Wings of Desire

I first saw this film in the winter of 1988-89 at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham, near the BBC studios at Pebble Mill. As I left the cinema, which was situated in Cannon Hill Park, I saw a police car waiting in the car park, headlights on. As I left the cinema, I felt a guardian angel watching over me. As I left the park and started walking home, I heard running behind me. Next thing I knew someone had kicked me in the back and a group of 5 or 6 or 7 mid-teenagers were around me punching and kicking me.

Somehow I managed to escape the melee and had the presence of mind to run up the drive of a large detached house and pretend to ring the doorbell. The group of teenagers decided to flee...

The most direct association I have with this film is having a guardian angel who totally failed to protect me.

And then there is Berlin - which I had visited the previous summer in 1988 - and all the impressions I had from the then-divided city. In fact all the impressions I had from the inter-railing tour of France, Italy and Germany from that summer 23 years ago are associated with this film.

Apart from several day-trips to Calais and Boulogne-sur-Mer, and two Mediterranean package holidays, I had not left the British Isles till then. Waking up in a night train on the railway bridge across the Rhine in Cologne was the germination of all my dreams of Europe, dreams that led me inevitably to Brussels.

And so to the film, which is about mortality, time, history, desire and the heaven over Berlin. The film has a certain kind of melancholic serenity. Footage is mixed in black and white (angel vision) and colour (just like in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (or Stairway to Heaven in the US)) and film shot in the 80s and the 40s. The footage from the 40s is also mixed black and white, and colour.

I haven’t wanted to face my dreams of Berlin since my last visit 18 years ago, in 1993. As I write this text, I fly there tomorrow, flightpath Tegel. In a month where my life’s structure has been partially broken, it seemed time to face the dreams of a city divided, the witness I made to the cold war, the fractured city partly coalescing in 1993, the empty wasteland of Potsdamer Platz. Time to recall the memories of the nazi swastika showing through the faded East German paintwork in Potsdam near Sans-souci. Also time to face the reputation of wild debauchery that echoes the Wiemar Republic times, times maybe not so dissimilar to our own in 2011.

Tomorrow I leave Brussels and descend from the Himmel über Berlin.