By Joseph Gilson
In Wim Wenders’ 1975, Wrong Move, the central fragment of his road movie triptych, Bernhard Landau, the existential poet, laments, “The feeling of not even being a silhouette in the universe was terrible… Why must there be so vast a space between me and the world?” He wanders amongst the crumbling psychological architecture of a post-war Germany in which time stands still, waiting for the past to become bearable, waiting for a future that won’t come. Waiting for his life to blossom back into colour.
Of the country of Germany in its post-war state, Wenders said, “It seems to me that this is something that does not exist anymore. Or which at least does not yet exist again.” He saw his Heimat (a profoundly human fondness for a certain place, with no English language equivalent) as in a somewhat liminal state, suspended in a void of history in which movement was the only refuge; movement across landscape, movement into the deeper recesses of one’s mind, movement with, against, and around time. And so came the director’s masterpiece, Wings of Desire (1987), in which his omniscient camera moves through the fragmented spaces of Berlin, and the lost souls within. It’s a symphony of introspection, the mass of inner voices forming a low murmur of discontent that rumbles throughout the city. Above and beyond the physical metropolis linger the angels. The murmur rings in their ears, the sorrow of the city’s people stares into their eyes, but they cannot affect the course of history, they remain detached, recording potent moments of human existence in notebooks but not experiencing any for themselves. They are essentially the shadow that existence forms, trailing the potent moments, bending to its whim. What Damiel the angel longs to do, is to embody the existence that he trails, to “conquer a history” for himself, for his life to blossom into colour.
Damiel goes in search of the weight that will make him fall to existence. Cassiel, his friend and fellow angel, stays behind. They both begin in the city’s library, pawing over the infinite accounts of history within the books, history that does not belong to them. Cassiel meets Homer, mankind’s self-professed storyteller, and becomes his shadow, following him throughout the city, looking for a Potsdamer Platz that has long since been destroyed. He encounters tortured souls on his journey and attempts to cure their existence, a condition they see as some kind of curse. A man sits atop a tall building, his legs hanging over the edge, horrified onlookers beckoning him to return to the safety behind the fence. Cassiel enters the frame and places a significant hand on the man’s back, rests his head against the man’s shoulder and listens to his thoughts, tries to influence his decision. The man drops out of the frame, leaving a void of space against which Cassiel still rests. Cassiel cries out in anguish.
Damiel has been drawn to alluring trapeze artist, Marion, her vitality stirring a passion inside his heart, long since empty. Suddenly the space between himself and the world doesn’t seem so vast. She represents the profoundness in human connection, the transcendental desire that can override the perpetual grinding of time, of a punishing history. Whilst Cassiel trails Homer, his doomed narrative odyssey eventually tumbling into the abyss, Damiel and Marion track down a new world of sensation. The angel watches her perform high above on her trapeze, she falls from her elevated position towards the ground, the previous black and white tones of the film give way to radiant colour, but she is caught by the trapeze and continues to swing, returning to the former world of melancholic monochrome. The chasm between worlds has been breached, however; Damiel’s new history sighted. And it appears again as they share the intimate space of Marion’s trailer. She plays a Nick Cave record and sings along to its verses whilst Damiel picks up a stone from her dresser. The song becomes emphatic and Damiel’s stone is transformed into two, the solid one and a ghostlike replica. The camera closes in on the ghost stone – the shadow of the solid one – and it begins to solidify. He passes it between his hands, weighing it, and Marion again blooms with colour as she sings her verses. Earlier he had said to Cassiel, “Instead of forever hovering above I'd like to feel a weight grow in me to end the infinity and to tie me to Earth.” Here, a literal but also metaphysical weight grows in Damiel. He witnesses that crucial transformation, that fall to Earth, as the shadow of existence became an existence of its own breath. The infinity of time, of Homer’s epic narrative, is conquered by the desire stirring within Damiel and Marion.
Towards the end of the film, after Damiel has finally fallen and entered his new world of colour and sensation, he returns to the circus, the site where he first set his distant eyes on Marion. The circus, however, has moved away, packed up and left. A ghost space remains. And he waits within. Beyond his state of liminality, unto the physical world, Damiel witnesses time as a mutation. He longed to be free of eternity and embrace the moments as they came to him, the atoms as they fell. He now realises he cannot control time, as he once did. What now informs his movement amid the cerebral rubble of Berlin are the reflections of the intimate moments he shared with Marion. He wanders, lost, down a directionless street but then spies a poster for a concert. Nick Cave, the musician that Marion sung her verses to, is playing nearby. The atoms fall, the weight of attachment to Earth is reaffirmed, the stone forming a bulge in his coat pocket remains.
Inside the concert hall, Damiel and Cassiel reunite having parted ways on their separate journeys. They reappear in devastatingly contrasting conditions. Cassiel remains in black and white, aimless, and now even without the comfort of Homer’s story of eternity. A shadow, dislocated from its origin. He rests his head against the wall. Amid the commotion of the concert, his world is numb and muted. A white light shines upon his face, its staggered flashes cast a series of Cassiel’s shadows on the wall, each one becoming more and more faint, more and more ghostlike, as the stone did when Damiel lifted it from Marion’s dresser. He has no emotional weight holding him to Earth however, solidifying his existence, no eternally human connection. He is destined to fade into the crevices of time. Damiel, meanwhile, has begun to conquer his own history. “There is no greater story than ours. That of man and woman,” speaks Marion. Inciting the first story of man and woman – Adam and Eve – she implies a new beginning, a new history for them both, built upon the love they share, and no longer the dilapidated psyche of the city.
Cassiel sits atop the Victory Column of Berlin, gazing from a distance at all the beginnings, at all the poignant moments of human connection. His legs hang over the edge. He drops out of the frame. He cascades down towards Earth. He is a weight, but a weight uninformed by an eternal sensory moment. He returns to his own beginning, and will try to exist, again.
“Time will heal everything. But what if time was the illness?” contemplated Marion as she swung on her trapeze. It is the same rumination that is explored throughout David Lowery’s 2017 film of love and loss, A Ghost Story. Many parallels arise between these two films, the space between worlds being the most prominent. However, their parallel narrative lines crossover as the films progress. Damiel descended to the Earth from his liminal state of infinite time. In A Ghost Story we see Casey Affleck’s character, “C”, transcending the opposite way. He leaves his mortality behind and enters the temporal eternity of the afterlife.
The two lives and worlds of C exist in a closer proximity than Damiel’s. Shortly after his death, his body lies in a hospital bed, under a white sheet. Rooney Mara’s “M” stares down upon her husband, struggling to comprehend the enormity of the atoms that have fallen her way. She leaves the room, but the camera stays. It watches the recently deceased C from a distance, its gaze locked upon the sheet for one moment after the other, again and again, until the sheet rises from its slumber. There is no blossoming into colour, no falling to or from Earth, the camera simply watched as C transcended into the world of liminality. The worlds are seen as touching, overlapping, rubbing against each other, but nonetheless apart. And the space now, through C’s eyes, incredibly vast. He leaves the hospital and returns home, to where he believes his weight to existence lies – his wife, his house which holds his history within its walls. When he is in the house, however, he is visibly disconnected from that history. He cannot ease into the surroundings, he is a visible anomaly standing in the centre of the room. His wife returns, he appears heartened. That is until she can’t see him, she walks straight past. Lowery again practises his still, gazing camera as M attempts to find some kind of comfort in a pie. As she sits on the floor of her kitchen devouring the pastry, and the camera holds on her for moments upon moments, we witness her full uninhibited grief, a grief that C can no longer influence or relieve.
As M cries on her bed, a close up of a sheet-covered hand begins to caress her shoulder. Here, C reflects the inability of Cassiel to alter the future of the suicidal man atop the building. As Cassiel experienced the inaccessibility of existence for what must’ve been the infinite time, C discovers it for the first.
As the film progresses, this inaccessibility, this frustration for C manifests more and more severely. A montage of M leaving the house again and again indicates a significant time elapsed in which C has accepted his fate in his liminal world, destined to forever observe and never again participate in her life. The zenith is reached when C leaves the house of their history for the final time. As she drives away, the sheet is seen in the window, longing after her but unable to leave too. In Wings of Desire, Cassiel attached himself to Homer and his story of humankind, but became a shadow dislocated when the story faded away. C mirrors this, a shadow of his former life, now disconnected from that origin too, floating in a void of time and history, hoping to begin again.
Without the emotional weight of M tying C to a relative sense of time, he surges into the future. His house, his history, is knocked down by the bulldozers of human progression. High-rises emerge, and he is trapped within, wandering the clinical and synthetic halls of future business. He steps out into the alien metropolis, innumerable floors up. The wind whistles through the sheet, the sheet flutters over the edge. Cassiel atop the Victory Statue, C atop the high-rise. They both plunge towards the city, and into the past. Cassiel disappears towards some unknown existence. C appears on the ground in which his house, the one that will hold his weight of history, is beginning to be built. A ghost space, like the forgotten circus, but reflecting the future rather than the past.
Just as he did before, C surges into the future, this time to catch up with M, existing again. As he returns, however, he witnesses the possibility of all ghosts across time. He stands in the house again. In the room stand four figures: himself, C, M, and a second sheet. The multiplicity that time can cause is laid bare. He travelled to the past to exist again in the present, and the future. But what he sees now is the vaster distance that his travel caused, he has become a ghost of a ghost, like Cassiel’s shadows projected onto the wall. However, the weight that held him there for so long, the emotional connection to M, is still there. He can see it as he watches his former self and his former wife move into their new house, all those years ago. The sheets of time overlap, and he is free to ascend into eternity, because he is still there, on Earth, and he will always be. Just like Wim Wenders’ Germany.
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