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Home , Alban Berg, Wings of Desire

Chapter Five

Leafing through Wings of Desire

film has a much greater affinity with literature than with photography1

1. Prompting words, many words The fourth and, to date at least, final collaboration of Wenders and Handke, Wings of Desire, is undoubtedly the most famous, having even received the accolade of being given away in the UK as a free DVD with the Independent newspaper in 2006. It is also the least „collaborative‟ of their collaborations: Handke refused to write a screenplay, pleading exhaustion following completion of his novel Repetition (Die Wiederholung, 1986), and was not involved in any way in the production of the film. In what follows, the discussion will concentrate on the relationship between Handke‟s contribution to the film – a series of poetic monologues – and Wenders‟s integration of these texts into his narrative. In order to understand the difficulty, impossibility even, of the task facing Wenders it will be necessary, in the first instance, to consider some of the ways in which Handke‟s writing had developed since Wrong Move, A Moment of True Feeling, and The Left- Handed Woman. Wings of Desire has prompted a torrent of commentary, exegesis, and discourse like no other film of Wenders. In 1999 Richard Raskin compiled a bibliography on the film which includes 18 interviews with the director and 96 reviews and analyses of the film, and the torrent has not abated since then.2 It is also the film of Wenders which has been most eagerly taken up by literary scholars, in particular Germanists, who doubtless feel at home with the film‟s literary style and erudite allusions. These articles tend to draw on an impressive range of critical tools to interpret and deconstruct the film; to take just one example: in his article on popular music in the film, Andrew Murphie draws on Deleuze, Guattari, Nancy, Kristeva, Foucault, Klossowski, Freud, and Spinoza.3 Benjamin and Derrida are especially popular in the more learned articles, and there is much engagement with the film‟s explicit

1 Alexander Kluge, Wilfried Reinke, and Edgar Reitz, „Word and Film‟, in Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader, ed. by Timothy Corrigan (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999), pp.229-45 (p.243). 2 Richard Raskin, „A Bibliography on Wings of Desire‟, p.o.v., 8 (1999), 171-76. 3 Andrew Murphie, „Sound at the End of the World as We Know It: , ‟ Wings of Desire and a Deleuze-Guattarian Ecology of Popular Music‟, Perfect Beat, 2.4 (1996), 18-42. 244 Wenders and Handke: Collaboration, Adaptation, Recomposition intertexts, in particular the allusions to Rilke and Homer.4 Rather than simply supplementing this body of scholarship, or surveying the critical positions occupied by the film‟s vociferous apologists and detractors, what follows will concentrate on identifying the nature of the „collaboration‟ that produced it, one which was founded on absence rather than participation. We will explore what an understanding of it can contribute to a reading of the film, and examine the extent to which Wings of Desire, through and beyond its collaborative dimension, constitutes a recomposition of film as „angelic adaptation‟.

1.1 Cerebral origami Of course the film itself, opening with a hand writing and closing with a homage to a trinity of film auteurs, legitimises, prompts, even demands the kind of scholarly effort that has been lavished on it, not least thanks to its seductive multiple citations, often within a single scene, and an almost fetishistic obsession with the inherited media of film. Shot 1078, which lasts a mere 8 seconds, is an example among many.5 In Hans Scharoun‟s State Library, frequented by Wenders‟s uniquely bibliophile, German angels, Damiel () passes a young woman studying. The camera, adopting roughly the angel‟s point-of-view, looks over her shoulder as she writes. On the desk we see – amongst other things – musical scores, a library book (with a photograph on its cover), a notebook, and some writing instruments. The young woman is copying a text, which the published screenplay identifies as a letter of the Austrian Alban Berg. Next to the writing paper is the title page of a bi-lingual score to ‟s radio Das Ende einer Welt (The End of a World, 1953 and revised 1964, based on a short story by Wolfgang Hildesheimer). The title is clearly visible in German and English. Resting on the open page is a small origami frog made of light paper. Alongside the score is a small, closed „Aufgabenheft‟ (exercise book). After a couple of seconds we see Damiel‟s hand reach down to „take‟ a white pencil from its case. In a striking double-image the hand lifts away a ghostly, semi-transparent „copy‟ of the pencil. In what is an echo of the film‟s opening shot, we see a hand writing and, as in that first sequence, the

4 See, for example, Robert Smith, „Angels‟, Film Studies, 1 (1999), 32-40. Smith discusses Kundera, Hegel, Rilke, Benjamin, and Derrida. 5 The published script is divided into seven acts (of 87, 88, 125, 149, 78, 89, and 56 shots). They are numbered 1001, 2001 and so on. Wim Wenders and , Der Himmel über Berlin: Ein Filmbuch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990). References in the text as HB.