ARTicles vol.5 i.2a: Out of Berlin

Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire is probably the most framous and enduring artistic representation of the divided city of Berlin. Even as Wenders made the film in 1987 that Berlin was on the verge of disappearing; two years later the Wall fell, and everything changed. Wenders himself was aware of the temporary nature of his subject; “The fact that something is due to go is always a good reason to include it in a scene,” he later told an interviewer. “Wings of Desire is full of examples. Almost none of our locations exists any more.” Like the angels of his film, Wenders’ task was to observe and record a fleeting moment in the city’s life.

When he made the film, Wenders had returned to Germany after almost a decade living and working abroad, and was searching for a way to express his feelings for his country. Wings of Desire may be a snapshot of a specific time and place – its German title, Der Himmel über Berlin, reveals the central role played by the city – but Wenders’ deeper subject is more lasting. As he explains in his essay ‘An attempted description of an indescribable film’ which is based on the first treatment for Wings of Desire, “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?”

Almost twenty years later, when we were considering how to adapt Wings of Desire for the theatre, that “perennial question” was foremost in our minds. We could never bring Berlin to the stage even if we wanted to—the city that Damiel and Cassiel wandered through no longer exists, and it would be a strange act of archeological hubris to try to resurrect it, when it is already so perfectly remembered in the film. It was the human story, or rather the angelic story, that interested us most, and the relationship between the individual characters and the world they inhabited, whatever that world would turn out to be. But Berlin seemed so central to Wings of Desire; how could we proceed without it?

The answer lay in the screenplay itself. In searching for a language for the film, Wenders had asked his friend and frequent collaborator, the great Austrian poet and playwright Peter Handke, to contribute some scenes to the script. Handke agreed, as long as he could send his contributions from Vienna rather than coming to Berlin. As Wenders later recorded, “Every week […] I would get an envelope full of dialogue, without any direction or description, like in a stage play. There was no contact between us; he wrote, and I prepared the film. There was a growing gulf between the work Peter was doing in Salzburg and the film that was gradually taking shape in Berlin, in discussions with the actors, and the physical preparations. Peter’s scenes – though beautiful and poetic – were like monoliths from heaven. But they didn’t fit: there was a complete discord between his dialogues, the scenes we envisaged and the locations we’d decided on.”

Wenders’ solution was to incorporate most of Handke’s “monoliths from heaven” as voiceovers, representing the characters’ interior thoughts. The city and the world, the specific details of each scene, are barely mentioned in the language of the screenplay, indeed there is very little conventional dialogue in Wings of Desire. Berlin exists largely in Wenders’ exquisite choreography, which is juxtaposed with the poetic worlds inside the minds of the Berliners and their guardian angels. As a result, the process of bringing the text of our adaptation out of Berlin and the 1980s was relatively straightforward; with only two or three minor emendations and a few cuts, the text that you’ll hear performed this evening is very close to that of the Wenders/Handke screenplay.

Gideon Lester is the A.R.T.’s Associate Artistic Director.

5_2