This month offers a valuable opportunity to revisit and re-examine an acknowledged German cinema classic of the past 25 years with World Movies broadcasts of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire on December 3, 19 and 20.
Watching the film today is a strikingly different experience to seeing it in its original 1988 Australian cinema release. Although it has a loose story of sorts, about two guardian angels (played by Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander) listening to the private thoughts of ordinary Berliners until one of the angels falls in love and decides to become human, the film is less of a dramatic narrative than a poetic reverie on human frailty, history, love and mortality. But most of all this is a film about Berlin itself - not for nothing is its original German title Der Himmel über Berlin, which translates literally as The Sky over Berlin.
Wednesday, December 1. 2010
December 2010 – Looking back at Wings of Desire
This is emphatically a different city to the Berlin of today; the wall between communism and western democracy not only looms large but seems an immovable fact of life. Only two years away from the collapse of the Iron Curtain, there is no hint of the momentous changes that will soon occur. A pall of melancholy seems to have settled over the city.
Not only have this time and mindset now long disappeared but also their geographical features. The Victory Column, still at the centre of the wooded Tiergarten , is one of the few tourist landmarks in a film dominated by empty spaces - WW2 bomb sites and wastelands cowering in the shadow of the Wall. (Wenders tried to get permission to film in the East from a sympathetic Communist official but was laughed at and given an emphatic "no" when he explained his angelic lead characters would be walking through the Wall as if it didn't exist.)
Scarcely none of the film’s locations still exist. Not only the Wall (now almost entirely demolished, as many tourists are surprised to discover), but also the unkempt spaces that pockmarked the old West Berlin. Real estate would finally get its act together and notice the waste ground that hosted the circus where Ganz’s angel fell for Solveig Dommartin’s angelic trapeze artist, and the elegant old theatre serving as a venue for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. No longer markers of a terrible history, these became valuable properties, ripe for redevelopment as supermarkets, blocks of flats, service stations - artefacts needed by Berliners, perhaps, but probably not by Berlin.
Most dramatically transformed today is Potsdamer Platz on the border between east and west. Now a glitteringly sterile complex of postmodernist office towers, a symbol of western consumerism and pleasure-seeking packed with shopping malls, luxury hotels and cinema megaplexes, the Platz displayed here is a terrible reminder of history, a bleak and almost unimaginably vast no-man’s-land bounded by the Wall and its guard towers. Wenders’ camera tours through the devastation, using as his guide a Holocaust survivor unable to make sense of history’s erasure of the lively and elegant café scene he recalled from his youth inthe 1920s and '30s.
Thanks to the remarkable and (mostly) black and white camerawork of France’s Henri Alekan (who had shot, among many other films, Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast and Wyler’s Roman Holiday), even the film’s ugliest locations, such as this, retain a striking beauty, reflecting the affection with which Wenders regarded the city to which he had just returned following eight years living and working in the United States. Note that Wenders names the circus after Alekan, his way of dedicating the film to the veteran cinematographer (who died in 2001).
But the film’s achievements are not limited to the visual, its sound world is equally alluring – a symphony of whispers and sombre musical cues that breaks down conventional distinctions between sound design and musical score. All this is entirely fitting for a film that is above all a sensual and poetic experience. That's why its narrative weaknesses and occasional self-indulgences (viz. too many loving shots of Dommartin, who at the time was Wenders’s girlfriend) matter less than they might have done in the hands of a lesser filmmaker.
The rambling structure reflects Wenders risky decision to film without a script – unusual even for him. While 10 scenes featured prepared dialogue supplied by novelist-playwright Peter Handke, a previous collaborator, Wenders improvised most of the film from day to day, a high-wire act that he later admitted kept him awake at night with his stomach knotted in anxiety. This explains the dramatic drift, the perpetual sense that its narrative is always about to begin - and the fact that, when it does, the film is about to end.
Wings of Desire might be considered a kind of companion piece to Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 day-in-the-life film, Berlin: Symphony of a City, but for this viewer there is another, perhaps less obvious film, to which it is closely related. Federico Fellini’s 1960 success, La Dolce Vita, is also a meditation on a European city – Rome, in Fellini’s case – frozen at a resonant moment of 20th century history. Like Wings, it features a protagonist (a journalist played by Marcello Mastroianni) who is essentially passive, and an episodic narrative somewhat adrift from dramatic cause and effect. Yet both films are so richly textured, so lovingly captured and flagrantly imaginative, that their places and characters leap of the screen and remain unforgettable.
Not only have this time and mindset now long disappeared but also their geographical features. The Victory Column, still at the centre of the wooded Tiergarten , is one of the few tourist landmarks in a film dominated by empty spaces - WW2 bomb sites and wastelands cowering in the shadow of the Wall. (Wenders tried to get permission to film in the East from a sympathetic Communist official but was laughed at and given an emphatic "no" when he explained his angelic lead characters would be walking through the Wall as if it didn't exist.)
Scarcely none of the film’s locations still exist. Not only the Wall (now almost entirely demolished, as many tourists are surprised to discover), but also the unkempt spaces that pockmarked the old West Berlin. Real estate would finally get its act together and notice the waste ground that hosted the circus where Ganz’s angel fell for Solveig Dommartin’s angelic trapeze artist, and the elegant old theatre serving as a venue for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. No longer markers of a terrible history, these became valuable properties, ripe for redevelopment as supermarkets, blocks of flats, service stations - artefacts needed by Berliners, perhaps, but probably not by Berlin.
Most dramatically transformed today is Potsdamer Platz on the border between east and west. Now a glitteringly sterile complex of postmodernist office towers, a symbol of western consumerism and pleasure-seeking packed with shopping malls, luxury hotels and cinema megaplexes, the Platz displayed here is a terrible reminder of history, a bleak and almost unimaginably vast no-man’s-land bounded by the Wall and its guard towers. Wenders’ camera tours through the devastation, using as his guide a Holocaust survivor unable to make sense of history’s erasure of the lively and elegant café scene he recalled from his youth inthe 1920s and '30s.
Thanks to the remarkable and (mostly) black and white camerawork of France’s Henri Alekan (who had shot, among many other films, Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast and Wyler’s Roman Holiday), even the film’s ugliest locations, such as this, retain a striking beauty, reflecting the affection with which Wenders regarded the city to which he had just returned following eight years living and working in the United States. Note that Wenders names the circus after Alekan, his way of dedicating the film to the veteran cinematographer (who died in 2001).
But the film’s achievements are not limited to the visual, its sound world is equally alluring – a symphony of whispers and sombre musical cues that breaks down conventional distinctions between sound design and musical score. All this is entirely fitting for a film that is above all a sensual and poetic experience. That's why its narrative weaknesses and occasional self-indulgences (viz. too many loving shots of Dommartin, who at the time was Wenders’s girlfriend) matter less than they might have done in the hands of a lesser filmmaker.
The rambling structure reflects Wenders risky decision to film without a script – unusual even for him. While 10 scenes featured prepared dialogue supplied by novelist-playwright Peter Handke, a previous collaborator, Wenders improvised most of the film from day to day, a high-wire act that he later admitted kept him awake at night with his stomach knotted in anxiety. This explains the dramatic drift, the perpetual sense that its narrative is always about to begin - and the fact that, when it does, the film is about to end.
Wings of Desire might be considered a kind of companion piece to Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 day-in-the-life film, Berlin: Symphony of a City, but for this viewer there is another, perhaps less obvious film, to which it is closely related. Federico Fellini’s 1960 success, La Dolce Vita, is also a meditation on a European city – Rome, in Fellini’s case – frozen at a resonant moment of 20th century history. Like Wings, it features a protagonist (a journalist played by Marcello Mastroianni) who is essentially passive, and an episodic narrative somewhat adrift from dramatic cause and effect. Yet both films are so richly textured, so lovingly captured and flagrantly imaginative, that their places and characters leap of the screen and remain unforgettable.
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