TCM (Turner Classic Movies) broadcast a double feature comprised of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death and Wim Wenders Wings of Desire (aka Himmel ueber Berlin). I am hesitant to watch films that have been a touchstone for me -- I fear that the passage of years has made either the movie or my earlier admiring reactions irrelevant and it's always distressing to respond with indifference to something that once was important to me. We age and the movies that we admired and that, even, guided our lives to some extent, age as well; memory's golden haze often obscures aspects of the viewing experience that we have either omitted from our recollection or passed over in our inner discourse on the filmin discrete silence. I'm not indifferent to Wenders' Wings of Desire, but more alert to the picture's flaws and self-indulgence, features that I haven't thought about much in the years intervening between 1988 and the present.
As everyone knows, Wings of Desire is about two angels who ramble about Berlin, then a divided city, eavesdropping on people's thoughts. These are recording angels who recite facts about water levels in the Spree and Havel as well as other statistics. Sometimes, children can see them and their consoling presence may be sensed by people who are desperate and dying. The angels are idealized voyeurs, detached but compassionate, and seem to stand for the camera wielded by the director and the process of making movies. One of the angels, played by Bruno Ganz, wants to experience corporeal reality -- he desires the taste of coffee, the sense of the "weight of bones" as he walks, the colors of things. (The angelic realm is depicted in austere in velvety black and white.) Ganz' angel encounters a circus performer, a woman who works as a trapeze artist in a hard-bitten "mud" show with its tent pitched in a bombed-out area between the West and the eastern (Communist) district of the City. The angel surrenders his wings to embrace the girl (and attend a morose and annoyingly pretentious Nick Cave concert). There's a movie within the movie, a film involving Nazis and extras playing persecuted Jews, and, for some reason (probably a homage to Cassavetes), Peter Falk is hanging around. Peter Falk senses the presence of the angels and encourages Ganz's character to "crossover" to become mortal.
What I had forgotten about the movie is that the rather slender plot involving the angel becoming human accounts for only about a quarter of the film. Most of the picture involves the angels listening to people's thoughts and sullenly staring at them. The thoughts that the angels record are very abstract and, certainly, unlike most people's inner discourse. No one has to go to the bathroom or is looking for a toilet; no one is sexually aroused (most people think about sex every two or three minutes). Rather, Wenders' mortals brood about being lonely, isolated, crushed by debt or other circumstances. One old man muses in a very abstract way about being the world's last storyteller and that, with his death, narratives will end -- I don't know exactly why he thinks this way but it's a weirdly self-important and pretentious perspective. The oddly remote and abstract monologues that the angels hear embody the film's distressing thesis that everyone is, more or less, isolated, alone, facing the void without the consolations of companions or community. People are walled-off from one another, trapped, a proposition made manifest by the divided city, split by a wall to which, someone says, "all roads lead." It's no wonder that half of Wenders' Berliners (I know, pace JFK that a "Berliner" is a jelly-roll but what the hell!) seem to be suicidal or, at least, very depressed. Nick Cave's yowling to crowds of mostly motionless, inert-looking Germans, further, exemplifies the film's argument that everyone is radically apart from everyone else. Even when the angel yearning for a tangible, physical existence gives up his wings, he's still aloof from the woman that he loves. At the film's climax, Ganz has taken on corporeal form and meets the trapeze artist in a bar adjacent to Cave's concert; the girl, who has not seemed particularly philosophical prior to this moment, embarks on a long pompous monologue -- in effect, she says that human intimacy is only a momentary encounter between two profound solitudes; it's hard to see the embrace between these two radically alienated solitudes as any sort of happy ending. No one thinks like Wenders' Berliners; and no one talks like the two lovers who embrace at the end of the film (something that the movie discretely declines to dramatize). In the final scene, Ganz spots the trapeze artist as she performs a routine on a suspended rope high above the sawdust of the arena. Now, we hear his thoughts, also a long and bizarrely abstruse monologue -- Ganz' angel describes sex as if it were some sort of Hegelian process involving an inside that is an outside and a labyrinth of solitude. The monologue is so sulky and dismal that it's inadvertently funny. (The problem is similar to the climactic scenes in Paris, Texas in which Harry Dean Stanton and his long-lost wife harangue one another in philosophical discourse for about a half-hour; it's not clear what the characters are saying and, as they speak, they are physically isolated from one another -- Natassia Kinski is in a glass box in a porno-place and the panes are reflective so that the characters seem to talk to their own reflections.) Ganz and the girl never say a word to one another -- they merely indulge in long, tedious monologues, talking at, but not to, one another. This desolate proposition, that humans are inevitably estranged from one another, is embodied by a scene in which Ganz walks along the Berlin Wall; the Mauer has been painted in a huge mural that shows a row of penis-shaped personages, each with a single eye, confined in separate, walled panels. (In the credits, it appears that Wenders actually had the Wall "re-painted" to produce this mural for use in the film.) Wenders, who is extraordinarily intelligent and a German intellectual, clearly intends everything that we see in the movie; it is all intensely controlled -- but the question remains: Why make a love story in which the characters don't seem to even remotely connect with one another? Peter Handke co-wrote Wings of Desire with Wenders; Sam Shepherd co-wrote Paris, Texas. I have always blamed Handke and Shepherd for the pretentious speechifying in both pictures -- but, now, I think that Wenders is likely responsible for this aspect of both movies. (My guess is that Handke's contribution to the 1988 film was primarily a series of monologues spoken by the angels that begins with the words "when the child was a child...", speeches arguing that, not only are we isolated from other people, but also exiled from our own childhoods when we viewed the world with naive and wondering eyes. Wenders also shows that we are in exile from our pasts -- probably, a more specifically German plight since he show the past in the film as rubble, Truemmer-frauen clearing heaps of smashed bricks, bombers, and dead children.
There is another baffling error in the movie: Peter Falk's thoughts are available to us in voice-over and he says that his grandmother, apparently a German immigrant possibly from Berlin, told him to go "spazieren" -- that is, strolling through the city. Falk recalls the food that she made and her German accent. But, later, in the picture, Falk claims that he was an angel himself, that he made the decision to become mortal 30 years before, shedding his armor breastplate and selling it in a 42nd Street pawnshop in New York.(where he was ripped-off). So is Falk's character someone with a German grandma or an angel with presumably no parents or grandparents at all?
I still love this movie but I'm much more alert to its faults thirty-six years later. I love the movie, I think, out of affection for an earlier version of myself. I'm not blind to the movies defects, but they don't really matter that much to me emotionally. You always experience art with the heart first and, then, the mind.
A Matter of Life and Death is a superb film and, as curated by David Byrne in dialogue with Ben Mankiewicz, makes a wonderful counterpoint to Wenders' picture. Like the Wenders' film, Powell and Pressburger's picture involves an immortal, the soul of a pilot killed in World War II, who yearns to remain in the world because he has fallen in love with an American girl. The British film is much warmer and, in fact, richly comical. It also uses color to represent the pleasures of earthly existence and an austere, beautifully designed black and white to illustrate heaven, here shown as a kind of quasi-military bureaucracy. As with the Wenders' film, A Matter of Life and Death is extremely talky and concludes with a long, bravura trial sequence in which Raymond Massey squares off against Roger Livesey in a duel over the fate of David Niven's pilot. The scene plays like a much expanded and more abstract version of the supernatural trial in The Devil and Daniel Webster. The issue in dispute in the 1946 film is whether an American girl can fall in love with a British aviator -- this seems a strange, allegorical representation of the fraught relationship between sibling nations, America and England. The movie features a sort of nascent United Nations, a crowd at the trial that represents the dead of all nations (with the notable exception of Axis casualties) a throng of people killed in the recent war. Pressburger and Powell also foresee the collapse of the British Empire. It's hard to impanel a fair jury since most of the world, the film suggests, has reasons to detest the Brits: the first jury is comprised of an Indian subject, a Boer, together with an Irishman, people who don't have much reason to sympathize with the British. A Matter of Life and Death is a glorious picture, a strange combination of bizarre imagery (the neurologist has a camera obscura with which he surveys his village and the dying aviator. upon clambering out of the tidal flats, first encounters a naked boy playing a pan-flute to a herd of goats) with a crowd of luminous and eccentric character actors -- that is Dickens crossed with Maurice Maeterlinck. It's interesting to think that Niven's aviator, flaming out over the English channel, is probably returning from dropping bombs om Berlin (or, at least, Germany) when he's shot down.
The double feature coupling these two picture is wonderful. David Byrne struggles to be cordial, but his bemused semi-autistic responses (or non-responses) to Ben Mankiewicz's questions aren't particularly helpful. And Mankiewicz seems to barely tolerate the dour and uncommunicative Byrne.
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