Fragments on "Wings of Desire" (Or, Fragmentary Representation as Historical Necessity)

This film has a circus, at center. It is unannounced. We first catch sight of it from a distance, through one of those tunnels which often in cities run across and under elevated roads or highways. We approach circus, slowly, lured by melancholy music, and when we emerge from tunnel we are already inside tent, where Marion is swinging high on trapeze, wearing wide angel wings. When Karl Rossman, in Kafka's Amerika, emerges from underground station at Clayton, in search of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, what he finds is an itinerant caravan of racetracks, platforms and employment bureaus, which closely resembles a circus. He is lured into this travelling show by the noise of many trumpets, which are being blared by women on high pedestals, dressed as angels in white robes with great wings on their shoulders.' These two very different circuses constitute foci of an elliptical narrative of ever-present European concern with America. In film a reversal is enacted, and a return. After a series of itinerant films engaging with America, roads, and spatial movement, in Wings of Desire Wenders returns to European stage by dealing with a single location and with temporal movement (Berlin and history). Within this return, circus in Wings of Desire becomes a reversal of Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Max Brod writes that used to hint smilingly, that within this 'almost limitless' theater his young hero was going to find again a profession, a stand-by, his freedom, even his old home and his parents.2 If Kafka has a utopian moment with Nature Theater of Oklahoma, where we see Karl Rossman re-enacting and fulfilling, on new American continent, his past and his childhood, Wenders, on other hand, takes this theater back to most devastated of post-war European scenarios, and makes it into a circus which shuts down as soon as we enter it, thereby putting an end to Marion's childhood dream of becoming a trapeze artist. Wenders' return to Europe does not complete or fulfill Kafka's project, which needs to remain unfulfilled if it is to retain its peculiar beauty, since, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, this is the beauty of a failure.3 The

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Linguistics · Political science · Sociology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Cinema and Media Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Schopenhauer and Stefan Zweig