A Film That Puts Me at Ease With Being Alive
‘What my timeless downward look has taught me, I want to transform— to sustain a glance, a short shout, a sour smell. I’ve been on the outside long enough. Absent long enough. Long enough out of the world.’
Let me enter the history of the world.
— Damiel, Wings of Desire
Life can be hard.
Sometimes, things that happen in life washes away our sense of purpose.
We are left feeling powerless, lost, with no options — flailing helplessly in the quicksand of our own angst.
We forget to celebrate and enjoy life. We neglect to embrace its beauty.
Like the big ball of fire that melts into the ocean, the sun-kissed summer breezes, and the capacity for us to narrate our own lives.
To author our own stories.
Wim Wenders’ eye-opening film, Wings of Desire (1987), portrays human meaning as driven by narratives; a quality unique to the human condition.
The film depicts the observations of two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, who listen to the thoughts of Berlin’s inhabitants such as a pregnant woman, a victim of a motor accident, a man before his suicide, a trapeze artist, and an old man named Homer implied to be the Homer who wrote the Odyssey contemplating the horrors of human past.
Wenders’ illustrates the observations of the quasi-all-mighty angels in monochrome to symbolise Damiel and Cassiel as chained from fundamental human freedoms such as interacting with other people and creating a distinct narrative for oneself.
The transcendent observers are shackled for eternity.
An eternity stripped of basic human freedoms.
‘I felt films were extraordinary, necessary; they were about life, they gave me life and life had given them to me, I gave them life too, I passed them on. Writing “about a film” was passing the experience with it.’
— Wim Wenders
Wings of Desire weaves together a celebration of living life like a story.
The angels feel compassion for humans — they exhibit a love for life that transcends our own appreciation for a world so submerged in mundanity.
The taste of drinking hot coffee in the cold. The sensation of bleeding. The way that water dances down a river.
Quotidian moments of existence that humans are oblivious of or frown upon are those that the angels love.
In the intellectual montage below where Damiel is a human, he smiles after taking a sip of coffee and observing the advertisements, exposing a sense of innocence, purity, and love for life. Wenders passes on this sense of salvation and meaning to the audience, resonating an artful celebration for the everyday.
Damiel and Cassiel are enriched by every sight and every action — no matter how small.
In my eyes, to call Damiel and Cassiel angels — superior beings that symbolise the epitome of human beauty — is too generous a term.
Rather, Damiel and Cassiel are powerless spirits that coexist among humans, unable to interact with them, only able to observe them.
Damiel and Cassiel don’t have a life of their own.
In the tonal montage below, the bird’s-eye view paints a subjective mood of isolation as Damiel is observing the people of Berlin from above— a group that he is not a part of nor one that he can influence.
Damiel and Cassiel are chained from helping those in pain and are constrained from interacting with people and their stories.
They are locked up in a monochromatic vacuum of human freedom where they can’t do anything but appreciate what it’s like to live — to own a narrative.
Wings of Desire incorporates a musical performance titled From Her to Eternity (1984) by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, an Australian post-punk rock band.
The song’s visceral lyrics layered with percussion-heavy instrumentals explore a man’s infatuation to be with a girl who lives above him that is suffering and crying.
The narrator’s ‘desire to possess her is a wound’, as he wants her, but is shackled to only observe and question her pain.
He suffers because he can’t act upon his desire to be with this girl.
Similarly, in Wings of Desire, Damiel and Cassiel feel compassion for those in pain but are eternally tortured as they are unable to intervene.
For instance, Cassiel attempts to comfort a man contemplating suicide who is sitting at the edge of a building.
Despite this compassion, the man falls.
Cassiel’s response is piercing.
“Nien!”
No matter how much the angels care for people, they are cursed to an eternity of only being able to observe.
A narrative for life precedes purpose.
Interacting with people in particular ways and being able to act upon desire gives us control over our identity.
Damiel decides that he has been ‘absent long enough, long enough out of the world’, and wants to ‘sustain a glance, shout a short shout, smell a sour smell’, and hold an apple.
Damiel wants to live.
He finds beauty in contending for an individual story, deciding that the uncertainty and vulnerability of becoming human is worth it; that it is better to ‘enter the history of the world’ than to remain an impuissant ‘spectator’.
Wenders invites the audience to engage with the meaninglessness of transcendence to evoke an appreciation for the uniquely human ability to live life like a story.
Wenders depicts the mundane as beautiful by capturing the momentary appearance of things in nature.
The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire, written by Robert Phillip Kolker and Peter Beicken explores that Wenders ‘deemphasises coherent narrative’ (page 19) to capture the ‘momentary appearance of things’ (page 9).
Film to Wenders is an instrument for self-expression, played to preserve ephemeral moments of existence in pursuit of making its beauty perceptual.
The tonal montage below exemplifies Wenders’ expressiveness to preserve the banal existence of life. The scene induces a visceral appreciation for the mundane reality of quotidian existence by capturing the momentary stills of Germany.
In Wings of Desire, Wenders’ unsystematic approach to film-making engages the audience to celebrate the everyday that we take for granted, resulting in a more meaningful life.
A more meaningful narrative.
“When the child was a child, It played with enthusiasm, and now, has just as much excitement as then, but only when it concerns its work. When the child was a child, It was enough for it to eat an apple, … bread, And so it is even now.”
— Damiel, Wings of Desire
While adults can not see the angels, the intellectual montage below switches between a child and Damiel to imply that children have the unique ability to see angels.
Unlike adults who are jadedly venturing through life’s challenges, the purity and innocence of children enable them to see beyond the obvious.
The imagination and curiosity of children allow them to find a sense of broader purpose, as they develop grand narratives encircling their ambitions and desires; unlike adults that generally tend to assign a higher value to financial stability and working.
When I was a child I spent most of my free time drawing.
Drawing about what I wanted to be, what I wanted to do and what I loved.
But as the years ticked by and school grew in importance, how I went about life went from feeling like I was in an exciting narrative to possessing a constant urge to work hard so I can get into my dream course.
Make no mistake, my current desires aren’t bad; rather, It has degraded a unique human capacity to live life like a story — something, after watching this movie, I have become more appreciative of.
Wenders portrays the cliff of adulthood as one that eclipses curiosity — that growing up kills our ability to see beyond the obvious and take control of our individuality.
That the plot of our lives becomes narrower and narrower.
Life is hard.
It can bore us, send us to tears, frustrate us, confuse us, question us, scare us and disappoint us.
But Wim Wenders, Wings of Desire tells me that that’s okay.
That at least I have a story to narrate.
My life.
