Wings of Desire



Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, "The Sky/Heaven Over Berlin") is a 1987 Franco-German romantic fantasy film directed by Wim Wenders. The film is about invisible, immortal angels who populate Berlin and listen to the thoughts of the human inhabitants and comfort those who are in distress. Even though the city is densely populated, many of the people are isolated or estranged from their loved ones. One of the angels, played by Bruno Ganz, falls in love with a beautiful, lonely trapeze artist. The angel chooses to become human so that he can experience the human sensory pleasures, ranging from enjoying food to touching a loved one, and so that he can experience human love with the trapeze artist. The film is shot in both a rich, sepia-toned black-and-white and color, with the former being used to represent the world as experienced by the angels. Wim Wenders won best director award both at Cannes film festival and European film Awards for the film. The film was selected as the West German entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy award and BAFTA award, and was accepted as a nominee for the latter. The film has cult status and is included in Criterion Collection since 2009.

The film was followed by a sequel - Faraway, So Close!, in 1993. City of Angels, an American remake, was released in 1998.

Plot
Set in contemporary West Berlin (at the time still enclosed by the Berlin Wall), Wings of Desire follows two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, as they roam the city, unseen and unheard by its human inhabitants, observing and listening to the diverse thoughts of Berliners: a pregnant woman in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, a painter struggling to find inspiration, a broken man who thinks his girlfriend no longer loves him. Their raison d'être is, as Cassiel says, to "assemble, testify, preserve" reality. In addition to the story of two angels, the film is also a meditation on Berlin's past, present, and future. Damiel and Cassiel have always existed as angels; they existed in Berlin before it was a city, and before there were even any humans.

Among the Berliners they encounter in their wanderings is an old man named Homer, who, unlike the Greek poet Homer, dreams of an "epic of peace." Cassiel follows the old man as he looks for the then-demolished Potsdamer Platz in an open field, and finds only the graffiti-covered Berlin Wall. Although Damiel and Cassiel are pure observers, visible only to children, and incapable of any physical interaction with our world, Damiel begins to fall in love with a profoundly lonely circus trapeze artist named Marion. She lives by herself in a caravan, dances alone to the music of Crime & the City Solution, and drifts through the city.

A subplot follows Peter Falk, who has arrived in Berlin to make a film about Berlin's Nazi past. As the film progresses, it emerges that Peter Falk was once an angel, who, having grown tired of always observing and never experiencing, renounced his immortality to become a participant in the world.

As one can take only so much of infinity, Damiel's longing is in the opposite direction, for the genuineness and limitedness of human existence in the world, perhaps a reference to Dasein, or Existenz. When he sheds his immortal existence, he experiences life for the first time: he bleeds, sees colors for the first time (the movie up to this point is filmed in a sepia-toned monochrome, except for brief moments when the angels are not present or looking), tastes food and drinks coffee. Meanwhile, Cassiel inadvertently taps into the mind of a young man just about to commit suicide by jumping off a building. Cassiel tries to save the young man but is unable to do so, and is left haunted and tormented by the experience. Eventually, Damiel meets the trapeze artist Marion at a bar (during a concert by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), and they greet each other with familiarity as if they had long known each other. In the end, Damiel is united with the woman he has desired for so long. The film ends with the message: "To be continued."

The story is concluded in Wenders' 1993 sequel, In weiter Ferne, so nah! (Faraway, So Close!).

Cast

 * Bruno Ganz as Damiel
 * Solveig Dommartin as Marion
 * Otto Sander as Cassiel
 * Curt Bois as Homer, the aged poet
 * Didier Flamand as The Angel
 * Peter Falk as himself (credited as "Der Filmstar")
 * Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds as themselves
 * Crime & the City Solution as themselves

Screenplay and improvisation
Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry partially inspired the movie; Wenders claimed angels seemed to dwell in Rilke's poetry. The director also employed Peter Handke, who wrote much of the dialogue, the poetic narrations, and the film's recurring poem "Song of Childhood."

The movie was made with a minimalist script; it is a mood piece exploring people, the city, and a concept: a longing for and love of life, existence, reality. Peter Falk wasn't meant to be a sketch artist until Wenders discovered Falk's talent. Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander were cast because they were old friends, who had known each other for decades. Solveig Dommartin was Wenders' actress girlfriend; although the circus part required extensive and risky acrobatics, she was able to learn the trapeze and rope moves in only eight weeks, and did all the work herself, without a net.

Cinematography
The film was shot by the 77-year-old cinematographer Henri Alekan, who had worked on Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête. It represents the angels' point of view in monochrome -- they cannot see colors -- and switches to color to show the human point of view. During filming, Alekan used a very old and fragile silk stocking that had belonged to his grandmother as a filter for the monochromatic sequences.

The shift from monochrome to color, to distinguish the angels' reality from that of the mortals, was first used in A Matter of Life and Death by Powell and Pressburger in 1946.

Deleted scenes
As revealed in the DVD, Wings of Desire could have turned out to be a far less serious film. Cut scenes from the beginning of the film had Cassiel humorously mimicking the humans' actions. Other cut scenes were experiments of how to show the angel's invisibility/lack of physical form using double exposure. There was also a female angel who was cut from the movie, appearing only during a pan-shot in the library scene. The end was much different from the final cut—it was originally to have Cassiel turn human as well, and finding Damiel and Marion at the bar where they engage in a pie fight.

Dedication
In the closing titles it says: "Dedicated to all the former angels, but especially to Yasujiro, François and Andrej." This is a reference to fellow filmmakers Yasujirō Ozu, François Truffaut, and Andrei Tarkovsky.

Reception


Wings of Desire received "Two Thumbs Up" from Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on Siskel & Ebert & The Movies. Leslie James of 680 News Toronto claims it is one of the best movies of all time. It was ranked #64 in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes records that 98% of its cited critics gave the film a positive review. According to online film resource They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, Wings of Desire is the most acclaimed film of 1987.

Awards
The film won the award for Best Director at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival. In 1988, it won the prestigious Grand Prix of the Belgian Film Critics Association.

Remake
In 1998, an American remake called City of Angels was released. The setting was Los Angeles (nicknamed the "City of Angels") and starred Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage. Apart from the premise of angels watching humans, the opening scene also taking place in a landmark library, a secondary love story arc, and specific parts of the script, City of Angels differs from Wenders' original film in many ways. In 1990, an Indian film in Malayalam, titled Njaan Gandharvan (I, the celestial singer) was made by P Padmarajan, with a similar thread. The film went on to attain cult status.

Theatrical adaptation
The first theatrical adaptation of Wings of Desire was created by the Northern Stage theatre company in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK in 2003. This particular adaptation, which used film footage of the city and stories from the community, was adapted and directed by Alan Lyddiard who then re-created it at Betty Nansen Theatre in Copenhagen in 2005.

In 2006, the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Toneelgroep Amsterdam presented another stage adaptation of the movie, created by Gideon Lester and Dirkje Houtman and directed by Ola Mafaalani.