably the classic mixture of documentary and narrative technique -- and conveys the essence of a particular historical (though almost mythological) Berlin for Wenders. Wiemar Berlin is reflected in Ruttmann's non-narrative portrait-of-a-city, of course, but it is also alluded to in Homer's search for the Potsdamer Platz, and in the use of the Esplanade as one of Wings' settings. M is, arguably, the most complete portrait of a city's machinations and of the interrelations of an urban populace. Beyond being set in the same city, Wings strives towards this comprehensiveness through a less Brechtian cross-section of lives, suffused with significantly more internal spiritual and emotional portraits and significantly fewer material social relationships. The particular techniques employed by Lang in M, however, are where the most interesting parallels occur. Of particular note is the use of the non-narrative film forms employed. "In the style of a police education film, M shows the result of the raid: the camera pans slowly over an amazing array of tools and a large assortment of weapons. Lang is fond of such inventory shots; they reinforce the film's documentary dimension... " as do other interludes, such as the series of close-ups of doctors' reports about recently released mental patients. There are also brief but direct ties between Lang's M and Ruttmann's Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a [Great] City), such as the spiraling concentric circles contraption in the knife shop window.

In Wings of Desire, Wenders mixes forms (poetic city documentary/essay and narrative/feature love story) to a (for him) new extreme. He has Peter Falk (whose most famous role is that of a TV detective named Columbo) play an actor in Berlin named Peter Falk (who happens to be a famous American television actor whose character on TV was named Columbo). For those viewers familiar with the manner in which Falk was brought into the project, and the circumstances by which his part grew in scope as the filming progressed, the Falk character’s comments when the audience first sees him on the plane are full of foreshadowing. "I don't understand this character," Falk the actor/character says in voiceover. "It's amazing how little I know about this part. Maybe we'll discover it during the shoot. That's half the battle."

The treatment of the Falk character/actor is a logical extension of Wenders' long-standing approach to actors and their characters. In conversation with Peter Jansen, Wenders has said that "the actors I work with aren't so much actors as just themselves, in my films. I don't look to them to be actors, so much as to be themselves." In Wings, Wenders places his actors as two extremes around this general practice. On the one hand, "with Bruno (Ganz) and Otto (Sander) in Wings of Desire it was obviously a bit different. As angels, they weren't able to use their life stories... ". On the other hand, Wenders took his actor=character equation to its logical extreme with Falk. Solvieg Dommartin / Marion falls somewhere towards the middle of this continuum -- and might thus be considered a most typical Wenders' character. For example, Marion's trailer is decorated with postcards of Nancy, Dommartin's home town.

Wenders wants the viewer to put aside notions of expectation and open oneself to a gamut of possibilities. He knows that the expectations regarding narrative will arise, but relies on them being, at least at first, subverted. Ideally, the viewer will accept the subversion. Wenders seeks to place the viewer in the role of a child by creating a diagetic context that undermines the viewer's reliance on past experience and places her in the role of a child, learning about the world anew. In this way, the viewer is set up to be born into a new world -- to be willingly but inevitably led into a transformation.

These essays are copyrighted © 1999 - 2001 by Nathan Wolfson (nathan underscore wolfson at yahoo dot com). Quotations from other sources are copyrighted by those sources, as indicated in the Notes and Bibliography. All rights are reserved.