The Contours of Longing: Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire as Visual Poem and Mortal Testament

Wings of Desire is a visual poem that reflects most eloquently the currents of memory, the contours of longing, and the yearning for contact with life itself. We strive to encounter life in its most base form, and then we suffuse it and decorate it and desecrate it with all the filth and beauty and desperation that human life can play host to.

We are all time bound and as we live we press up against our temporal boundaries, negotiating with them, bemoaning them, and ultimately succumbing to them. Wings of Desire is about the weight of life between the days, the presence of a beating heart that passes the dead time, endowing it with the animal desire to make passing moments hold for an eternity.

Boris Pasternak once wrote in a poem that he wanted to ‘get to the heart of the matter, in all things’ in his life. Are our varied protagonists in Wings of Desire seeking just such a goal? They strive to purify life to its most timeless essence, using the labyrinth of memory, dreams, and nostalgia as clues. By seeking the heart of the matter they seek to encounter life at its most foundational, its most unembellished. But are we ever capable of sloughing off all the subjective ephemera and detritus to see a thing in its most purified, unsullied form? Wenders keeps mute on this inference.

The most poignant, startling revelation that Wings of Desire makes evident is that in our individualized reminisces, wonder, and pain we become but a small piece of eternity, and in this way, through our most mortal engagement with life, we become immortal.

On offer today is a small collection of the wisps and fragments that endow Wings of Desire with its soulful cinematic hold on the sensitive imagination. Combine with the timeless, haunting meditations of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and the intimate musings of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil.