The sky over Berlin

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Movie
Original title The sky over Berlin
Country of production Germany , France
original language German , English , French
Publishing year 1987
length 127 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
Rod
Director Wim Wenders
script Peter Handke
Richard Reitinger
Wim Wenders
production Anatole Dauman
Wim Wenders
music Jürgen Knieper
camera Henri Alekan
cut Peter Przygodda
occupation

and in smaller roles: Hans-Martin Stier (dying man), Annelinde Gerstl (on the autobahn), Beatrice Manowski (stick girl), Didier Flamand (angel), Jürgen Heinrich (in an old building)

chronology

Successor  →
Far away, so close!

Wings of Desire is a fantasy - drama from Wim Wenders from since 1987.

action

The angels Damiel and Cassiel appear as observers of the world, especially in Berlin . You cannot intervene in people's lives and not reveal yourself to them. However, you can instill new courage in them. The life of angels is purely spiritual, sensual sensations are inaccessible to them. Damiel's desire to participate in the life of mortals and their world of feelings becomes so great that he is ready to renounce his immortality. With his armor as start-up capital, he is thrown into the world. He finds his counterpart in a trapeze artist who seems to be breaking away from the gravity of the earth.

Building The Angel by the architect Jean Nouvel . With an angel from the film watching the residents of Prague-Smíchov .

background

The locations of the film include the angel on the Berlin Victory Column (which is a studio replica), Potsdamer Platz (in front of the new building), the reading room of the Berlin State Library there , the Anhalter Bahnhof and the Langenscheidt Bridge in Berlin-Schöneberg . The outdoor shots for the circus take place on the grounds of today's Theodor-Wolff-Park (Kreuzberg), in the background you can see the Tommy-Weisbecker-Haus . The high bunker Pallasstrasse became the location for the bunker scenes . The concert scenes and the final acrobatics scene take place in the relics of the Hotel Esplanade (Berlin) , which has meanwhile been moved and integrated into the Sony Center . Damiel and the trapeze artist meet there for the first time at a concert by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds .

The song being a child of Peter Handke runs like a leitmotif through the entire film, the individual verses were recorded separately. Other texts to which the film refers are Prolog für eine Liebe , Invocation of the World (1987) and The Weight of the World (1977) by Peter Handke, On the Concept of History (1940) by Walter Benjamin , the Duineser Elegien ( 1923) by Rainer Maria Rilke and the Odyssey (approx. 8th century BC) by Homer .

reception

Reviews

The sky over Berlin achieved great international recognition, with the US film critic portal Rotten Tomatoes - based on 49 reviews - it has a positive rating of 98%.

"A poetic declaration of love to life, to sensuality and the limitations of earthly existence."

- Lexicon of international film

“Wim Wenders' meditative masterpiece is film poetry to dream. Theater veterans Otto Sander and Bruno Ganz enchant with their intense play in intoxicating black and white images and monochrome colors. Floating tracking shots and sensual sound collages give this award-winning film a radiance with an almost hypnotic effect. "

- Premiere film editing

Camera: Henri Alekan. That is almost everything that one can credit Wenders' rather naive and excessively long film (script: Peter Handke). A chatty, synthetic piece of cinema, ailing from the arts and crafts. "

- Moth

“ Sky over Berlin does not create tension just by filming his plot. Rather, it creates a mood of sadness and isolation, longing and the transience of everything earthly. If humans are indeed the only animals that know that they exist in time, this film is about that very knowledge. A wonderful film. "

- Roger Ebert

Awards

The sky over Berlin won numerous prizes. In 1988 he received the German Film Prize in Gold, the Bavarian Film Prize and the European Film Prize . At the 1987 Cannes Film Festival , Wim Wenders won the award for best director. At the film festival in São Paulo in 1988 the film received the audience award. It was also nominated for a César for Best Foreign Film and won the Syndicat Français de la Critique de Cinéma Prize for Best Foreign Film .

influence

The sky over Berlin was the first feature film to be broadcast on the day the arte TV station began broadcasting on terrestrial television , September 28, 1992.

In 1993 Wim Wenders shot the title In Far Ferne, so nah! a sequel with Otto Sander , Bruno Ganz and Solveig Dommartin in the leading roles. However, the film was unable to match the popularity of its predecessor.

In the music video for Stay by the band U2 that same year, sequences from both Der Himmel über Berlin and In Weit Ferne, so nah! taken over, band members represent the invisible angels.

In 1998 the theme of the film was adapted under the title City of Angels (with Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage ). In the same year the single Hartreim Saga by Moses Pelham was released , which with Homer's penultimate words (“Name the men and women and children who will be looking for me, me, their narrator, lead singer and tone setter, because they need me like nothing else in the world. ”) begins.

For the 20th anniversary, the film came back to the cinema in 2007 with new copies - including digital ones; also in 2018 in a version restored from the original negatives.

In an interview in 2009, Wim Wenders reported that he had one of his most unusual experiences with his film in Tokyo. There, only women watched the film in a cinema that was always full. Nobody could explain it there. One assumption for this is that the men, i.e. the angels, are listening in the film.

The pop musician Alanis Morissette shot a video clip based on Der Himmel über Berlin for her song Guardian in 2012 in the German capital . The singer told bild.de in July 2012: “With the video, I take my hat off to Wim Wenders' film. It is celebrating its 25th anniversary. "

On the occasion of Wim Wenders' 70th birthday , a graphic novel by Sebastiano Toma was published by Jacoby & Stuart in 2015, based on the script by Wim Wenders , Peter Handke and Richard Reitinger .

In the 2017 film The Stars So Close , Der Himmel über Berlin is one of the protagonist's favorite films and is also shown in short excerpts.

literature

Web links

Commons : The sky over Berlin  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for Der Himmel über Berlin . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry (PDF). Template: FSK / maintenance / type not set and Par. 1 longer than 4 characters
  2. ↑ Song of Childhood. In: Handkeonline - Austrian National Library . Retrieved August 15, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Simone Malaguti: Intermedial Relationships in the Film Der Himmel über Berlin . In: Revista Contingentia . tape 5 , no. 1 , 2010, ISSN  1980-7589 , p. 20–40 , urn : nbn: de: hebis: 30: 3-257943 .
  4. ^ Wings of Desire. Retrieved July 28, 2018 .
  5. ↑ The sky over Berlin. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed October 10, 2016 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  6. ^ Conrad Menzel: The whole city , The Friday article from September 23, 2012. Retrieved on March 19, 2015
  7. ^ Wings of Desire , Review by Roger Ebert, April 12, 1998
  8. ↑ 10 years of ARTE: 1992–2001 , p. 10 (PDF; 3.6 MB) accessed on May 24, 2017
  9. ↑ A completely new look at a classic on morgenpost.de
  10. ↑ youtube.com
  11. ↑ Alanis Morissette's declaration of love to Berlin on www.bild.de, July 27, 2012