Accidents of desire
Oct. 16th, 2005 10:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkI guess you can tell that it’s going to be a less than stellar weekend when it starts with coming downstairs to find you forgot to put the cat out and she’s crapped all over the living room carpet. Not only that but an early rising seven year old’s attempts to clean up the mess have succeeded in globalising what might have been a purely local problem. Ugh.
Less messy but more expensive, in the night some drunk decided to trip the light fantastic on the sun roof of our car. God bless Direct Line. On the plus side a complementary DVD from the Honda garage turns out to be Wings of Desire.
I watched about an hour of it last night before falling asleep. Possibly at exactly the same scene as when I saw the film at the cinema years ago, because I do remember it as jumping unaccountably from black and white hipster angels to Peter ‘Colombo’ Falk in living colour. It’s an exciting new concept – the self editing movie. But that first hour is still compelling enough to make the film one I’d rank in my top ten most memorable.
It starts with a close up of an eye snapping open in profile, then the camera soars over the Berlin skyline resting briefly on the figure of a trench-coated angel surveying the city from high up on a ledge. The sound track begins with a Schoenberg like cello movement then shifts to a mass of whispered thoughts as the camera pans down to show all the people. Every so often a child looks up seeing something invisible to the adults around her. These are the angels, gaunt coated figures with their hair tied back, moving amongst the populace, listening, observing, recording. Compassionate, sometimes they sit with one of the more troubled souls providing some momentary comfort. At one point the setting is a great modern library, with the staircase leading up through its central atrium recalling the levels of Dante’s Inferno perhaps. One of the angels, Bruno Ganz, is starting to be tempted by mortality, by corporeality. In the library he slumps, hanging from his arms, bat-like against the banisters, picks up a shadow pencil from the desk of an aspiring writer, watches over an unemployed trapeze artist and falls.
The funny thing is I’ve always found the guardian angel concept creepy at best and yet in this film, something about the acting the dialogue the cinematography, the weird unengaging, impossibly serious Germanness of the whole thing just works and, like Mulder, I want to believe.
Less messy but more expensive, in the night some drunk decided to trip the light fantastic on the sun roof of our car. God bless Direct Line. On the plus side a complementary DVD from the Honda garage turns out to be Wings of Desire.
I watched about an hour of it last night before falling asleep. Possibly at exactly the same scene as when I saw the film at the cinema years ago, because I do remember it as jumping unaccountably from black and white hipster angels to Peter ‘Colombo’ Falk in living colour. It’s an exciting new concept – the self editing movie. But that first hour is still compelling enough to make the film one I’d rank in my top ten most memorable.
It starts with a close up of an eye snapping open in profile, then the camera soars over the Berlin skyline resting briefly on the figure of a trench-coated angel surveying the city from high up on a ledge. The sound track begins with a Schoenberg like cello movement then shifts to a mass of whispered thoughts as the camera pans down to show all the people. Every so often a child looks up seeing something invisible to the adults around her. These are the angels, gaunt coated figures with their hair tied back, moving amongst the populace, listening, observing, recording. Compassionate, sometimes they sit with one of the more troubled souls providing some momentary comfort. At one point the setting is a great modern library, with the staircase leading up through its central atrium recalling the levels of Dante’s Inferno perhaps. One of the angels, Bruno Ganz, is starting to be tempted by mortality, by corporeality. In the library he slumps, hanging from his arms, bat-like against the banisters, picks up a shadow pencil from the desk of an aspiring writer, watches over an unemployed trapeze artist and falls.
The funny thing is I’ve always found the guardian angel concept creepy at best and yet in this film, something about the acting the dialogue the cinematography, the weird unengaging, impossibly serious Germanness of the whole thing just works and, like Mulder, I want to believe.
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Date: 2005-10-16 10:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-17 09:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-17 05:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-18 01:37 am (UTC)So have you seen the rest of it yet? Will you post about it? It would be interesting to see what you think. And hey, synchronicity, it was the free giveaway in last Saturday's Independent (bought it for the DVD).
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Date: 2005-10-19 06:23 am (UTC)