With the release of City of Angels, it seemed a good time to
backtrack and look at the cultural icon that is Wings of Desire, the
film upon which City of Angels is based.

In this piece, Mike Frost, Australian Bible teacher, speaker, writer
and general man-about-town, gives his perspective on Wings and its
sequel, Far Away, So Close. This will hopefully be part of an occasional
series that Mike will write for Shoot as he digs through the video
vaults.

I regularly recommend that my students see Wim Wenders’ monumental
angel film, Wings of Desire, and its sequel, Far Away, So Close. Dressed
in Euro-chic black overcoats the angels depicted in these films are seen
only by children, invisible to the adults among whom they dwell. They
roam Berlin, perched over the city, drawn to winged monuments high above
the subways and housing projects.

They are here basically to attend to the embattled and beleaguered
urban dwellers of modern day Germany. They listen to the unspoken
yearnings and dreads of humans. They know our inmost thoughts, offering
silent touches of hope. But they are powerless to intervene in our
anguish.

The films are simply a parade of human yearning – what’s been called
a "discourse of souls". They capture the emptiness of the
technological age, the flat, hollow existence of modern urban life.
Wenders has attempted to portray the underlying hope within people of
the latter part of the 20th century for holiness, magic and mystery. His
angels are profoundly limited, but they care. The angels (the films
centre around two in particular), Damiel and Cassiel, also long for
otherness – in their case incarnation. Just as humans might yearn for a
more spiritual experience of life, these two wish for a more human
experience. They are, in fact, the mirror of humanity, a reverse image.
Each film deals with the ‘incarnational plunge’ made firstly by Damiel
(in Wings of Desire) because he desires a sensual experience of life and
secondly by Cassiel (in Far Away) because he is determined to make
a difference in the struggle between good and evil.

The films seem to indicate that in the process of eternity (the
chronos time of forever) there will always be the yearning for a kairos
moment; an inbreaking of history, a transcendent moment. Though the
films are photographed chiefly in black-and-white to depict the
limitations of angelic existence, when the angels become human the
screen comes to life in technicolour. Only when they are humans can the
former angels act and experience, rather than just listen and witness.
Hear as Damiel, just prior to crossing over into humanity, tells Cassiel
of his longing for life:

It’s great to live only by the Spirit, to testify day by day for
eternity only to the spiritual side of people. But sometimes I get fed
up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above, I’d
like to feel there’s some weight to me, to end my eternity and bind me
to earth. At each step, each gust of wind, I’d like to be able to say,
"now and now and now", and no longer say "since
always" and "forever". To sit in the empty seat at the
card table and be greeted if only by a nodÖNot that I want to beget
a child or plant a tree right away, but it would be quite something to
come home after a long day like Philip Marlowe and feed the cat, to have
a fever, to have blackened fingers from newsprint, to be excited not
only by the mind but, at last, by a meal, the curve of a neck, by an
ear. To lie through the teeth, to feel your skeleton moving as you walk
along. Finally to suspect instead of forever knowing all. To be able to
say "Ah" and "Oh" and "Hey" instead of
"Yes" and "Amen".

Damiel is simply expressing a yearning the reverse of that of
humans. He longs for otherness as we all do, but Wenders has cleverly
cast his yearning like a photographic negative of ours. It’s not as
simple as the grass always being greener on the other side. It’s a
vindication for those of us who believe there is another side at all.
(The other point to note is that Damiel seems much more aware of the
wonder of human existence than most humans are. By being off limits to
human experience he seems all the more appreciative of it.)

Later in the film Damiel says to Cassiel, "Observing from above
is not the same as seeing at eye-level." – a simple expression of
the power of incarnation. But reverse the sentence and you hear your own
heartbeat. Seeing from eye-level is okay, but we desire a vision of life
from above. Wim Wenders’ two films tell us more about ourselves than
they do about angels, I believe. And in one particular respect, namely,
the necessity of conversion. Both angels in the films have to take a
plunge. They have to fall, to convert. Spirituality without conversion
is a hollow form of the sacred. I will deal further with this later, but
it should be enough to say now that conversion is costly and
sacrificial. To see God revealing himself all around us is a nice idea,
but those of us whose eyes have been opened to this have had to pay with
our lives for it to make any sense at all.

Mike Frost or

Article last updated 30th June 1998 © Copyright to Shoot The
Messenger

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