On June 12, 1987, when Reagan visited West Berlin, he delivered a speech in front of the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate: "Mr. Gorbachev, please tear down this wall." There are still two years before the demolition of the Berlin Wall. It was also in this year that Wenders ended his eight years of wandering in the United States, returned to his hometown of Berlin, and began filming "Under the Sphere of Berlin".
The original German name of "Under the Sky of Berlin", Der Himmel über Berlin, translated into English has the dual meaning of The Sky Over Berlin and The Heaven Over Berlin. "I use movies to fight against lost tragedies and against the disappearance of the world." 42-year-old Wenders wrote.
At the beginning of the film, the camera is slowly moving in compassion, overlooking the devastated Berlin after the war and the people living in it from the perspective of an angel. The estrangement and dispute between parent-child and husband and wife, children in the corner watching other people's play alone, the pain and suffering of car accident victims, and the prostitutes who can’t make money back to their hometowns in the street are running down...
Angel Cassirer follows An old man who lost all his relatives in the war returns to the old place, listening to him reminisce about the golden age of Berlin. The former Potsdam Railway Station was located at the junction of various jurisdictions and the Berlin Wall crossed it. This bustling city center was reduced to a quarantine area after the war. The old man walked into the desolate wilderness, with no way to go, nowhere to go, and the scene of finally falling asleep was desolate and deserted.
As the first generation born after World War II, compared with his compatriots Fassbinder and Herzog, Wenders's films are not so strong in German. The main theme in his films is the lingering consciousness of loneliness and The trace of warmth that permeates this cold tone. Wenders’ political outlook can be seen from scenes where Nazi soldiers and Jewish extras casually stand together smoking and chatting on the shooting set of the concentration camp, as well as the scenes of angels constantly appearing in the film walking through the Berlin Wall repeatedly.
As Tarkovsky said: Artists can be divided into two categories, one creates their own inner world, and the other creates reality. Wenders’ angelic image is “transcending the world presented to mankind today”. As to whether, as Arendt said, people who deliberately keep a distance from the times will instead put the deepest mark on their times. I am afraid it is a question of whether the benevolent sees his benevolence and the wise sees wisdom.
Wenders originally planned to arrange angels from the four countries of the United States, Britain, France, and Russia to correspond to the situation in Berlin at the time. In the film, the angel Daniel is a German, the actress Marian is a French, and the "angel" Peter Falk who has fallen into the world is an American. They each speak German, French and English.
The world in the angel's perspective is black and white, the so-called super good and evil, and then it appears cold, isolated, and alienated. It is "poverty" because of its "purity". This is also the metaphor of East and West Berlin in the Cold War. Angels are a symbol of rational spirit, and Germany is the nation that is most adept at logical reasoning. In the setting of Wenders, the angels who were "exiled to Berlin by God" used wax to fix their hair intact and wandered around the world in a long black windbreaker. They cannot directly experience human feelings and emotions, and can only serve as bystanders from a distance, always remaining silent and unable to influence human actions.
The theologian Guardini's comment on the angels in "Elegies of Duino" is: "They are no longer messengers of living God... They are essence, and one can probably simply call this essence the gods. Wenders also admitted that the "first and most important thing" when he conceived the film was Rilke's work.
In the movie "City of Angels", although God is not present, he is frequently mentioned as an angel, but Wenders's angel is outside of God. They wander around the world and listen to people's inner confession. Only children can "see" them occasionally. They can't perform miracles, and the warm touch can't restore the self-defeating that jumped from a height. "I don't actually believe in their existence." Wenders answered the question about the angels in the film. "Their existence in the film is a metaphor."
"Under the Sphere of Berlin" reverses the image of angels that used to appear as children or women, and chooses middle-aged men to play angels. The "wings" the audience saw were on the mortal "angels" and Marian who complained about "how can I fly with these burdens". In Marian's performance on the night of the full moon, Wenders turned to look down from the previous lens and chose to look up from Daniel's point of view. The subversion of the subject and the object seemed to herald the result that the male "angel" was finally "redeemed" by the female. Daniel finally realized: "We are not bystanders, we are always in it." Nick Cave on the stage sang exactly " From Her To Eternity".
Wenders's sight of the only word "no" on the tombstone of Ozu Yasujiro undoubtedly shocked him. In the ending subtitles of "Under the Sky of Berlin", director Wenders paid tribute to the three names, Ozu Yasujiro was ranked first (the other two were Truffau and Tarkovsky).
In response to Borges's words, "Heaven should be like a library." The scene of the library reappears as a collection and distribution center for the angels in the film, and also as a clue to the plot. In a scene in the library, a woman read: "In 1942, Benjamin bought a watercolor by Paul Klee: the famous Nova Engle (New Angel)." Benjamin himself wrote: "This is how people portray historical angels. : Where we felt the chain of history, what she saw was a complete disaster. The latter piled up the wreckage one by one and threw them at their feet. This angel was willing to stop, awaken the dead, and put The shattered thing became a whole. But a gust of wind blew from the Garden of Eden, and the wind swelled the angel’s wings so powerfully that the angel could no longer close the wings. The wind pushed him unstoppably. He is facing the future, and the ruins in front of him are getting farther and farther away. This wind is what we call progress." Heaven and earth, eternal life and death, politics and war, Wenders’ introspection and The accompanying nihilism is just like what Cassirer said to him when Daniel was about to become a human in the film: "None of this will happen in real."
Rilke once said: "Life and death, recognize one but not the other, so that one will eventually eliminate the limitations of all infinite things." Angel Daniel, unable to bear the "lightness" of eternal life, came to the world, and finally sighed: " It happens only once, so it will become eternal." Countless beings in the world who carry the burden of death can look at the world with the eyes of the sky, and realize that "the poor body is the person in the eyes"?
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