Wings of Desire (Special Edition)
by J.M. Kenny, Wim Wenders
Our Price: $76.95
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $48.82 (click here)
Category: DVD
See more DVD releases
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
DVD Cover Information
Actor: Bruno Ganz, Curt Bois, Otto Sander, Peter Falk, Solveig DommartinDirector: J.M. Kenny, Wim Wenders
Writer: Wim Wenders
Producer: Anatole Dauman
Producer: Gina Hall
Producer: Ingrid Windisch
Writer: Peter Handke
Writer: Richard Reitinger
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language); German (Original Language); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 128 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-07-01
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Movie Reviews of Wings of Desire (Special Edition)
Movie Review: A Movie of Cinematic Poetry and Spirituality
Summary: 5 Stars
To describe today's troubling economy, one could say, as the poet Homer says in Wings of Desire:
"The world seems to be sinking into dusk, but I tell the stories as in the beginning in my sing-song voice which sustains me, protected by the tale from the troubling present." This is only one example of many of the cinematic poetry used in Wim Wender's Wings of Desire. Homer is very reminiscent of another "Homer": The author of the Iliad. All of his dialogue and even his blocking from the library scene to the couch in the middle of the field is pure poetry.
In fact, the film itself is bookended in poetry. The movie starts with an angel Damiel writing in his journal" when the child was still a child" he had questions about the world, was not picky, and was generally more cooperative. The tale is told in German in a "sing-song" voice, "Als Das kind kind war..." He sits next to his Angel friend Cassiel (played by Otto Sadler, who would later star in the epic movie Das Boot) in a convertible with the light reflecting off the windshield in such a way that it looks like wings. Damiel and Cassiel compare notes of what they have witnessed. The angels move around unseen among the people of Berlin, reading people's thoughts and whispering comforting words to people. The people too, are not completely seen by the angels. The angels can only view the world in black and white. While privy to all that will happen in the world and to immortality, angels do not know what it is like to feel, to taste, or to be acknowledged by a stranger. Damiel tells Cassiel that while it is great to live for eternity, he sometimes gets fed up with his spiritual existence. He longs to have blackened fingers from the newspaper, to have a fever, or to be excited by a meal. Cassiel reminds him that they are there to do no more that to preserve, collect, and testify. This too is poetry.
The angels like to spend much time in the library. The library is full of books of knowledge and therefore seen as a sacred place. They are seen whispering to people who are reading, perhaps trying to inspire them. The irony is that the books contain text which the angels can see. Text, like the angels, can inspire a person only if he or she is open to it. Ironically, even though human beings cannot see angels, the angels, even though they read thoughts, cannot see the pictures painted by the imagination in the minds of the humans when reading text.
Damiel yearns to be human even more when he goes to the circus and falls in love with his own angel: a trapeze artist that is dressed like an angel. He tells Cassiel that he wants to be human. Cassiel, in another example of cinematic poetry, brings albeit reluctantly, Damiel through the Berlin wall where he transforms to the human state and everything turns to color. Damiel and Cassiel are as symbolic as the Berlin wall that they pass through, as they are opposites. Damiel, free like the West, full of dreams and the desire to choose. Cassiel on the other hand is like the East: Rigid, does as instructed, no free thought or desires.
Meanwhile in a subplot, the angels have been following Peter Falk who has come to Germany to make a film. Falk tells Damiel, "I can't see you, but I know that you are there." When Damiel turns human, he looks up Peter Falk and Falk reveals that he too used to be an angel. When Damiel asks him what to do or expect, Falk tells him that he has to figure it out and that's what makes it fun. Damiel leaves to go find his trapeze artist.
After a series of near misses, Damiel and his trapeze artist end up at the same bar. Meanwhile, in another example of cinematic poetry, Cassiel closes his eyes in the bar and then the stage lights cast three different shadows off his body, alternating and shifting location and color as if the audience is watching him break into pieces.
Lastly, after Damiel and the trapeze artist do you unite, they are seen together as she glides on the trapeze with artistic beauty and in another poetic motion, their shadows are seen dancing representing the visible and only partly visible, but as the shadows suggest that they are only partly visible, that is part of the fun.
Summary of Wings of Desire (Special Edition)
From Oscar?-nominated* writer/director Wim Wenders (Buena Vista Social Club) comes this "exhilarating" (Vanity Fair) and life-affirming tale that won him the 1987 Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival and inspired City of Angels. Co-written with Peter Handke, this "enchanting" (The New York Times) film about the joy of life is "that rare thing a work of true originality" (Newsweek)! Damiel (Bruno Ganz) is a lonely angel who roams the streets of Berlin providing comfort to mortals in need. But when he is drawn into the life of a beautifuland troubledtrapeze artist, he experiences love for the first time and does everything in his power to be seen, heard and felt by her. Jeopardizing his divine position, Damiel is faced with a most difficult decision: either give up love or lose his eternal wings forever! *1999: Documentary Feature, Buena Vista Social Club"There are angels over the streets of Berlin," quotes the movie poster, but these are like no angels you've ever seen. Bundled in dark overcoats, they watch over the city with ears open to the heartbeat of the human soul, listening to the internal musings and yearnings of earthbound humans like existential detectives. In these delicate, astounding scenes we float through the thoughts of dozens Berlin citizens, from the weary and worn to the hopeful and young, as the angels record the magic moments for some heavenly record. But when Damiel (the empathic and sensitive Bruno Ganz) falls in love with an angel of another sort, the lonely trapeze artist Marion (willowy, sad-eyed Solveig Dommartin), he gives up the contemplation and observation of life to experience it himself.
Wim Wenders's most purely romantic film is like poetry on celluloid, a celebration of the transient and fragile moments of being human: the warmth of a cup of coffee on a cold day, the embrace of a friend, the touch of a lover, the rapture of love. Opening with an angel's-eye view of Berlin in silvery black and white (delicately captured by the great cinematographer Henri Alekan, who photographed Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast 40 years earlier), it transforms into a gauzy color world when Damiel "crosses over" by sheer will. Peter Falk plays himself as a fallen angel with a special sensitivity for celestial visitors ("I can't see you, but I know you're there," he proclaims), and Otto Sander, whose smiling eyes brighten a face etched by eons of waiting and watching, is Damiel's partner. Wenders made a sequel in 1993, Faraway, So Close, and Hollywood remade the film as City of Angels with Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan. --Sean Axmaker
Art House & International DVD Video
DVD Video
- Action & Adventure
- African American Cinema
- Animation
- Anime & Manga
- Art House & International
- Classics
- Comedy
- Cult Movies
- Documentary
- Drama
- Educational
- Fitness & Yoga
- Gay & Lesbian
- Horror
- Kids & Family
- Military & War
- Music Video & Concerts
- Musicals & Performing Arts
- Mystery & Suspense
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Special Interests
- Sports
- Television
- Westerns
Movies most talked about in The Great Films
Full Metal JacketWarner Brothers; Release date: 2007-05-15; DVD
Best price: $1.93
Price in other shops:
The Shining (Two-Disc Special Edition)Warner Brothers; Release date: 2007-10-23; DVD
Best price: $6.75
Price in other shops:
A Clockwork Orange (Two-Disc Special Edition)Warner Brothers; Release date: 2007-10-23; DVD
Best price: $8.96
Price in other shops:
2001 - A Space Odyssey (Two-Disc Special Edition)Warner Brothers; Release date: 2007-10-23; DVD
Best price: $9.23
Price in other shops:
King Kong (Single-Disc Edition)Warner Brothers; Release date: 2006-03-28; DVD
Best price: $2.49
Price in other shops:
The Wizard of Oz (Two-Disc Special Edition)Release date: 2005-10-25; DVD
Best price: $59.75
Pan's Labyrinth (New Line Two-Disc Platinum Series)Warner Brothers; Release date: 2007-05-15; DVD
Best price: $3.20
Price in other shops:
Citizen Kane (Two-Disc Special Edition)Warner Brothers; Release date: 2001-09-25; DVD
Best price: $9.49
Price in other shops:
Terminator 2 - Judgment Day (Extreme DVD)Lions Gate; Release date: 2003-06-03; DVD
Best price: $4.46
Price in other shops:
Minority Report (Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition)CRUISE,TOM; Release date: 2002-12-17; DVD
Best price: $1.23
Price in other shops:
Similar DVD Movies
The EdukatorsTWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT; Release date: 2005-11-15; DVD
Best price: $3.68
Price in other shops:
DownfallSony; Release date: 2005-08-02; DVD
Best price: $6.91
Price in other shops:
Jean De Florette / Manon of the Spring (MGM World Films)TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT; Release date: 2007-07-24; Published: 1987; DVD
Best price: $12.21
Price in other shops:
Good Bye, Lenin!Release date: 2004-08-10; DVD
Best price: $12.44
Price in other shops:
Wim Wenders Collection (The American Friend/ Lightning Over Water/ Notebook on Cities and Clothes)Release date: 2004-04-06; DVD
Best price: $7.18
Price in other shops:
Three Colors Trilogy (Blue / White / Red)Release date: 2003-03-04; DVD
Best price: $21.00
Price in other shops:
The Lives of OthersSony; Release date: 2007-08-21; DVD
Best price: $9.99
Price in other shops:
Paris, TexasTWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT; Release date: 2004-12-14; DVD
Best price: $95.89
Run Lola RunSony; Release date: 1999-12-21; DVD
Best price: $5.99
Price in other shops:
Faraway, So Close!Sony; Release date: 2000-09-12; DVD
Best price: $13.45
Price in other shops: