Wings of Desire: A stunning tapestry of sounds and images

Wings of Desire is one of cinema’s loveliest city symphonies. Bruno Ganz is Damiel, an angel perched atop buildings high over Berlin who can hear the thoughts—fears, hopes, dreams—of all the people living below. But when he falls in love with a beautiful trapeze artist, he is willing to give up his immortality and come back to earth to be with her. Made not long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, this stunning tapestry of sounds and images, shot in black and white and color by the legendary Henri Alekan, forever made the name of director Wim Wenders synonymous with film art.

The angels in WINGS OF DESIRE are those of the poet Rilke and the film uses them to present an astonishing poetic document about the life of the city, concentrating on an American movie star (Peter Falk playing himself), a French trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin), and a retired German professor who remembers what Berlin used to be like (Curt Bois). It features a howling musical cameo by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, which is movie poetry.

“Part romance, part comedy, part meditation on matters political and philosophical, Wenders’ remarkable movie posits a world haunted by invisible angels listening in to our thoughts… A film about the Fall and the Wall, it’s full of astonishingly hypnotic images, and manages effortlessly to turn Wenders’ and Peter Handke’s poetic, literary script into pure cinematic expression… few films are so rich, so intriguing, or so ambitious.” – Geoff Andrew, Time Out London