Wings of Desire

I've just watched Wim Wenders' film, "Wings of Desire," and was taken by the lovely quality the black and white photography imparts to even the ugliest, saddest scenes of Cold War Berlin: bombed-out buildings never rebuilt after World War II, ugly brutalist architecture, vacant lots, graffiti-covered sections of the Berlin Wall all have the crisp yet shadowy beauty of a platinum print. The faces of the angels, two worry-lined, middle-aged men, are so much more sympathetic in shades of black and grey than they are when the film stock changes to color. The angel who becomes human in order to experience rather than simply observe life finds the garish colors of graffiti characters (who look like a cross between the figures of Easter Island and Kilroy Was Here cartoons of the 1940s) ravishing. One of his first acts as a human is to learn the names of their colors, and he finds these painted cartoons, a cheap cup of snack bar coffee, his first puff of a cigarette, and his stroll through grimy Berlin streets exhilarating.

How lovely to find breath-taking beauty in the dingy and mundane after living in the rarified but impersonal realm of angels.