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Wings of Desire
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Introduction (December 2018): Wim Wenders’ trajectory as a filmmaker – and, in
particular, Wings of Desire – has accompanied me since my earliest years as a critic. I have referred to
this major film of his often, and usually in passing, in the midst of some
other, broader argument, either about his career as a whole or a larger
cultural context. The film has stuck to me, and keeps overcoming my announced
resistances to it – because, really, I love it. The closest I have (so far) got
to synthesising my evolving, scattered thoughts on Wenders and the stark changes
in his filmography appeared as "Dinosaurs, Babies and the Sound of Music" in the first issue (titled “Histories”) of LOLA in August 2011 (revised from a text of 2009). But sometimes it’s
probably better to simply arrange the fragments, appearing over time, that
constellate around a certain film, director or topic – rather than trying to
iron them out into a singular thesis. Recently seeing – and being overwhelmed
by – the digitally restored/enhanced version of Wings of Desire on the big screen of ACMI in Melbourne
convinced me that it is not only the “crucial crossroads” (as I once referred
to it) in Wenders’ career, but also something of a miracle in its material
coherence and cohesiveness, on the levels of both image and sound design – and
that even its most sentimental and wilfully “childlike” gestures and moments
fully work and integrate themselves as Wenders intended them to. Here is a
collage of three episodes (dating from the late 1980s and early ‘90s) from my
lifelong engagement with Wings of Desire and Wenders.
Wim Wenders’ Wings
of Desire is clearly two different films placed end to end – each of which
requires its own careful commentary. The one I like better is in
black-and-white and is about two angels (Bruno Ganz as Damiel, Otto Sander as
Cassiel). The second one, shorter and in colour, is a celebration of “life
itself”. The philosophical principles of neither film are ones I personally
particularly share; but there’s no doubting that, in every respect, Wings of Desire is, all up, a beautiful
and remarkable movie, and Wenders’ most elaborate concept-metaphor to date.
The first Wings
of Desire is a long commentary on modern melancholia. Like for the
characters in all Wenders’ films, the angels’ subject-position is one of
profound solitude: selves who can observe and even understand the travails of
others, but neither touch nor intervene in their lives (a theme granted an
extraordinary representation here in the suicide scene). Wenders gives full
poetic realisation to another, connected concern of his: the grasping of cinema
itself as a type of melancholia-machine. For these angels are cinema; they see all, hear all, note down all, but never enter
the scene of the Real, whether personal or historical reality. This movie is a
cinephile’s nightmare. But then, it is also a dream …
We can say quite precisely that Wenders’ cinema
represents a particular apolitical cultural sensibility of our time.
Withdrawing from any social space of other-relations (community, family,
collectivity), he appreciates only the flickerings of a lonely, twilight
subjectivity. But alienation – the goalie’s fear of penalty – is no longer the
keynote in Wings of Desire. Perfectly
in step with the desperate investment of the 1980s in lyrical subjectivity, Wenders
shrinks the world down to its smallest movements and gestures, and then blows
it up onto the big screen. It’s a wonderful world, indeed. And we can see how
the melancholic, solitary subject (i.e., the cinephile) is thereby saved: he
becomes, himself or herself, a kind of screen, barely a surface, through which
effects and affects pass, fleetingly. In Wings
of Desire, Wenders joins this projected subjectivity to the sad love
streams of John Cassavetes (here represented by the marvellous Peter Falk).
And, furthermore, Wenders claims his film as a gesture
in the service of peace, an optimistic film malgré
tout: because (you know how this goes from his earlier films) narrative is
identity is inexorable movement is violence is death is war, Wings of Desire traces all that is not
solid or linear or visible. An old storyteller (a figure sourced from an essay
by Walter Benjamin?) played by Curt Bois opens up hidden passageways in time
and space … Berlin is re-invented, and it is full of grace. A child’s world, a
child’s (pre-symbolic, or is it post-symbolic?) vision.
Around the moment that Crime and the City Solution’s
Simon Bonney gesticulates his way through an immaculately draggy rendition of
“Six Bells Chime” and Marion (Solveig Dommartin) sashays to it in the club-head
crowd, Wings of Desire is perfectly
balanced – overflowingly happy and sad all at once. Then the metaphoric premise
changes radically with the arrival of its second film. Being an angel becomes
the pretext (or ideological alibi, not all that different in this regard from
Frank Capra’s It's a Wonderful Life [1946]) for singing the praises of being human.
Pain (Bruno Ganz’s blood) is beautiful, the cold is beautiful, you and I are
beautiful …
And now the definition of optimism changes, too: from
the solitary self that flickers, we pass over (as in the home movies of Paris, Texas [1984]) into the unbearably romantic drama of the Holy Twosome, the perfect
heterosexual couple. Wenders seems to really believe in it; some of us try to,
as well. But at least he lets on that the whole thing is a fairy tale. And he
tries as much as he can to tie the two films together (by progressively
rewriting, as the film moves forward, an extraordinary text on childhood by
Peter Handke), and to make them interrogate each other (by returning, at the
very end, to another sad round of the other angel Cassiel’s black-and-white
film).
Wenders is not entirely in control of such awesome
forces and contradictions – who on earth could be? I’m just glad to have been
handed such a gift, as well as such a minefield.
For me, Wenders’ best films have an astonishing
materiality. The light, the sounds, the saggy flesh of the actors, the
extraordinary compositions framed by WW and his faithful cinematographers
Robbie Mueller or Henri Alekan: rarely are these formal elements granted such
prominence or eloquence.
These things hit you because Wenders lets them hit
you; his fiction films don’t have the same timing as mainstream movies. They are slow, lingering, concentrating on odd or
excessive things. Above all, they refuse a certain kind of narrative.
It’s amazing to see, in retrospect, that already in
his very first feature, the quasi-experimental Summer in the City (1970), Wenders had included an archetypal
reflection on the evils of narrative. The super-alienated central character
(Hanns Zischler, later co-star of Kings
of the Road [1976]) begins to retell the story of a novel, in which a man
wasting forever in prison starts, each night, to narrate the story of his life.
The details of the prisoner’s account inexorably gather together with ritual
force; they take on a direction, a forward movement, a foreseeable or
foreshadowed destiny … Zischler then avows that he could not even finish the
book, because it was obviously going to end in death. He immediately changes
the subject.
Narrative is death: this is the equation that worries
and drives experimental feature filmmkers including Wenders, Chantal Akerman and Jean-Luc Godard right from the 1960s through to (at least) the end of the
‘80s. Wenders gives the theme its purest expression in The State of Things (1982): the moment that the hero (Patrick
Bauchau as Friedrich) sets foot in big bad old Hollywood, looking for money to
complete his film and tie up his story, he’s a dead man – mysteriously gunned
down in the street (Hollywood is a shady place!).
Before this sorry conclusion, there has certainly been
some kind of story in The State of Things:
recognisable characters, settings of a particular world, and so on. But, as in
the entire first part of Wenders’ career spanning the shorts of the late ‘60s
to the features of the early ‘80s, this is a story under no particular pressure
to go anywhere. Instead, incidents and fragments are more-or-less left alone to
proliferate and resonate with each other, finding their own rhythm and tone in
the loose overall ensemble.
The same thing happens in the first, black-and-white
half of Wings of Desire: the angels
fly around, gathering scattered testimonies of all the world’s (or, at least,
Berlin’s) sad half-lives. (Wenders, in the open-ended, semi-improvised
production schedule of this film, in fact lingered way too much in imagining
and creating scenes for this part of the film – thus generating narrative
material that had to be deleted or postponed, and then taken up again in the
sequel, Faraway, So Close! [1993].) Such
films as Wenders makes in this mode (Alice in the Cities [1974] remains the very best
of them) might seem, at first glance, rather minimalist, thin on the ground: in
fact, they possess a rich, minutely intricate, mosaic, crystalline form and
texture – something that, personally, I never tire of re-experiencing.
If there’s something grandiose in Wenders, I suspect
it’s his tendency to project his own drifting, apolitical lifestyle onto
everybody else – to take his own, very particular malaise for the malaise of,
first, Germany, and eventually the entire globe. (Derek Jarman offers a close
point of comparison, especially in his The
Last of England [1987].) Wenders is no intellectual, and his penchant for
sweeping, global generalisations about the death of cinema and society, the
rebirth of art and Man’s soul – statements that spot his features, saturate his
essay films and veritably fill his anthologies of collected writing – are a
little short of profound. And Wenders’ love of the half-life has its
unpleasant, insensitive, awfully masculine side, too, as is all too clear in
his document of the dying Nicholas Ray in Lightning
Over Water (1980).
I probably like even less the Wenders who, in a conservative
turn, wants more and more to “return home” – the Wenders who places the boy-child
back into the arms of Mummy (Nastassja Kinski) at the end of Paris, Texas so that the male hero
(Harry Dean Stanton) can wander off back into the desert to pursue his eternal,
male angst; the Wenders who bets all on the sublime, saving grace of
heterosexual love at the close of Wings
of Desire. But that’s my rational (or rationalised) response: I cannot deny
to you that, in my heart, I find the romantic resolution of Wings of Desire as inspiring and
stirring as it is impossible and mad. The very images that convey all this –
Dommartin’s extreme close-up gaze right into the camera, Ganz leaning close to
her silently at the bar, followed by the leap ahead to him helping her do her acrobatic/angelic
turn in the circus – teeter right on the edge of collapsing into pure cliché,
of not working at all – but, somehow, they do hold together and do pull off
their fragile, wonderful work.
And maybe my personal response is just one sign that,
in the so-called New Age, Wenders has really come into his own. His newly
grandiose tales of rebirth, of the passage out of half-life and into full-life,
obviously trike very deep chords in many people (myself included). With a
naïveté and bravery that is truly disarming, Wenders goes for broke in his
cosmically-scaled Until the End of the
World (1991). With, it must be said, some dire results.
Does this matter? When Wings of Desire premiered at the Sydney and Melbourne film
festivals, I and most of my critic friends scoffed (or feigned to scoff) at its
lordly, humanist lament over the Berlin Wall as the marker of Germany’s
“divided heart and soul”. However, as we’d now have to admit, Wenders was onto
something. After all, that Wall did come tumbling down.
There is a cinema of twilight, a cinema of half-lives,
half-lived. This cinema belongs to the person wide-eyed at the window, keyhole
or movie screen – the stranger in Paradise. Outwardly passive, the stranger, in
fact, watches and listens and thinks furiously; and he or she yearns. There is no beyond to which
death might release the stranger; the vision of earthly, earthy life, just over
there, is all the Heaven one could ever desire.
There are two angels (Bruno Ganz as Damiel and Otto
Sander as Cassiel) in Wim Wenders’ Wings
of Desire, but for them, also, there is no Heaven in the conventional,
movie-fiction sense. Don’t ask from where they are meant to have come (fallen
angels?); they are stock figures quickly sketched for the sake of a parable,
and a fable. The parable is existential: it concerns the difference between
half-life and full life, reflection and action, twilight and sunrise. The fable
is romantic, defining full life as the mutual transfiguration of two souls
through their experience of an ecstatic and spiritual love.
Wenders is a brave man to have presented us with such
sentiments so unapologetically and unashamedly – whilst knowing, surely, the
responses he would get from materialists, nihilists, and just plan sceptics.
The suspicion that sometimes accompanies Wenders’ public image is
understandable: he’s a little too elusive, opaque and changeable from one film
(or career phase) to the next. But as to the charge (who can forget Jean-Pierre
Gorin’s vomitous disdain as expressed on the Melbourne Film Festival stage?)
that Wings of Desire is a slick,
calculated, opportunistically neo-romantic film on the wings of the latest
cultural fashion – how could I ever agree to that, in my heart? For repeated
viewings only confirm and deepen the first, awestruck impression: that this is
a rich, profound and wonderful film. Sincere, too.
The film seems undeniably personal in its intensity.
Yet Wenders’ symbolic autobiography here (the story of a love affair) is open
and universal; Damiel stands for all those distanced, quietly passionate
strangers for whom Paradise one day becomes available, as he swaps his ethereal
wings for mortal flesh, blood and sensuality. Some critics (including myself on
first viewing – see above) have chosen to take the first half of the film – its
black-and-white twilight section, as
it were – as radically distinct in tone, philosophy and achievement from the
second half, following Damiel’s search for his one, true love, Marion (Solveig
Dommartin, Wenders’ partner at the time of making this and Until the End of the World). The argument runs that while the first
part plunders a gritty, authentic melancholia tied to the collective, material
miseries of the real world, the second part launches (unconvincingly, for some)
into a Utopian, unrealisable dream of sublime heterosexual union between
all-too-beautiful, exquisitely special people – a dream, too, of innocence re-found, and reality left
behind, shut out of view.
This case has some weight; but I don’t accept that the
two sections of Wings of Desire cleave apart so distinctly or easily. First, let’s accept the fact (it’s hard
to watch, let alone appreciate, the film without accepting it as an a priori) that this is a profoundly
romantic work, which indeed drinks deep of German Romanticism at its purest. As
Raymond Durgnat said of Wenders at the time of Paris, Texas: “Finally, perhaps, he is a Romantic as ancient as
[Werner] Herzog. His modern themes […] mask the poetic angst of the Egoistic
Sublime”. (1) This means that, while the film touches on issues such as
workaday poverty and suicide (the sight of the latter releasing a literal cry
of poetic angst from Cassiel), it is really centred on the movement of a
Sublime Ego (belonging to Damiel, Wenders, or the spectator) from a
non-physical (half-alive) state to a physical one – engaged, at last, in the
world. But movement is too weak a word for this crossover; it involves a
veritable transfiguration, a lifting
up, a fusion with and transformation through an Other. That’s the romance of
the film in a nutshell; Wenders expects us to either take it or leave it, and I
respect this determination.
Yet I also suspect
that there is already a soul of sublimity already burning in the first part of
the film long before Love arrives for its central characters. It is certainly
already burning within Marion, this soul perfectly contained and preserved
(since she is already both angel and human, fragile and magical – and wrapped,
it would seem, in a shroud of chastity); yet it is also, more dispersed, within
the sublime fragments of everyday life that are depicted. Here again, Wenders’
romanticism draws a strict line: only outside the dark, domestic home can sublimity
spark into life, in all these satellite spaces of displaced, mobile life:
library, nightclub, ruin, makeshift film set, circus … virtual spaces one and all, temporary, transitory, but teeming with
possibility. Here, the Sublime Ego acquiesces in the experience of its own
perpetual loss or dissolution – a fragile cascading of impressions and
suggestions. Twilight brings its own voluptuous Utopia, however tinged with
sadness. As Bifo likes to say: there is a historical period of post-war boredom
that is rather pleasurable (even if still stuck), in its Antonioni-esque way … (2)
Wenders wants a higher love; and, appropriately, he
transfigures his film beyond its initial twilight state. But traces and echoes
call us back (in an almost deconstructive spirit) to the terms of a comparison:
traces of the multiple stories and parallel worlds that the film, at any
moment, could have followed up (Alain Philippon spoke, in a manner reminiscent
of Raśl Ruiz, of these “dozens of micro-fictions which have no less
importance”); (3) and a reminder, via the figure of Cassiel, of what resists
transformation and stays wilfully in the twilight. Wings of Desire is not like Paul Schrader’s Mishima (1985), opposing action to reflection and then longing,
impossibly, to itself become a real, violent, ascendant gesture; Wenders knows
that his film remains a film, and is therefore a reflection – an allegory, a
metaphor. This has much to do with its level of formal achievement.
For two-and-a-half hours, Wings of Desire redeems the whole sorry institution of commercial arthouse
cinema – at the very moment when this growing market seems set to sift and devour
the entire space of independent/marginal production. From one (oblique) angle,
it’s an instance of the particular form known today as the essay-film. It has no characters, really, to speak of, very little
psychological motivation; only figures who allow a minimum number of tiny plot moves to be very leisurely played out.
(As a fairy tale entirely without tension, it joins, in its year of release,
with Alan Rudolph’s far less marketable spiritual odyssey/oddity, Made in Heaven [1987].)
It begins with the writing of words, with ideas,
thoughts and concepts; and it maintains this level of abstraction via a system
of point-of-view narration that is completely ungrounded and floating (because
angelic). Whose thoughts, images, colours, shadings, sensations are these? What
these bifocal angels collect – since the have the power to see and hear all,
including inner speech – belongs, at one metaphoric remove, to the cinematic
apparatus itself as mystic writing-pad; and then to the spectator, caught in
the act of his or her own special half-life at the movies.
Wings of Desire is full of
improvisation, randomness and a wilful heterogeneity; innocently, simply, the
film uses it device of the “recording angel” to cue surprisingly experimental
passages employing pixilation, superimposition and other devices of abstraction
across a quite breathtaking play of rhythmic registers and tonal switch-ups. What
marks Wenders’ greatness as a director is the manner in which, in the middle of
this sometimes seemingly uncontrollable diversity of elements, he finds
powerful nodal points at which to articulate image and sound transitions – such
as the incredible moment when Cassiel puts his hand to his ear and hence cuts
the sound mix from cacophony to tranquillity. “Dreamlike” will hardly do as an
adequate description of how the film moves through and poetically interrelates
its heterogeneous materials: archival newsreel (in startlingly rich and vivid
colour), different performance modes from Ganz to Peter Falk via a surging sea
of extras (“extra humans”, as the latter muses), pillow shots (in the form of cityscapes
without people or events), deep dissolves, and Peter Handke’s concrete poetry
more recited (as detached voice-over) than naturalised as either monologue or
dialogue.
It is clear that, in Wings of Desire, Wenders approaches, more closely than before, a
particularly potent cinema-dream – the dream of a film that could speak
directly and feelingly to each of its spectators, cutting through all the
cultural codes and mediations. Falk (via the cinema of John Cassavetes) is on
hand to incarnate this extraordinary, even hopeless reverie of the love stream, strong and clear, between
screen and viewer. Yet Wenders ultimately
belongs in another tradition; that of Chris Marker, for example, who began his
immortal Sunless (1983) by
alternating autobiographical archive images with black leader, so that “if you
don’t see the happiness, at least you’ll see the black”. Or Peter Handke
himself, who titled a 1975 novel, both hopefully and ironically, A Moment of True Feeling. (4) Is Wings of Desire a moment of true
feeling? The film touches us; yet the place from which it speaks is still
somewhere, knowingly, in the shadows – with Cassiel and an ancient storyteller
remaining, in the closing images, Strangers in Paradise.
MORE Wenders: The Blues, The Brothers Skladanowsky, Buena Vista Social Club, The End of Violence, Hammett, Land of Plenty, The Million Dollar Hotel, Until the End of the World
2. See, for example, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Will It Happen Again? Boredom, Anxiety and the Peak of Human Evolution”, Crisis and Critique, Vol. 5 No. 2 (March 2018). back
3. Alain Philippon, “Retour amont”, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 400 (October 1987); Wenders was the special editor of this fantastic anniversary issue (on the occasion of Wings of Desire’s release), which invited filmmakers to bear witness to their impossible dream-projects. Philippon’s text is reprinted in his essential, posthumous anthology, Le blanc des origines (Crisnée: Éditions Yellow Now, 2002), pp. 100-106. back
4. Peter Handke (trans. Ralph Manheim), A Moment of True Feeling: A Novel (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977). back
© Adrian Martin June 1987 / August 1991 / April 1988 |
