THIS IS AN EXCERPT FROM The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations by Wim Wenders (refer to previous post):
The following, written in 1986, is from the first treatment for Wings of Desire.
And we, spectators always, everywhere,
looking at, never out of, everything!
—Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy”
At first it’s not possible to describe anything beyond a wish or a desire.
That’s how it begins, making a film, writing a book, painting a picture, composing a tune, generally creating something.
You have a wish.
You wish that something might exist, and then you work on it until it does. You want to give something to the world, something truer, more beautiful, more painstaking, more serviceable, or simply something other than what already exists. And right at the start, simultaneous with the wish, you imagine what that “something other” might be like, or at least you see something flash by. And then you set off in the direction of the flash, and you hope you don’t lose your orientation, or forget or betray the wish you had at the beginning.
And in the end, you have a picture or pictures of something, you have music, or something that operates in some new way, or a story, or this quite extraordinary combination of all these things: a film. Only with a film—as opposed to paintings, novels, music, or inventions—you have to present an account of your desire; more, you even have to describe in advance the path you want to go with your film. No wonder, then, that so many films lose their first flash, their comet.
The thing I wished for and saw flashing was a film in and about Berlin.
A film that might convey something of the history of the city since 1945. A film that might succeed in capturing what I miss in so many films that are set here, something that seems to be so palpably there when you arrive in Berlin: a feeling in the air and under your feet and in people’s faces that makes life in this city so different from life in other cities.
To explain and clarify my wish, I should add: it’s the desire of someone who’s been away from Germany for a long time, and who could only ever experience “Germanness” in this one city. I should say I’m no Berliner. Who is nowadays? But for over twenty years now, visits to this city have given me my only genuine experiences of Germany, because the (hi)story that elsewhere in the country is suppressed or denied is physically and emotionally present here.
Of course I didn’t want just to make a film about the place, Berlin. What I wanted to make was a film about people—people here in Berlin—that considered the one perennial question: how to live?
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And so I have “BERLIN” representing
“THE WORLD.”
I know of no place with a stronger claim.
Berlin is “a historical site of truth.”
No other city is such a meaningful image,
such a PLACE OF SURVIVAL,
so exemplary of our century.
Berlin is divided like our world,
like our time,
like men and women,
young and old,
rich and poor,
like all our experience.
A lot of people say Berlin is “crummy.”
I say: there is more reality in Berlin
than any other city.
It’s more a SITE than a CITY.
“To live in the city of undivided truth,
to walk around with the
invisible ghosts of the future and
the past . . .”
That’s my desire, on the way to
becoming a film.
My story isn’t about Berlin
because it’s set there
but because it couldn’t be set
anywhere else.
The name of the film will be:
“THE SKY OVER BERLIN”
because the sky is maybe the only thing
that unites these two cities,
apart from their past
of course. Will there be a common
future?
“Heaven only knows.”
And language, much invoked,
THE GERMAN LANGUAGE,
would seem to be shared also,
but in fact its plight
is the same as the city’s:
one language comprises two
with a common past
but not necessarily a shared future.
And what of the present?
That’s the subject of the film:
“THE SKY OVER BERLIN.”
“OVER BERLIN”?
In, with, for, about Berlin . . .
What should such a film
“discuss,” “examine,” “depict,”
or “touch on”?
And to what end?
As if every last particle
of Berlin hadn’t been
tapped, taped, typed.
Not least because it’s now
750 years old
and has been promoted to
LEGENDARY status,
which, while not unreasonable,
doesn’t do anything to clarify
the condition “Berlin,”
rather the opposite.
“THE SKY”?
The sky above it is the only
clear thing you can understand.
The clouds
drift across it, it rains and snows
and thunder-
and-lightnings, the moon sails through it
and sinks, the sun shines on the divided city,
today, as it did on the ruins in 1945
and the “Front City” of the fifties,
as it did before there was any city here,
and as it will when there is no longer
any city.
Now what I want is starting to emerge:
namely to tell a story in Berlin.
(With the right stress—not for once
a STORY but:
A story.)
That requires objectivity, distance,
or, better yet, a vantage point. Because
I don’t want
to tell a STORY OF UNITY but
something harder:
one story about DIVISION.
Oh, Berlin isn’t easy.
You’re delighted to find moral
support on the back of the catalog
for the exhibition Legendary Berlin,
in this sentence from Heiner Müller:
“Berlin is the ultimate. Everything else
is prehistory.
If history occurs, it will begin
in Berlin.”
Does that help?
In the film, of course, it’s not HISTORY
but A story, though of course
a STORY may contain HISTORY,
images and traces of past history,
and intimations of what is to come. Anyway:
HEAVEN ONLY KNOWS!
You need the patience of an ANGEL
to sort all that out.
STOP! It’s right here at this point
that the film,
DRIFTING
into my mind, begins:
with ANGELS.
Yes, angels. A film with angels.
I know it’s hard to grasp,
I myself can hardly grasp it yet:
“ANGELS”!
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The genesis of the idea of having angels in my Berlin story is very hard to account for in retrospect. It was suggested by many sources at once. First and foremost, Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Paul Klee’s paintings too. Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History. There was a song by the Cure that mentioned “fallen angels,” and I heard another song on the car radio that had the line “talk to an angel” in it. One day, in the middle of Berlin, I suddenly became aware of that gleaming figure the Angel of Peace, metamorphosed from being a warlike victory angel into a pacifist. There was an idea about four Allied pilots shot down over Berlin, an idea about juxtaposing and superimposing today’s Berlin and the capital of the Reich, “double images” in time and space; there have always been childhood images of angels as invisible, omnipresent observers; there was, so to speak, the old hunger for transcendence, and also a longing for the absolute opposite: the longing for a comedy!
THE DEADLY EARNEST OF A COMEDY!
I’m amazed myself.
What’s a film going to look like—what can it look like—possibly
a comedy, that has angels as its main characters?
With wings and with no flying??
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I’m not after a “screenplay” here. All I can do is go on describing what’s “ghosting around” in my imagination.
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