Win Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin is a film out of time. The city it so richly maps no longer exists. West and East Berlin were divided from each other for decades. And then, a couple of years after Wenders’ movie, they weren’t.
The Potsdamer Platz of the film is desolate wasteland remembered as a cosmopolitan centre. And now it’s full of skyscrapers.
This Berlin is not celestial. It is grubby and muddy and crowded and decaying. It is fallen.
Michel Serres finds his angels in the airport. His angels are messengers, vectors of communication, knitting the world together. Whereas Wenders’ angels do not pass on anything as distinct as a message. Instead they bear witness to world in front of them. They are recording angels.
The angels hear the thoughts of the city’s inhabitants constantly. And all this before Twitter made the thoughts of our fellow humans all too accessible. They stand and sit with their human charges, providing what comfort they can. Is this role a punishment with the angels condemned to constant exposure to the human psyche? Or is it a privilege to exist so close to the earth and the material? Or is just a job? It seems that it is possible to resign the title of angel.
Der Himmel über Berlin is by turns intense, beautiful, tragic, and goofy. The director considered ending it with a custard pie fight. There is a deep sense of the absurd running through its celluloid*. It’s not a film that you watch for its plot. It offers an enchantment for the eyes. Images well up from history and dreams. The angels see the cosmos in a stark black and white. Damiel’s decision to renounce his angelhood in pursuit of a circus acrobat plunges him into the world of colour. And Peter Falk is a former angel. Because of course he is.
Dated. Timeless. Nowhen.
*Damiel and Cassiel sometimes have a Vladimir and Estragon vibe to them.