We excitedly countdown to the 72nd Festival de Cannes with a different prize winning film each day.
Der Himmel über Berlin / Wings of Desire, 1987
Prix de la mise en scène – Win Wenders
What is it about your favorite directors that draws you to them? Is it the way they provide a full creative vision for a project? Or maybe you gravitate to directors that really work well with actors and pull out their best performances. What about directors that also write or act in their own projects?
Certainly directors find themselves wearing these hats at one time or another when working on a film. On top of that, they also have countless choices that happen behind the scenes. The best directors are able to juggle all of that to bring a picture together.
“Wim Wenders was firing on all cylinders when he directed Wings of Desire in 1987.”
I open this piece with that because it seems that Wim Wenders was firing on all cylinders when he directed Wings of Desire in 1987. For his directing work, he won the Best Director Award (Prix de la mise en scène) at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival. Wenders also co-wrote the film’s screenplay with Peter Handke and Richard Reitinger.
The film follows angels who live in and around Berlin. They comfort disillusioned people who live in the city, though they cannot be seen. They have been in Berlin since before any people inhabited it, always watching. One angel, Damiel (played by the late Bruno Ganz), falls in love with a trapeze artist named Marion (Solveig Dommartin). He confides in fellow angel, Cassiel (Otto Sander), that he wants to leave the immortal world and join the human one. He is tired of being a bystander. Peter Falk also plays an important role in the film, playing himself.
One technical component that stands out right away about Wenders’s work on this film is his use of perspective. That word can have both literal and figurative meanings, and Wenders handles it beautifully on both accounts. Literally, Wenders places us in the perspective of the angels. He does this first by using the camera.
In the film’s early scenes, we see a shot of Damiel on a ledge looking down on the city. Then there’s a cut to that exact perspective as we look down on the city from high above. Instantly, whether we consciously understand it or not, we’re being presented with the angel’s perspective – watching from above, but not intervening.
Later, as Damiel wrestles with his desire to join the human world, Wenders uses color to differentiate between perspectives as well. Most of the film takes place in black-and-white, but when Wenders wants to highlight the human perspective, the film switches to color. In a story where the perspective of the characters is of such high importance, Wenders does an incredible job of making sure the viewer is always aware of what’s going on.
“The acting in this film is fantastic across the board.”
I think this film reaches another plane altogether when you consider the ways it handles perspective figuratively. The entire film showcases the lives of people who are on the outskirts and the edges of society. We hear their plights and their thoughts, and we are moved to consider their perspectives.
Possibly my favorite character in the film is Homer, the elderly poet (played by Curt Bois in his final feature role). He wants to write an “epic of peace” but he feels this incredible pressure as the world’s storyteller. If he gives up, he feels that humans will forget their childlike qualities. We get a palpable sense of his perspective, and we really feel for him as a character.
The acting in this film is fantastic across the board, something that also points to the quality of the work that Wenders did. He clearly was able to coax powerful performances out of each actor, and I did not find a single performance to be any less than stellar.
This is one of those films that has so much within it that focusing on any one element allows the other incredible components to fade a bit. The way Wenders uses perspective was what caught my eye initially, but there is so much going on in this film outside of that.
Wenders was certainly deserving of the recognition given to him at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, and the way Wings of Desire has remained in the cinematic consciousness is as much a testament to that as anything.