Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders
1) Many of Wenders's films are about the presence of American culture in the former West Germany.
2) Characters in his films are fascinated with emulating American culture:
a)they listen to American rock music
b)and drive American cars.
3)Wenders’s films both glorify and critique American culture and movies,
4) but also pay homage to the cinema itself.
5) For example, Nicolas Ray stars in Lightning Over Water (1980)
as himself while dying of terminal cancer.
Wings of Desire (1988)
1)Is one of Wenders’s most acclaimed films,
2)and was later remade in America as City of Angels with Nicolas Cage.
3)The film is about two angels assigned to Berlin who listen to the thoughts of mortals.
4)They eavesdrop on the thoughts of people and wonder what it would be like to be human.
5)What the angels see is presented in black and white,
6)while mortal experience is in color.
7)One of the angels, Damiel, played by Bruno Ganz falls in love with a mortal, trapeze artist.
8)Damiel decides to become human to experience the pleasures of human sensation.
9)Peter Faulk plays a former angel in the film.
10)Wings of Desire also features performances from postpunk acts such as City + the City Solution
and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds.
Michael Atkinson explains,
" As the angels haunt Berlin, Wings of Desire also has its haunters—the audience, observing the observers. As it dawns that we, at least in the viewing moment, might be closer to the ineffectual angels than to the people they hover over,
Damiel edges nearer to surrendering his angelic immortality and omnipotence for a short life of love, books, coffee, wind, children, and urban messiness—in effect, exiting his own private movie house and entering the throng of unaestheticized life. He desires, in a sense, to leave the movie he’s in and join us on our way home.
Is the plot arc of Wings of Desire a cry against cinema, even as it equates watching with love? Or does it suggest, to the choir, only a more engaged participation for us, the give-and-take of art film as opposed to the utterly passive experience of Hollywood dross, the Godardian sense that cinema is not an escape from life but life itself?
Once Damiel goes human, awakening in the no-man’s-land between the east and west sections of the wall, we as viewers may have an experience akin to Greta Garbo’s after she’d seen the Beast in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast transform into the clean-shaven Jean Marais: 'Give me back my Beast.'"
The following scene shows two angels (Ganz and Otto Sander) comfort two humans in distress: one a victim of an accident and the other remembering the atrocities of war.
Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1988):
Film trailer Click Here
Five visual themes of the film Click Here Five visual themes in Wings of Desire – Wim Wenders’ immortal film about watching
A contemporary film of Wim Wenders that I love.
Paris Texas
Until the End of the World
Click Here
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