Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin) A Film by Wim Wenders (1987)

If you have ever wished you could fly, see Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire on the big screen. This may mean suspending your disbelief however and accepting that you have become an angel to Wenders, because in our secular world, Wings of Desire is an unabashedly spiritual film. That may take some getting used to for some people, but if you can warm up to the idea that the protagonists we sympathize with are indeed immortal spirits lovingly observing life in holy black trench coats, you are in for a gloriously elegant visual symphony. In it, Wenders does not just want you to watch the angels go about their business; he wants you to be an angel too. His camera hardly ceases its weightless movement throughout the film, hovering flawlessly over the mundane moments that make up the lives of Berlin citizens. Wenders has a way of making the mundane seem extraordinary though, and this is very much the purpose of the film, which ultimately surfaces an unusual irony: to grow accustomed to an empyreal perspective is to gather a paradoxical longing for the concrete, sensual pleasures of real life.

Such is the case with Damiel (Bruno Ganz), an angel who has grown bored of his task to spend eternity without human sensation. Instead, he mournfully watches both public and private moments unfold, periodically resting a hand on a woeful victim's shoulder without being seen or felt. He has the uncanny ability to tune in to the inner monologues of random pedestrians, catching snippets of their thoughts before moving on to new subjects, a tactic which sometimes results in a whispered aural collage. For instance, he'll track down a line of subway passengers or peruse around a spacious public library witnessing testaments that range from the humorously momentary to the abysmally philosophical. His partner in voyeurism, Cassiel (Otto Sander), goes about the same routine, although his pursuit is far more ascetic; he treats it like the deeply compassionate activity that it is rather than an unfortunate inevitability. In Wenders' Berlin, the immortals are very much in coexistence with the mortals, even when neither realizes it. Both seem equally relevant to the flow of everyday life.

Evidence towards this is present in the starry-eyed gazes that children cast in the direction of the angels once in a while, and also in the character of Peter Falk (playing himself) who admits to having made the "transition" long before the film begins. Falk is the good-natured, gruff film actor starring in the film-within-a-film, which appears to be some sort of concentration camp thriller. In the middle of Wings of Desire, while ordering coffee at a concession stand on the side of a drab street, he begins addressing Damiel directly, claiming he senses his presence. He starts explaining how the blissful combination of coffee and cigarettes is what swayed him towards switching to a mortal life. Despite the odd impression Falk makes on the confused passersby, Damiel is touched by the unfettered joy he gets from the simplest of human excitements. At this point, he has made up his mind: he wants to become mortal.



Falk is not the only factor in this persuasion however. The other - a beautiful trapeze artist Damiel is enamored with - ultimately thrusts the film in a wayward direction. Throughout the film, he sits in at circus rehearsals in which the woman, Marion (Solveig Dommartin), contorts in phenomenal directions high above the rest of the performers while the camera downplays its graceful movement to be replaced by her astonishing displays. Damiel even observes her privately in her trailer home swooning to records and relaxing in her bed, a privilege that thousands of peeping toms spend their lives yearning for. Wings of Desire's final chapter, in which Damiel makes the transition to mortality and guilelessly searches Berlin for Marion, essentially feels tacked on and insipid, as if Wenders could not resist an urge to endorse the film with conventional appeal. The contemplative tone of the long black-and-white preface is dropped in favor a color-drenched romantic fable that is burdened by the melodramatic nature of Damiel's cloying naiveté. Although we sense that Damiel's lust for sensation is finally met, the overlong ending makes Wings of Desire needlessly bifurcated.

Yet the meditative perfection of the majority of the film overshadows its near spoiler of a conclusion. Working with exemplary cinematographer Henri Alekan and assistant director Claire Denis in her early stages, the film is a recipe for beauty. The soaring but cautious crane and dolly shots that capture elaborately choreographed scenes adopt the first-person perspective of the angels and emphasize their affectionate scrutiny. To accompany the magnificent visuals, Jürgen Knieper's minimalist cello score pairs with the inner monologues of Berlin citizens to create intricately layered sound design. All of this works to exhibit a Berlin that is stung with an acute sense of melancholy that is similar to that of Angelopoulos' Greece, yet it is not without its celebration of life's pleasures as well.

Cherry Blossoms (Kirschblüten - Hanami) A Film by Doris Dörrie (2008)

Rudi and Trudi are both nearing a point in their lives when it becomes increasingly essential to communicate true feelings, release inhibitions, celebrate inner desires, and break routine. Trudi, the wife, is aware of this. Rudi, who mechanically goes about his habits from day to day, is not. Trudi is also aware of Rudi's impending death from a terminal illness. Rudi is not. When Trudi manages to pry her husband from his humdrum groove and take him on a trip to Berlin to visit two of their equally disinterested children, Franzi and Klaus, Trudi startlingly dies in her sleep. These events, which bear a striking resemblance to Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story, make up the initial half of German filmmaker Doris Dörrie's Cherry Blossoms.

The film is not just narratively akin to Ozu's seminal benchmark in humane cinema though; Dörrie's approach here - which to be sure, is quite arbitrary when looking at the rest of her unpredictable career (she may have the only film about a talking penis in film history to her credit) - is just as attune to the rhythms of life as the Japanese master. Documentary-style editing and camerawork is frequently interspersed with pleasant cutaways that are a product of Dörrie's impressionistic eye. Her camera has a way of vibrating every last ounce of life out of flies, flowers, trees, ocean waves, and even the most spiritless Toyko buildings. This, along with her ability to extract stellar, authentic performances from her cast, give Cherry Blossoms a genuine feel of verisimilitude, intimacy, and lightness even when the story moves towards more tearjerking territory.

Following Trudi's death, which rhythmically feels very much like a second half, Rudi departs for Tokyo to stay with his other son, the disenchanted Karl, while attending the Cherry Blossom Festival. He does so upon learning through hidden paraphernalia of Trudi's disguised personality, which withheld passionate interests in Japan and their sense of spirituality, embodied most tellingly by Butoh dancing, a form of dance in which women paint their faces white, wear vibrant clothing, and evoke the concepts of birth and death with an alertness to past memories. Although Rudi is somewhat shocked by this unearthing at first, he slowly becomes more and more enamored by the idea of living out Trudi's unfulfilled hopes, even going to the length of wearing her favorite sweater during the process. At the Cherry Blossom Festival, a celebration of the omnipresent flower which is a symbol of the beauty of ephemerality, Rudi encounters Yu (whose name is the source of one of the film's many bouts of light humor), a vagabond Butoh dancer who he uses as both a channel to transcendence and a sweet friend indicative of a new beginning.

His meeting of Yu also brings about the final stage of his existential journey: Mt. Fuji. Cherry Blossoms' "second half" is not quite as satisfying and well executed as its first though; sometimes, Dörrie views Rudi's sorrow with such diligence that he becomes hopeless and awkward, and she also overpronounces some of her symbols, specifically the cherry blossoms and the flies, which arrive repeatedly to remind us that all things come and go. More perceptive are the ongoing images of shadows, a motif that is imitated by the reflection of Mt. Fuji against a lake towards the end, quietly emphasizing people's capacity to harbor separate, more discrete personalities. Dörrie could have worked out some kinks in the finished product, but there's no denying that Cherry Blossoms has a staying intimacy and truthfulness about it.

Bagdad Cafe (1987) A Film by Percy Adlon

German director Percy Adlon's American debut is a strange effort, a film that has largely been forgotten but remains adored in small alcoves of film culture. That it did indeed wisp away into the kind of nowhere that the film is set in is more of a justification of its uneven retelling of ancient myths, a subject that has been more interestingly explored in countless other arthouse films, than a testament to its flaws. While Bagdad Cafe is almost arrhythmic and awkward as a whole, it does contain some preciously offbeat characters and scenarios. Adlon does not necessarily assemble a situation in direct reference to a particular ancient tale, but rather modernizes the general notion of a hero that arrives supernaturally to bring about change.

He sets his film in the middle of the desert, somewhere vaguely in the American West, and treats it as a place that is in an anxious standstill, desperate for a change. At the Bagdad Cafe, where the frizzy-haired African American owner Brenda (CCH Pounder) scuffles uncomfortably through the premises sneering at her children and husband and the dilettante Italian chef lounges around without any incentive to reverse the broken coffeemaker situation, one can smell the unease. So from the boonies, lead by an illusory pair of lights in the sky, comes a plump, orderly German woman named Jasmin (Marianne Sägebrecht), fresh off a fight with her husband that left her stranded without a car. She sharply contrasts the disheveled look of both the employees and the regulars, a foreign Goddess in a tightly wound dress (a modern day robe) who brings with her a camouflaged distaste for American sloppiness.

Her arrival immediately sparks suspicion in Brenda and eventually, when Jasmin begins spending time with her children, jealousy. Brenda believes she is in the middle of a cat and mouse game between the two, but Jasmin's intentions are clearly all good. Brenda even prompts the arrival of the sheriff who comes to inspect Jasmin's unusually tidy habits only to find her completely harmless. She acts as a typically stubborn figure for most of the film, but finally upon discovering she may be the only one left with bad vibes towards Jasmin (Jasmin even works up a tender relationship with an ex-Hollywood set painter (Jack Palance), who roams the film as a laughably kind-hearted and nervous cowboy), she rethinks her position. One afternoon, she snaps at Jasmin while she's playing with her kids and immediately, feeling guilty of evil, returns through her motel room door and apologizes. This relationship reversal comes too abruptly, and what follows - a gradual give and take of lifestyles until an equilibrium is reached - feels rushed and unrealistic. Jasmin loosens up her clothing and Brenda allows her son to play on the piano during work hours, an activity that had previously ticked her off greatly. The Bagdad Cafe, previously a haven for sweaty drifters, turns into an entertainment escape, with Jasmin's magic tricks as the main act.

Bagdad Cafe's strengths are ironically sometimes also the source of its weaknesses; Adlon's wickedly wry humor rides a thin line between amateurishness and intended drollery. Frequently it is an uncertainty whether one is supposed to laugh or take something seriously. Adlon also seems to get a kick out of graceless edits, so that when he is establishing a visual gag, he'll cut away clumsily to a brief shot of a truck passing in the street, silence the music, and then return as if nothing happened. Much of the film is reminiscent of 2004's Napoleon Dynamite however, both in its similar setting and its modern breed of "awkward" black comedy, so the balance between humor and disguised poignancy is understandable. While Bagdad Cafe is indeed forgettable, it stands as a unique departure from most decidedly small filmmaking projects, and is sometimes enjoyable just for its clumsiness.

Heart of Glass (Herz au Glas) A Film by Werner Herzog (1974)

Heart of Glass is quite unlike much of anything I've seen. It is rambling but sublimely beautiful, excruciatingly slow but curiously enthralling, plotless yet carved out of a simple Bavarian folk legend, and gimmicky but intuitive. The entire cast (lest the prophet Hias) performs under hypnosis induced by director Werner Herzog, constituting one of the bravest conceptual decisions by a seminal director who otherwise has eaten a shoe, dragged a ship over a mountain, leaped into a cactus patch, and would most likely climb K2 naked if he had the chance.

The barest scrape of a story is conjured; in a Gothic, pre-industrial Bavarian village, a glass factory owner dies without a chance to pass down his renowned secret recipe for producing ruby glass and therefore sets off a moral crisis in the town - hammered home most tellingly by the younger glass mill owner who comes to fetishize the art of the secret - and elicits the arrival of an apocalypse-dwelling prophet. It's difficult to decipher most of the drivel that slips of out of the mouths of the hypnotized actors, thus causing elusiveness, but this is often precisely what adds magic to the film. Herzog was enthused by the idea of presenting people on the screen in a way that we have never seen them before, and the somnambulistic lull that results is indeed mystifying, less a form of Bressonian stiffness and more a warped Theater of the Absurd. Characters stare blankly, laugh uncontrollably, scream awkwardly, smash beer glasses on each other's heads, and wear droning patinas of gloom on their faces at all times in a way that brings to mind Roy Andersson's work. In one scene in a bar room, men sit posed like statues, the grave stillness in the room a poetic image of a civilization that refuses to fix its problems, declining rapidly while vainly fiddling with silly things like a glassblowing secret. Hias sees things on a global, even spiritual level, which is evoked in a nonsensically pessimistic way but reaches a sense of hope by the final scene, an anecdote about a group of spirited thinkers living on a rock island who finally decide after years of rumination to set off on canoe to discover whether or not the Earth is flat.

Heart of Glass is essentially an example of Herzog's conceit. The film is relentlessly formal and concept-based; most scenes unfold with a small number of cuts and the fixed, detached gaze echoes Bela Tarr (one bar scene involves a man playing a bizarre accordion-like instrument) and Tsai Ming-Liang's work. Herzog also periodically inserts stunning nature footage of the misty, mountainous Bavarian landscape to the kind of operatic accapella music he so frequently utilizes. There are a number of truly astounding images of hyperspeed fog rolling over trees, through swamps, over gorges, and around waterfalls. The film is at its most transcendent in such instances, when Herzog takes a break from his often times frustratingly oblique tale and does what he does best: capture "adequate images of our civilization". This phrase has an applicable ring to it as well; although the film takes place in Gothic ages, we are viewing a village that can be seen as a microcosm of human civilization as a whole. His recent succession of environmentally aware documentaries would certainly substantiate this.