Melancholy is a winged bird, descending into our lives, accompanied by a host of reveries, disillusionments, and small claims at immortality. In Wings of Desire, melancholy descends from the sky and lingers on in the urban tempest of Berlin, appareling the city in a moody hypnotic tone. Wordsworth used the phrase a ‘pageantry of fear and ecstasy’ in one of his poems, and I think it is an appropriate point of departure for exploring what the psychological city amounts to: a pageant of dual impulses.
Wings of Desire casts Berlin as a gloomscape, with tattered colours appearing at the boundaries between self and city. The urban cauldron is at once a starkly placed prop, a visually taut vacuum in which to pour any number of self indulgences, preoccupations, and aspirations. The dynamic, frayed psyche of the city acts as a vector that magnifies and enhances and distorts. The urban form of Berlin is a mapped double of the phantom city of the mind, the physical dwelling space of a tangible, invisible emotional terrain. A dispersed constellation of longings finds shape in the contours of the city
Wender’s masterpiece is richly textured with the visual typography of melancholy: the quotidian misgivings of postwar life, gloom toned cityscapes, and Cold War Era Berlin’s stark industrial urbanity. The constant flux of seeking, drowning, lusting, and doubting animates our minds as we move through our urban existence. Within the echo chamber of our minds we find sorrow, madness, wonder, loss- flavours and impressions that forcefully hold to our beings and mold us to their likeness. We are prisoners, hostages, and dreamers – ever preoccupied with what was and what could have been. Within the apparatus of the city we seek catharsis where we can find it, whether it be the touch of a stranger or the barely perceived brush of an angel’s wing.
