A new 4K remaster of Wim Wenders’ melancholic masterpiece finds beauty in a broken Berlin.
Imagine for a few moments that you are living in West Berlin. From the ground, the Berlin Wall’s silent terror is inescapable, looming at the end of every road. As one character remarks in Wings of Desire:“you can never get lost in Berlin. You always end up at the Wall.” Yet from the sky, the wall is nothing but a speck of grey in a metropolitan sea of concrete and tarmac. This is the view of birds, aeroplanes—and angels. Now re-released in 4K, Wings of Desire is one of the most humane pieces of cinema. Both poetic and deeply philosophical it is a testament to the flawed beauty of human beings.
Bruno Ganz plays Damiel, an angel who is uncannily both a part of this world but also eerily disconnected from it. He wanders the streets of Berlin, his gaze rendered in cool monochrome. The 4K restoration draws attention both to the details of the streets, but also to shapes and structures of the busy city: moving, weaving, and dancing with each other. The more we watch, the more we realise how similar Damiel is to us as audience members—separate from this Berlin, seeing the city through his angelic but inhuman eyes, a stranger who knows every street.
Daniel soon tires of his metaphysical existence and falls in love with Solveig Dommartin’s trapeze artist Marion. It is because of this that he decides to become human at which point Cinematographer Henri Alekan switches the film to colour causing us, like Damiel, to become overcome by the beauty of the mundane. Wings of Desire gorgeously takes full advantage of the medium of film to achieve this poignancy. All we can do is watch it unfold like Wenders’ angels watching from afar, unable to reach out and touch the world.
The interplay of memory and time are also key understanding to Wings of Desire. As an angel, Damiel has access to the thoughts of Berliners who he encounters on their daily journey. The present in all its immediacy is haunted by the past, both on a personal and societal level. Not only individuals’ histories, but the memory of Berlin’s history, a city that even today still bears scars from war. All of this flows to the surface beautifully as Damiel’s fellow angel Cassiel (Otto Sander) trails Homer (Curt Bois), an aged poet who tries to reconfigure his memories of Berlin to the present as if he had torn apart two pieces of paper which when placed together do not fit. Expanses of bombed out buildings and rubble were a common site in Berlin right until the end of the decade. Wings Of Desire is not the kind of film to fade in and out of relevance because it is fundamentally about life and the sanctity of presence. It will always be relevant in a universal sense of shared human experience.
There also is something profound to be said about collective trauma stratified across the personal and the collective levels. For Damiel’s Berlin it is the trauma of the war. Everyone who was there has their own story that Wenders gives a brief flash of through eerie voice overs. Each one must measure themselves across a collectivised national narrative. The Pandemic gives the film a contemporary resonance in this sense because it forces us to confront how the past has shaped the present. Whilst the events of lockdown may be disappearing, its spirit will haunt us for a long time to come. Perhaps Wings of Desire can help us reflect and appreciate life now that we can live again.
Words By Alexander Cohen
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