10 / 10
Official trailer
Wings of Desire is Wim Wenders’s 1987 German fantasy drama and one of the strongest films in the director’s filmography. Bruno Ganz plays Damiel, an angel who has observed Berlin and its inhabitants across centuries without direct engagement. Otto Sander plays his fellow angel Cassiel. Solveig Dommartin plays Marion, a French trapeze artist whose presence draws Damiel toward considering mortality. Wenders, Peter Handke, and Richard Reitinger wrote the screenplay. Argos Films and Road Movies Filmproduktion produced the film, and it was released in West Germany in October 1987.
This is my kind of film, and I don’t say that about many movies built around angels. Wenders slows me down to the pace of someone who’s watched Berlin for centuries, and by the time Damiel decides he wants a mortal life, I want it for him as badly as he does. I think it’s close to perfect.
The film works as fantasy drama and as a study in the conditions of mortal engagement. The work refuses the elaborate plot mechanics that fantasy cinema typically deploys. The narrative is structurally simple. Two angels observe Berlin and the divided city’s inhabitants. One angel chooses mortality. The structural simplicity allows the film to develop atmospheric content at depth that more elaborate plots wouldn’t permit. The work establishes a distinct visual tone through alternating black-and-white sequences depicting angelic perception and color sequences depicting human perception. The visual differentiation carries serious argumentative weight.
The Visual Approach
The angels see the world in monochrome and the humans see it in color, and the film never stops to tell you which is which. You track where you are through the image itself. I think that’s the boldest choice Wenders makes, and it pays off enormously, because by the time color starts to feel like a gift, I understand why an angel would give up eternity for it.
The cinematography by Henri Alekan works at the highest level of black-and-white practice.
Alekan had previously shot Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946) and brought particular monochrome vocabulary from that earlier work into the contemporary German setting. The angelic black-and-white sequences treat Berlin’s particular architecture, the divided city’s spatial geography, and the inhabitants’ physical environments with documentary attention combined with formal compositional discipline. The color sequences work at warmer tones that suggest human emotional possibility against the angelic detachment.
For Writers
Visual or formal alternation can carry argumentative weight that single-tone approaches can’t support. Wings of Desire alternates between monochrome and color to develop arguments about perceptual modes. This applies to fiction. Consider whether your work benefits from formal alternation or from consistent tone. Alternation requires careful preparation to support the transitions. The investment can produce work that single-tone approaches can’t match.
The Ganz Performance
Bruno Ganz’s performance as Damiel runs on the restraint the premise demands.
The angel can’t touch the lives he watches, so Ganz has to build the decision to become mortal out of small observations instead of dramatic peaks. He does it with micro-expressions, the way he moves through Berlin, and an economy of gesture I find mesmerizing. Ganz is the reason the film works for me.
The performance also engages with particular philosophical content that the screenplay develops. Damiel desires mortal experience including physical sensation, emotional engagement, and the capacity for accidental error that angelic perfection prevents. The actor traces the development of this desire across the runtime through accumulated particular moments instead of through stated philosophical argument. Performance can carry philosophical content through depicted behavior instead of through expositional treatment. The work is a foundational text for philosophical cinema that works through performance instead of through dialogue.
For Writers
Performance technique can carry philosophical content through depicted behavior instead of through expositional treatment. Wings of Desire develops Damiel’s philosophical position through Ganz’s accumulated particular work. This applies to fiction. Consider whether your philosophical content works through stated arguments or through depicted behavior. Behavioral development of philosophical positions produces deeper reader engagement than stated arguments alone. The reader who arrives at the position through behavioral observation holds the position differently than the reader who’s told the position.
The Berlin Setting
The film sits within the divided Berlin setting that the work’s broader argument requires. The Berlin Wall, the particular architectural environment, the cultural divisions between East and West, and the historical weight of twentieth-century German experience all inform the depicted dramatic situation. The setting carries documentary value alongside its dramatic function. The film captures Berlin’s particular 1987 conditions before the fall of the Wall in 1989 transformed the city considerably.
Berlin works as a character too. The cinematography treats the city’s density, its architecture and its cultural landmarks as dramatic material, and the library sequences are the stretch I’d point anyone to first. No other city could have given them that setting. The film has also picked up documentary value since the Wall came down, and that adds an ache I find hard to shake.
For Writers
Specific settings carry historical and dramatic weight that generic settings can’t match. Wings of Desire captures 1987 Berlin with specificity that’s acquired documentary value as the city has transformed. This applies to fiction. Consider whether your settings carry historical specificity that may acquire additional value over time. The investment in setting specificity often produces work that ages into additional cultural value as the depicted conditions become historical.
Craft Note
Wenders’s collaboration with screenwriter Peter Handke required careful preparation in how to integrate Handke’s poetic prose with the visual approach the film required. The screenplay includes extended angelic monologues that develop philosophical content through prose poetry instead of through conventional dialogue. The integration of this material with the visual approach required careful pacing that allowed the prose to work without overwhelming the visual content. The completed film works because the director and screenwriter developed methods for combining their distinct contributions. The lesson applies to creative collaboration broadly.
Strong individual contributors require working methods that allow their distinct contributions to combine instead of to compete. The investment in integration methods pays off in work that no single contributor could have produced alone.
Is Wings of Desire as good as people say?
Wings of Desire is one of the strongest films in Wim Wenders’s filmography and one of the principal accomplishments of postwar German cinema. The visual approach develops arguments about perceptual modes through formal alternation between monochrome and color. The Ganz performance carries philosophical content through depicted behavior instead of through expositional treatment. The Berlin setting carries historical and dramatic weight that’s acquired additional documentary value as the city has transformed.
It’s a 10. My one small gripe is that Handke’s monologues are dense enough that I sometimes want the film to give me a second to catch up. I like everything else: the monochrome and the color, Ganz, Alekan’s camera, a Berlin that no longer exists.
If you care at all about German cinema, about Wenders, or about films that think, see it. Very few films get a perfect score from me, and this one gets it easily.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Wings of Desire (1987), The Criterion Collection
- Wings of Desire, Wikipedia
- Wings of Desire (1987), IMDb
