Standing on a concrete river bank in Berlin, they recall that it took a long time before the primeval river found its bed. They remember the melting of the glaciers. They are a reflection of the solitude of God, who created everything and then had no one to witness what he had done; the role of the angels is to see.
The film evokes a mood of reverie, elegy, and meditation. It doesn't rush headlong into the plot, but has the patience of its angels. It suggests what it would be like to see everything but not participate in it.
It's about being, not doing.
His camera seems liberated from gravity; it floats over the city, or glides down the aisle of an airplane. It does not intrude; it observes. When the angel follows the trapeze artist into a rock club, it doesn't fall into faster cutting rhythms; it remains detached.
The critic Bryant Frazer observes that Cassiel, the other angel, "leans against the wall and closes his eyes, and the stage lights cast three different shadows off his body, alternating and shifting position and color as though we're watching Cassiel's very essence fragmenting before our eyes."
Existential film style So
So far, Wenders' films have formed a unique candid and calm style. His film language rhetoric basically excludes montage and especially prefers unedited movements and scenes to directly reveal the authenticity of the existence of things. He does not seek to argue; he seeks a film that quietly observes, waits, and develops without pause, especially likes to show roads, cars, trains, planes, and ships, and thus repeatedly depicts migration, wandering, and travel.
The landscapes photographed by Wenders always avoid the appearance of figures, but they are filled with a strong sense of "people's presence", and the large-format images almost magically shorten the distance between the viewer and the landscape. Behind the images is Wenders' desire to capture fleeting moments. The fleeting moments of time and history, and the characteristics of different landscapes all reflect the artist's imagination. Every landscape that has been washed away by time and age, while making a single moment eternal, also reflects the evolution of civilization.
Unlike moving images, photography enables Wenders to give the background the same importance as the foreground. Even within the series, each photo is self-contained, creating its own context without the need for context. In short, they are Wenders' intuitive existentialist interpretation of the unnamed spectacle.
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