Wings of Desire

Wings of Desire

Opening Shot

Black and white. Berlin from above. A hand writes in a notebook. Damiel (Bruno Ganz) perches on the shoulder of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, watching the city below. Henri Alekan's camera floats through the streets, passing through walls, hearing the inner monologues of everyone it passes: a woman worried about her child, a man thinking about money, an old man remembering the war. Wenders opens with omniscience and then makes you feel how lonely omniscience is.

What It Does

Alekan was 78 when he shot this, a career that started in the 1940s with Cocteau, and his black-and-white photography of Berlin is the most beautiful the city has ever looked on film. The angels see in monochrome. Humans see in color. When Damiel falls, choosing mortality, the screen blooms with reds and yellows and the specific brown of a coffee cup, and the transition from black-and-white to color has never been used more emotionally effectively. Alekan makes the shift feel like a birth.

Jürgen Knieper's score is contemplative, string-based, and exists primarily in the angel sequences. The human world has different music: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play a concert that Damiel attends after his fall, and Cave's raw, physical performance is the opposite of the angelic choir. The musical shift from classical contemplation to rock fury is the film's argument about mortality made sonic: being alive is louder.

Ganz plays Damiel with an ancient gentleness that makes the desire to become human feel like the most rational decision an immortal being could make. He watches a trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin) and decides that a lifetime with her is worth more than eternity without sensation. Ganz makes you believe that choice. The scene where he first feels cold, first tastes coffee, first sees color, is played with such wonder that you remember what it was like to notice the world before you got used to it.

Why It's on the List

Wenders made the definitive film about the city of Berlin during the last years of the Wall, and he did it through the eyes of beings who have watched the city since before it had a name. Wings of Desire is a film about choosing mortality, choosing limitation, choosing the specific over the infinite. It argues that the sensation of rubbing your hands together on a cold day is worth more than knowing the thoughts of every person on earth. That's a theological argument disguised as a love story, and it works as both.

The Argument Against

The pacing is deliberate to the point where some viewers check out during the long monologue sequences. Peter Falk's cameo as himself (an angel who already fell) is charming but tonally inconsistent with the film's register. The love story between Damiel and Marion develops quickly once it starts, and the trapeze artist's characterization is thinner than Ganz's angel, which creates an imbalance: you understand perfectly why he falls, less so why she's worth falling for beyond her beauty.

Closing Image

Damiel and Marion stand in an empty lot. She speaks to him about the seriousness of choosing. The camera, now in color, watches two people standing together for the first time. The Berlin Wall is still visible in the background. The text on screen says: "To be continued." Two years later, the Wall fell. The story continued.