Wim Wenders’ extravagantly wistful, intensely literary romantic fantasy, co-conceived with Peter Handke, is re-released and right now it looks more than anything like an elegiac “city symphony” about Berlin. How extraordinary to think that just two years after this film came out, the Wall and the city’s division into east and west – which had seemed as poetically fixed and immutable as a river shoreline – disappeared. With its amazing crane and helicopter shots, Wenders’ movie swoops and hovers and floats over the city, pointedly surmounting the hated wall, enacting the longing of Berliners to somehow overcome history’s gravity and get over this ugly barrier.
Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander play Damiel and Cassiel, two angels in the sky above Berlin who amuse themselves by watching and studying all the people in the teeming city below them. They can hear what these human beings are thinking and feeling. They roam freely, ubiquitously, through the still semi-shattered city of Berlin and their musings are interspersed with archive footage of the destroyed capital in 1945. Children can see the angels, but not the grownups – except for one grownup, the Hollywood movie actor Peter Falk, who has come to Berlin to shoot a movie apparently set during the second world war, and can somehow sense the angels in front of him. Falk’s presence is a reminder of Wenders’ unique love of America and melding American cultural presences in Europe: appropriately enough, as Berlin itself was the epicentre of Germany’s prewar Amerikanismus, its fierce love of everything from the US.
