There are angels on the streets of Berlin, they walk along beside you and they listen to your thoughts.
The Wings of Desire is a fascinating example of a floating existentialism used in the art of movie making.
The movie is of the best director on festival De Cannes in 1987,seen as a masterpiece from the history of cinematography.
The film is shown from the point of view of angels, the camera floats giving away existential style of the movie. The artistic angles of the camera and unusual shots of the scenes take the audience into a mystical and limitless world of art, as well as uncovers dark and depressing sides of human’s mind. It appears that all the negative thoughts are never said out loud and humans are holding back with sharing their real thoughts with others which makes them unhappy. The scene with a disabled girl sets a dramatic and dark entrance making us think about the existence and reasons for tragedies in life. It sets the movie in a deep, meaningful and spiritual mood touching problems of real life through the ‘eyes of art’. The movie shows variety in thoughts representing different moods and stages of human’s life and their different realities. Most of the dialogues are expressed through the stream of thoughts of the actors. The angels can read peoples’ mind, they shift among different types of people and listen to their inner thoughts. They witness all the history because they are immoral, they are watching, waiting and studying humans’ behaviour. The two angles travel together exploring and learning through listening, they love going to the library, which is where they can learn from others while they read or contemplate, they study along with humans.
There are people constantly asking themselves about the reasons for existence and sense of life. Adults' thoughts are filled with worries and concerns of different matters. It appears that the only time that they stop worrying is when they are intoxicated or their thoughts are deafened by music. The real joy and free mind is possible only through alcohol and hypnotic music.
Angels like listening to childrens’ thoughts, careless and free of worries, filled with innocent curiosity for life and happiness, thoughts that are not yet toxic-ated with misery and problems of an adult life and awareness. The anxiety in adults' life makes people sick, they don’t know how should they live or what to think, the grey reality takes over their lives. Following an old man, the angels see the sadness and longing of a person in an old age, for things that he used to know, places and people that used to be part of his life. He is lonely and lost in the world in which he feels useless and not needed. They meet a young prostitute that wishes no one recognises her on the street and thinks of how much money will she be able to earn this time. There is also an element of how the war made living conditions worse for people, it puts the movie in context of time and place (Berlin, after II WW) and brought some of the justification for misery. Angels meet an American actor, Peter Falk (best known for his role as Inspector Columbo), who plays a German officer in a film about WW II. Then angels talk about the evolution “when there was nothing” and use the phrase from an ancient philosopher, Socrates, “I know that I know nothing”. The movie jumps from a scene to scene touching different concepts, and brings different characters without any chronology, it’s following the idea of stream of consciousness (Ulysses, Joyce) giving the plot even more unpredictable flow.
One of the angels, Damian, starts to wish that he could experience the physical and emotional part of human's life, like smell of the morning coffee. Damian is fascinated by the humans' world and would like to become part of it. He does not want to know of things or be certain anymore, he would like to throw himself into unknown and question things (existentialism), become mortal and bleed when getting hurt. He sees the emptiness and lack of things in being an angel. Damian meets Marion the trapeze artist who is filled with the desire for love, need for love that would make her happy and save her from her meaningless life (nostalgia, longing for something). After her last performance she is thinking of death, she realises that she will have to go back to work as a waitress and mean less to the society and herself to when she was a trapeze artist. Damian likes watching her performances and begins to worry about her and her future (human feelings). This is when we see first scenes going into colour, everything so far was in black and white. It can symbolise that for Damian the existence as an angel was senseless and with no emotions but with the moment Marion became part of his existence the movie is shown in colours. When Damian fell in love with her (Existential love) and all the angel life was not enough for him anymore.
In the scene when Peter, the American actor behaves as if he was talking to Damian, Damian realises that this is what he wants, to become a human. Become a human and show Marion love, that she deeply desires, make her happy and bring meaning to his own existence.
“He, who loves her, decides to fall.”
Damian becomes a fallen angel going to live among the humans. He discovers that Peter, was once an angel and made the same decision. A romantic feeling for the trapeze artist brings Damian to the girl and in the labyrinth of happiness “she showed him home” and he knows now what no other angel knows.
The University of Winchester Journalism Course
History and Context of Journalism, part IV , week 4, screening The Wings of Desire
