Wings of Desire

German auteur Wim Wenders’ dream-of-Berlin film, Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987), poses a question of existence: “Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there?” This line from Peter Handke’s poem, “Lied vom Kindsein” (“Song of Childhood”), raises a daring, long-asked question: How long is a person a “me” for, and how long does a “me” exist or subsist?

In the wake of the New German Cinema movement, Wenders and his writing partner Handke (who wrote much of the script’s dialogue) aimed to address prevailing feelings of “nationlessness” and “in-betweenness”. Wings of Desire provided a mirrored purview for its audience to feel understood – to see their disillusionment acted out. Repeatedly reminding us of Germany’s spectres of past war and strife, the film makes persistent references to decay, reconstruction, and consistency, embodied by landmarks of Berlin (such as the frequent appearance of the Victory Column, the cultural and geographical anchor-point of the film) and the characters’ inner attitudes towards shifts in modernity. The film situates itself in a realm where (predominantly Western) Berliners could reclaim a narrativised account of their own lives and give back meaning to what had been divided and taken – a world where, despite the ruin and inclination towards post-war survivalist mentalities, angels are among us.

Wings of Desire inspects a broad range of both social contagions and social wonders, providing a lyrical survey of quotidian afflictions as witnessed from the more-than fly-on-the-wall perspectives of two immortal angels: Damiel, played by Bruno Ganz, and Cassiel, played by Otto Sander. Damiel wishes for the feelings rendered real by the physicality of the human experience, and pines after a beautiful trapeze artist, Marion (Solveig Dommartin).

Wenders opens his film with Handke’s poem about childhood, and immediately transitions to the opening credits, scratched onto 35mm film. These are followed by a series of cross-dissolves: credits into an overcast sky with a small port for angelic light to beam through; the light beam to an eye; an eye to a dynamic aerial shot of residences; and finally, to a lonesome angel, looking down solemnly from his perch. The dissolves of the skylight-to-eye-to-city sequence convey the film’s core tenets, communicating connectivity to something global: to the otherworldly, the singular, and the collective. Our angel’s wings dissolve while a child stares directly back at him, and grown-up voices linger like whispers.

As commercial filmmaking continued to promote the ascent of the “overly suave” or “camp” protagonist while minimising on-screen appearances of the quotidian citizen, Wings of Desire resisted this encroaching characterisation by attempting to target something interior, by showing how a nation can create a collective consciousness through acts of mundanity. Charming in his own incandescently subtle way, Damiel absorbs the abundance of fleeting yet pronounced thoughts traversing through Berlin.

Wings of Desire’s lasting power can be attributed to Wenders’ and Handke’s script. Though the film features naturalistic, conversational dialogue filmed in standard two-shots, its success and interest are contingent on a non-linear, introspective emphasis, where each inner monologue reads like all the thoughts you’ve ever had put into articulated and actualised poems, waxing on mortality, faith, belonging, love, and estrangement. Handke’s dialogue reveals the veridical nature of diarism as a form that can help make sense of interiority and investigate personhood through the mundanity of the collective unconscious.

Broken down, Handke’s writing errs on the side of fragmentation, evoking a sense of personal vulnerability as well as a transience of thought and identity that feels particularly resonant. Exploring childhood innocence and incipience, “Lied vom Kindsein” reveals the tenderness within youthful naïveté, outlining the contested role of tabula rasa as a metaphor for childhood (“When the child was a child, it didn’t know it was a child”). We are not made aware of the self’s separation from other “selves” until we enter society, and subsequently, a social contract. Moreover, it raises a furrowed brow – not in snobbery, but curiosity – at the profundity of personhood and how to define oneself as “human”.

Once the opening narration finishes, the script transitions into the diaristic monologuing of its two primary angels, Damiel and Cassiel. The film allows its audience to voyeuristically see into the interiority of Berliners – some thoughts are inhibiting and insular, while others share universalised themes and commonalities. The characters and passers-by remain interconnected, which foreshadows the contemporary milieu of tacit digital surveillance, of heard-thoughts and keeping everything that should be externalised inside.The characters speak in aphoristic platitudes, and they express thoughts about almost everything. Handke’s writing exposes how the stream-of-consciousness literary style can be understood tangibly and directly, diverging from Joycean streams-of-consciousness, which often work in dense free-association monologues. Handke’s monologues give equal importance to the “little guy” as to those subject to pedestalisation.

For Damiel, it is difficult to resist the temptation to feel and to be – the self is such an enticing thing that even as beacons of immortality, the angels hunger for the singularity of corporeal human experience. Damiel finds solace and beauty in the desire of the human; he persistently yearns for life’s smallest pleasures and often catalogues good feelings and experiences that are unique to humans: he wants to taste a hot, bitter coffee; he wants to fall in love. As he lingers around, Damiel hears musings of how children are fledged into “thinking things”, exiting their embryonic states. He listens to people yelling things aloud in their cars and thoughts that aren’t meant to be heard by anyone else. From the rooms next door, internal reflections about failed parenting sound off in the heads of disappointed parents. He observes that people are aggravated by traffic, sad to be separated from their families, and always thinking about what it means to “be”.

The film raises more questions about what it means to occupy a contentious childhood, where one is inclined towards limitlessness and yearns for liberation. Personhood seems to be a cohesion of passive, fragmentated thoughts that eventually find forms of semblance. Damiel and Cassiel spectate people of all ages caught in dialectical discrepancies: children chatter while adults think, internally, about “what could go wrong,” people spend the majority of their lives lamenting the “wanted”, and the “could have had” while also revelling in the “nowness” of living presently and physically. All the somewhat opposing overheard thoughts and positions eliminate a fatalistic or rigid idea of humanity, and this reality of choice incentivises Damiel’s wish to become human.

Idleness and loneliness in youth continue into old age, where Wenders’ frame exposes a young boy’s first instance of ostracisation and, in a later scene, a man contemplates and follows through with his own suicide. Damiel’s and Cassiel’s only task as angels is to remind the jaded adult what it once felt like to exist in a dreamy and invincible childhood, and to bestow hope and persistence unto the lonesome child that life will improve. By whispering poems on the tops of Berliners’ heads for guidance, they hope to instill regained consciousness and humanity vis-à-vis “the eyes of a child”.

Just before Damiel makes the passage from the immortal realm into the mortal realm, the film embraces visual abstraction – black-and-white to colour transitions, long crane shots, quasi-bokeh lighting effects – and experiments with acts of formal incongruity, such as shaky handheld camera movements which mimic and complement the fragmented writing style.

Damiel’s venture into the mortal realm and encounter with love assert a philanthropic ending to the film. Wenders and Handke make no explicit claim that good deeds beget good outcomes, but rather that humans might be intrinsically and inherently good – the goodness of humanity allows humanity to prevail. One of the many passers-by asks, “Why am I even alive?”, to which Damiel might hypothetically respond with a soliloquy, and announce interest in the corporeal – touch and pain and feeling, wiggling your toes and feeling your teeth, and seeing life in colour.

Wings of Desire advocates resisting isolation as a means of understanding personhood. Though their thoughts are personally individual, humans are not solitary islands – in the end, they make up a broader sense of togetherness. Personhood is not rigid; personhood is not fatalistic. Personhood is ever-changing and diverse; personhood is where the singular meets the universal. Without a peek into introspection, what about humanity is exciting? Wenders and Handke hold that the temporality of living – to have a finite period on this Earth – validates uniquely human integrities. And to live on this Earth, with reflection and contemplation, is what grants someone their value, their autonomy – their personhood.

While traditional dialogue relies heavily on affectation and performance (something often unnatural and “put on”), internal monologue is the closest we can get to a stripped-back, raw version of one’s thoughts. Without proof of how people actually feel, Damiel would be deceived by what humanity actually means, and would not wish to be human at all. The film effectively conveys the malaise of Berliners as they trudge through a post-war city, where the remnants of their nation’s sinister past seemed inescapable and harrowing. Through its unique writing, Wings of Desire echoed Berlin’s changing politics in the late ‘80s, when emotional alienation pervaded from the physical barrier of the Berlin Wall, articulating and actualising the language of its citizens on screen.

Der Himmel über Berlin/Wings of Desire (1987 West Germany/France 128 mins)

Prod Co: Road Movies Filmproduktion/Argos Films/Westdeutscher Rundfunk Prod: Wim Wenders, Anatole Dauman Dir: Wim Wenders Scr: Wim Wenders, Peter Handke Phot: Henri Alekan Ed: Peter Przygodda Mus: Jürgen Knieper Art Dir: Heidi Lüdi Cos Des: Monika Jacobs

Cast: Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin, Otto Sander, Curt Bois, Peter Falk, Hans-Martin Stier, Elmar Wilms, Sigurd Rachman, Beatrice Manowski