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Wings of Desire
(Der Himmel über Berlin)

Director in Person
$12 Special Event Tickets
Directed by Wim Wenders.
With Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin, Peter Falk.
West Germany/France, 1987, DCP, 128 min.
German with English subtitles.
DCP source: Janus Films

The fluidly mobile camera, long a staple of Wenders’ filmmaking, receives its most thorough workout in Wings of Desire, a film whose style approximates the floating, omniscient eye of a celestial presence. Gliding, hovering, and craning around West Berlin in dazzling sequence shots, this camera becomes a conduit to the divine perspective of Bruno Ganz’ Damiel, an angel who quietly, invisibly observes the living alongside fellow immortals, occasionally offering ineffable consolation to those in need. In expressing this state of being, Wenders accomplishes some of the most compelling filmmaking of his career—hallucinatory juxtapositions of classical music with overlapping voices, for instance, and intricate bits of staging that blend point-of-view and third-person framing—but the film ultimately moves beyond a mere angel’s-eye city symphony in exploring Damiel’s muted yearning to join the ranks of the corporeal after becoming infatuated with an exquisite trapeze artist. When the silvery black-and-white of a phantom Germany gives way to the color of a finite, concrete world, Wings of Desire starts to take on troubling existential heft, raising questions about the worth of an existence without sensation or finality.

00:00 / 00:00
      Wings of Desire introduction and post-screening discussion with Haden Guest and Wim Wenders.

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