The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Wim Wenders · a film · 1987 · about 128 minutes · written with Peter Handke · in German, with English and other languages among the voices, as Der Himmel über Berlin
Mode
Film poem and city symphony carried by voice-over and a metaphysical conceit; the fable of a fall
Mythos
The angel who chooses to fall, recast as a choice for mortality; the old storyteller searching for his place; the human who plays the angel while the angel longs to be human
Phase
Some days in Berlin, from the broken spire of the Memorial Church to a bar where a band is playing: the angels’ watch in black and white, the life after the fall in colour
Presentation
Feature film, about 128 minutes, in black and white, at times sepia-toned, and in colour; Henri Alekan’s travelling camera; dozens of interior voices, mostly in German
Register
From a library’s murmur and a dying man’s litany to a coffee stand and a rock concert; tenderness at a height, then a looser warmth on the ground
Scale
Two angels, a trapeze artist, an old storyteller, an actor playing himself, one divided city
Governing Proposition
Two angels keep watch over Berlin, hearing every thought and changing nothing, and one of them chooses to fall, for a trapeze artist and for the weight of ordinary things. The wager of the film is that to be human is to be inside time, partial, mortal and weighed down, that this weight and not the overview is where meaning lies, and that a camera which can go anywhere and hear anyone can show, by giving that power up, what it is worth to have a body, a cold hand and a colour.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a hand writing. The text is the song of childhood, written by Peter Handke, and it will return as a refrain. Then an eye over the city, and Berlin seen from above. On the broken spire of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church stand angels, looking down. Among them are Damiel, played by Bruno Ganz, and Cassiel, played by Otto Sander. They wear long coats, and they have the patient faces of those who have watched for a very long time.
The image is black and white, at times toned to sepia. This is how the angels see: without colour, and without consequence. They can go anywhere, and Henri Alekan’s camera moves as they do, slowly and unbound, through walls, over roofs, along the carriages of trains, into one apartment and out into the next. Adults do not see them. Children do, and alone among the living they look back. The camera’s freedom is the angels’ condition, and the film gives it at length, so that it will be felt before it is given up.
What the angels have instead of colour is hearing. Every thought is audible to them, and the soundtrack is made of thoughts: dozens of interior voices of every age, mostly in German, with English and other languages among them, overlapping and cut off as the camera passes on. The angels listen, and the film listens with them. Nothing in this first movement is plot. It is a condition, shown in its fullness: attention without end, tenderness without power, eternity as a kind of overhearing. The drift from room to room is the point, and it is also the film’s risk.
Movement II
The angels gather in the Staatsbibliothek. They stand among the readers, and the readers’ thoughts rise around them into one murmur, a choir of separate minds. It is the film’s image of what the angels are for: to keep company with human attention and to hold it. On the underground the thoughts of strangers pass one into another. Damiel crouches on the shoulder of the gilded Victory on her column above the city. Wherever they go the angels are present and unseen, and whatever they hear they cannot answer.
A motorcyclist lies dying on a road. Damiel holds him, and in place of the man’s fear he gives him a litany of remembered things, small and particular, the matter of a life. It is the height of what witness can do, and it shows what witness cannot: the man is dying, and the angel cannot change that. The scene is tender and exact, and it is the clearest statement in the film of the angels’ gift and of its limit.
Then the limit is reached. A young man is going to jump, and Cassiel is beside him and cannot prevent it. He jumps, and Cassiel cries out. The cry is the breach in the angels’ composure, and the crisis of the film turns on it. To witness without consequence, however tenderly, is a kind of poverty, and here the poverty is paid in a death. From this point Damiel’s wish to be inside time, to bear weight and to be able to act, is no longer a reverie but a decision waiting to be made.
Movement III
An old man, played by Curt Bois, is called Homer. He thinks of himself as a storyteller whose audience has gone. He invokes the muse, as his namesake did, and he goes looking for a place he remembers: Potsdamer Platz. What he finds is a waste ground beside the Wall, and he sits in an armchair on the empty ground, an old man on a field that was a city. Bois makes the search sorrowful without pathos. The old storyteller looking for the square is the city looking for its memory.
The memory comes through him and through footage of 1945: the ruined city and dead children. The film does not stage the war; it shows the record, and returns to the present, where the ruin has become a waste ground and a wall. The wound of the divided city is given in image and sound and is felt in full. But it is witnessed more than opened. The Wall is a backdrop, and who made Berlin’s ruins is asked only in passing. The film’s sorrow over history is real, and its argument with history is slight.
Peter Falk is in Berlin as himself, shooting a film about the Nazi years in the city where they happened. Between takes he sketches the extras, and his thoughts, in English, run on in their own shambling comedy. The fiction inside the fiction is played lightly, and part of it is play. But the doubling holds: a film about memory contains a film that manufactures it, and the American actor at its centre is a former angel, who already knows what Damiel has still to learn. He is the hinge of the film, and the comic face of its law.
Movement IV
Damiel finds a circus, and in it Marion, played by Solveig Dommartin, a trapeze artist who performs in feathered wings. The circus is closing for lack of money. Damiel listens to her thoughts, which are long and declarative, about the closing. At moments of near-crossing, as he watches her, colour enters his sight. The human who plays the angel and the angel who longs to be human face each other across the whole design, and for a moment the black and white gives way.
Falk, at a coffee stand, talks to what he cannot see. He speaks of the small goods of the body, coffee and cold hands among them, and he calls the presence beside him “compañero” (“comrade”), a Spanish word from an American actor in Berlin. The former angel is making the case for the fall. What the angels lack is not knowledge but weight, and the argument for mortality is put by the film’s most comic figure, which is the film’s way of saying that the argument is not grand. It is a cup of coffee, held.
Damiel falls. He comes down beside the Wall, the angel’s breastplate with him, and the film is in colour. He tastes his own blood, and the taste is a discovery. He sells the breastplate to a junk dealer and walks the city as a delighted tourist of his own condition. The change of image is the change of state: when Damiel sees colour, the viewer sees it with him and learns in the eye what he has gained. The fall is also a change of physics, and the film keeps it. Damiel has colour, weight, blood and time, and he does not get his powers back.
Movement V
The second movement is shorter, looser and warmer. The camera no longer floats through walls; it stands among people, in a more ordinary grammar. Damiel goes among the living with Falk’s help. The overview is lost, and the film means the loss: to be human is to see less, from one place, in colour. Some of the whimsy of this movement sits uneasily with the first movement’s world, and its pace slackens. It lifts less often than the first. What it shows instead is a life begun.
There are two concert sequences, held for the music as much as for the argument, and they fix the film to its year: the post-punk clothes, the noise, the night. They answer the library. In the first movement the thoughts of readers rose into a murmur heard by angels; here the noise is a crowd’s, bodily and loud, and Damiel is in it. At a bar, while Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play, Marion speaks to Damiel at length, a declaration of what they are to be to each other.
The monologue says what the images had carried, and it is the film’s least earned elevation. Then a title says that the film will be continued, and the end carries a dedication to all the former angels, naming Yasujiro, François and Andrej: Ozu, Truffaut and Tarkovsky, three directors honoured as angels who had fallen into the world. Cinema is placed among the things that watch and cannot save, and the film, which began with a hand writing, ends by naming the hands that came before it.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the film as cut. The first movement resists subtraction better than it seems to. The drift from apartment to apartment, the library’s murmur and the thoughts on the underground are the angels’ condition, and their accumulation is how eternity is made to weigh: cut them and the fall has nothing to fall from. Homer is required, or the city’s memory is only footage; Falk is required as the hinge; the suicide is required as the failure of pure witness. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve lies after the fall and in display: the circus’s closing told and retold, Marion’s monologues saying what the images carried, two concerts held for their music, Falk’s shoot partly play. A film about drift is not wholly exempt from drift.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: to be human is to be inside time, partial, mortal and weighed down, and that weight, not the overview, is where meaning is; to witness without consequence, however tenderly, is a kind of poverty. The structure proves it, showing first the overview in full, angels who hear everything and change nothing, then the small goods of the body: cold hands, coffee, blood on the tongue, colour. A second truth, the divided city’s inner life and its wound, is given through image and sound and counts in full. Held below the gate because the central disclosure is close to a mood of benediction, and the history is witnessed more than opened: the Wall is a backdrop.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation is frequent, and it is the film’s method. A hand writes the song of childhood, an eye looks down on the city, and angels stand on the broken spire of the Memorial Church. In the Staatsbibliothek they move among readers while the thoughts rise into one murmur. Damiel crouches on the shoulder of the gilded Victory on her column. He holds a dying motorcyclist and gives him a litany of remembered things in place of fear. Cassiel cries out as a young man jumps. Homer sits in an armchair on the empty ground of Potsdamer Platz. Alekan’s camera makes height itself a register. Held from the top because the second movement lifts less often, and its closing monologue asserts by text an elevation the image has not earned.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The myth is built and bears the structure. The angel who chooses to fall is an old figure, from the sons of God and the daughters of men to Lucifer, here turned from pride to desire, and to Rilke’s angels in their terrible remove; the film recasts it as a choice for mortality. The first movement is heaven, the second earth, and the change to colour is the fall made visible. Round it more is built: Homer, an old storyteller invoking the muse, searching for a place, his audience gone; Marion on the trapeze in feathered wings, the human playing the angel as the angel longs to be human, a chiasmus that bears load. Held below the top: Marion stays more emblem than person, and Homer’s strand is evoked as much as built.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is Wenders’s own road cinema of the 1970s and Paris, Texas (1984), at 8.3 on this desk; the New German Cinema’s quarrel with German history; and the city symphony back to Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927). The turn is real: after a road film of American myth had won him the Palme d’Or, Wenders made a static, metaphysical film of one city, in German, built round Handke’s poetry, and that was a stake. The image system is less new than it looks. Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946) had already divided a heaven from an earth by monochrome and colour, in the opposite assignment, and the guardian angel among mortals is an old Hollywood figure. The swerve is in tone and seriousness more than in what cinema could do.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The angels’ gaze is the camera: Alekan’s slow, unbound movement through walls, over roofs and along train carriages is the experience of eternity, attention without weight. The overlapping interior voices, heard and cut off, are the city’s consciousness, and the angels’ listening is the film’s; told as plot, it would vanish. The black and white is the angels’ poverty of sense, and the colour is not decoration but the content of the fall: when Damiel sees colour, the viewer learns in the eye what he has gained. The looser, warmer grammar after the fall is itself knowledge, the overview lost. Held from the top because that second form does less work, and the closing monologue reverts to statement.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Thirty-nine years of return are evidence. The film has been read as theology, as a Rilkean poem, as a film about cinema, with an actor playing himself as a former angel and three dead directors honoured as former angels, and as a film about German memory. History changed it after 1989: the waste ground of Potsdamer Platz has been built over, and Homer’s search has become the film’s own. The formal returns are real, in the doublings of the two angels, of angel and trapeze artist, of the library’s murmur and the concert’s noise. Held down because much of the return is to texture and mood, and the film is clear about what it values: a rereading deepens the feeling more than it complicates the meaning, and the second movement can seem thinner each time.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Released in 1987, into the cinema of the 1980s. The intrinsic force: a feature-length film poem, a city symphony carried by voice-over and a metaphysical conceit, made with the means of art cinema, which showed that a contemplative film without a plot could hold a wide audience in a decade of narrative consolidation. It perfected and widened a manner, Wenders’s own, Handke’s and the essay film’s, more than it reorganised what cinema could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the angels in long coats on the rooftops passed into common visual reference, Wenders answered the film with a sequel and Hollywood remade it, and it stands as one of the last monuments of the New German Cinema. Particular lines of descent into later contemplative cinema are contested and are not credited.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric over thirty-nine years. The film as released survives whole. Its presence has been continuous: repertory screening, home video in successive editions, a steady place in teaching and in lists of the decade’s films, while the fame of the American remake has kept the original’s name in circulation. That is wide presence for an art film but not the widest, and the figure is the usual one for its span. The surface is fixed to 1987 exactly, in the divided city, the Wall, the post-punk concerts and their clothes. But that fixity has turned to document, not to staleness: the Berlin it shows is gone, and the film is a record of it. Its subject, the mortal moment seen from outside, has not dated.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The making bears weight in several departments. Henri Alekan, then nearly eighty and the photographer of Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946), gives the black and white a silvered softness and the camera an unhurried, floating authority, and the passages into colour are exact. Bruno Ganz carries Damiel’s attention, then his delight, with very little; Otto Sander’s Cassiel is grief held in a fixed face; Curt Bois, in Berlin films since childhood, makes Homer’s search sorrowful without pathos. Peter Przygodda’s cutting weaves the voices into a texture, not a list. Jürgen Knieper’s choral score is apt and at times over-insistent. The costs: Solveig Dommartin, near a novice, is stiff in the long monologues in French-accented German, the second movement slackens, and some scenes are held longer than their content.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Falk’s shambling comedy at a coffee stand, sketching extras and talking to a presence he cannot see, and the newsreel of 1945, the ruined city and the dead children. One law governs both, the worth of the particular, mortal thing seen from its edge: Falk is the law’s comic face and the footage its tragic one, and the circus, the library, the dying motorcyclist and the Wall obey it. The fall is a change of physics the film announces and keeps: after it come colour, weight, blood and time, and Damiel is not given his powers back. The strain is the tonal break after the fall, where whimsy and declamation do not always share the first movement’s world, and the concerts, which belong as much to the director’s taste as to the law.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. Consciousness, in dozens of interior voices of every age; childhood, in the song and in the children, who alone can see the angels; love and the body; the city as one organism; history, in the war, the ruins and the division; the sacred, as the premise; storytelling and cinema, in Homer and in Falk’s film. One device integrates them, listening, and that is the achievement. Held where it is because labour and the state appear only as faces in a crowd and as a wall, the family is glimpsed in a few apartments and not entered, and the orders are sampled across the city more than worked through one another: history and the sacred run in parallel, not in collision.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.8, then The Sublime at 8.7, then The Archetypal Deep, The Imperishable and The Made at 8.6. A form in which the camera’s freedom is the angels’ eternity and colour is the content of the fall; an elevation that is the film’s method, from the broken spire to a dying man’s litany; a myth of the fall that organises the whole, heaven in black and white and earth in colour; a survival in which a vanished city has become a document; and a making carried by Alekan’s camera and three performances.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.9: the first movement’s drift is the angels’ condition and resists subtraction, but after the fall the film gives, in a circus closing told and retold, monologues that say what the images carried and concerts held for their music. Above it, The Encompassed at 8.1, where labour and the state are a crowd and a wall and the family is glimpsed, and The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3, a turn in tone more than in what cinema could do, and a manner widened more than a field reorganised.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short, and The Swerve at 8.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 each fall two tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.9, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.1. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.4 from a sum of 101.1, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire), West Germany and France, as released in 1987, about 128 minutes (listings give 127 or 128), in black and white and in colour, in German with English and other languages among the voices, from the hand writing the song of childhood to the closing title and dedication: directed by Wim Wenders from a screenplay by Wenders and Peter Handke, Handke writing the poetic texts, produced by Wenders and Anatole Dauman for Road Movies Filmproduktion and Argos Films, photographed by Henri Alekan, edited by Peter Przygodda, with music by Jürgen Knieper, with Bruno Ganz, Otto Sander, Solveig Dommartin, Curt Bois and Peter Falk. It premiered at Cannes in May 1987, where Wenders won the prize for direction. The film is judged as released, and no other version is judged. The sequel, In weiter Ferne, so nah! (1993), and the American remake, City of Angels (1998), are separate works and are named only as part of the film’s life. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the original; English subtitles are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. The German text is not quoted, since its exact words are not held with certainty, and the song of childhood is described; the one word quoted is Falk’s Spanish. Claims that could not be verified, among them a further credit on the script, whether more than one cut has circulated, the date and form of a later restoration, how much of the script existed when shooting began and the minute at which the film turns to colour, are not given.