FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Wim Wenders - Der Himmel über Berlin - Wings Of Desire


Sunday, most beautiful sun and so many people sitting locked up in their dark backyard apartment during these days. that's why we need an especially good film for our "Corona Cinema" channel today. Wings Of Desire, which is the artistic landmark of our city, is the perfect choice. Just to make everyone feel a little bit better, okay?

The angels in Der Himmel über Berlin are not religious angels. They are intellectuals who do not act, witnesses since eternal times. They have already experienced the Ice Age and that is their role: to see. Invisibly they walk through the divided Berlin, exchanging notes and observations. Sometimes they can descend and put their hands on the shoulders of a suicide victim. But events are not changed by this (the young man commits suicide nevertheless). But maybe they are able to give hope after all? Wim Wenders' film has the mood of a reverie, a meditation. Like the angels, the film does not participate, it just watches. We follow Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) and are seduced by the magic of this strange work of art that Wim Wenders wrote together with Peter Handke. Although Der Himmel über Berlin is staged slowly, you don't get impatient - simply because there is no plot and so we don't wait for what happens next. At first the film deals exclusively with "being", only when Damiel decides to become a human being because he falls in love with a circus girl, does a plot begin. Attracted by her doubts and vulnerability, he talks to Cassiel about his plan. But there is another person with whom Damiel sympathizes and it seems as if he can see him too: Peter Falk plays himself and apart from him, only children are able to notice the angels. Adults on the other hand have lost this ability. The sky over Berlin spreads sadness and isolation (symbolized by the wall city Berlin). The legendary cameraman Henri Alekan has translated this feeling into beautiful images. His camera seems to float weightlessly over the city. If the camera looks through human eyes, the images become colorful. Bruno Ganz has a good face for an angel: not beautiful, but open. Now he wants to feel what he has seen. Basically, Der Himmel über Berlin is a pure critic film. It lasts two hours and nothing happens, and it plays with complex symbols. Der Himmel über Berlin is more like a piece of music or a painting, it leaves so many gaps that you start to think for yourself and end up asking the same questions as the film.