On Art and Being: Wim Wenders, Rainer Maria Rilke and Iris Murdoch

Illustrated by Tula Wild.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic
Orders? And even if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry
of a darkened sobbing. Ah, who then can
we make use of? Not Angels: not men,
and the resourceful creatures see clearly
that we are not really at home
in the interpreted world. Perhaps there remains
some tree on a slope, that we can see
again each day: there remains to us yesterday’s street,
and the thinned-out loyalty of a habit
that liked us, and so stayed, and never departed.

First stanza of the ‘First Elegy’ from Duino Elegies by Rainier Maria Rilke 

A lone angel stands atop a crumbling church spire. He glares down at the city of Berlin below him. The people, busy with their lives and in constant forward motion, do not notice their guardian above. He is separated from them by his “metaphysical existence” and they cannot see or touch him, but he can hear their thoughts and feel their pain. He is present in their world: within and without, but they are not present in his. So begins Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Wings Of Desire, a testament to love in a city divided by the echoes of war, where years after unconscionable barbarism tore it apart; the past still exists in the present. The film is in some senses a metaphor for art itself; it holds a mirror to the very act of engaging, standing outside a world, and peeking in. This is a central idea in the philosophy of Iris Murdoch who also drew our attention to artistic attunement and its relationship to moral vision. Wenders’ film and Murdoch’s philosophy, taken together, accentuate each other, ultimately illuminating the essence of art.

Wenders conceived of the film when reading the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Born in Germany, he had returned from critical success in the USA after winning the Palme D’Or Winning for Paris, Texas. He felt alienated in the country of his birth, unable to fully integrate, too foreignised, a stranger. In the midst of this dejection he was rescued by Rilke’s poetry and his depiction of angels. For Rilke, angels are not divine entities or heavenly messengers of God but purely metaphysical beings that transcend the everydayness of human existence. For them there is no business and  no distractions. They exist alongside us but trapped (or perhaps liberated), only able to watch. Wings of Desire (originally called Der Himmel Uber Berlin – The Heaven over Berlin which better captures this distancing) owes much to Rilke, not only borrowing his vision of angelic being but by transposing Rilke’s sometimes melancholic, sometimes life affirming imagery into visual medium. Rilke’s angels fly off the page and onto the screen, wandering through the grey cast skies and concrete tower blocks of 1980s Berlin. 

Wenders’ film is unique in that it forces us, the audience, to consider and reflect on the very thing we do when we engage with art: watch from afar. The worlds we are presented when we read poetry, stare at art, or watch a film are forever out of reach. In the case of cinema they are literal  projections. As much as we want to be within that world we never will be. In the world of the film we, the audience, watch this dialectic unfold through the eyes of Damiel, a metaphysical angel who stands outside the world. His vision of the world is rendered through the melancholic use of black and white.  At first this strikes us. It is a beautiful film with an equally moving soundtrack; each frame is perfectly  crafted. But we realise that just as it lacks literal colour, Damiel’s world also lacks metaphorical colour. To appropriate a quote from German Philosopher Martin Heidegger (who was a great admirer of Rilke) the world is presented “with its skin off.” Heidegger’s project was to critique western metaphysics that he believed precluded us from engaging in the world in its most basic phenomenological sense. We soon long for colour, for the force of reality and the imperfection just as much as the beauty, just as the angel Damiel longs to be human. He falls in love with a lonely trapeze artist but knows that his very being means he can never act on his desire. The irony is this: in order to see the world and be able to fully appreciate it, one must stand outside it. It is only the person who cannot be within the world who can know how beautiful it really is. Rilke’s angels are cursed by their nature as much as they are blessed with it.

In reflecting on the act of attuning ourselves to a fictional world we gain a new sense of how to engage in reality itself. In 1987, Berlin was exasperated, nearing the end of its fractured post war existence. The scars of the past  have resurfaced after years of repression: we see images that form a testament to the darkest recesses of human capability, scrappy concrete slabs stained in graffiti, burnt out houses. One scene from the film follows a man accompanied by an unseen angel as he surveys the wreckage of Potsdamer Platz; he longs to piece together his childhood memories with the destitute reality like two pieces of paper that have been ripped apart but when placed together do not match. One cannot help but recall the quote from Theodor Adorno: “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.” The most notable manifestation of this is the Berlin Wall, a monotonous presence in the city that divided families as well as a nation. As one character puts it: “You can’t get lost. You always end up at the wall.” 

This is where the film can be accentuated with the ideas of philosopher and writer Iris Murdoch. Wings of Desire is not as an embodiment of her ideas about art and moral perception (which would force us to engage in the film in a different way) but as an accompaniment, a cerebral garnish to accentuate the aesthetic experience. Murdoch’s essay The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts inherits a tradition of equating the true with the good that dates back to Plato. She argues that great art is morally good in that it allows for “unselfing”, or the repudiating of the selfish narratives we create for ourselves. These expectations about the way the world is or how people will act often leads to anxiety or suffering. A relevant example: think how anxiety ensues when a hard-working student forms an impression of themselves as intelligent only to be rejected by every graduate scheme they apply for. They are distanced from the truth by the lenses  that they have created for themselves.  

Contrastingly in focusing our attention on something that is external to us and real, be it natural beauty or great art, our attention is drawn out of ourselves and the ego’s anxieties are dissolved. When one’s attention is momentarily caught by a kestrel hovering outside the window, we are drawn out of ourselves. Our entire being is subsumed by its grace and charm. Murdoch writes, “there is nothing but kestrel”, just its beauty in that precious moment. In unselfing, our moral perception becomes better attuned to reality. We can attend to the world and others within it, not just our egos. 

This process is exactly what happens in Wings of Desire. The audience, through the eyes of Damiel, as a Rilkean angel, practices a constant unselfing by stepping into the shoes of a being whose essence is inherently alienated. Not only does this mean we become attuned to the reality of post war Berlin, but we practice fine tuning our moral perception that allow us to become attuned to this  world. As the film progresses, we realise that the monochrome imagery is that of our own world, albeit one that we are either too busy or too selfish to see. When Damiel transitions into being a human we, like him, are filled with a childlike curiosity and awe for everything. Wenders marks this moment by transitioning the film into colour, which Damiel sees for the  first time as a human being in the world he longed to become a member of. He stops a stranger to ask about the names of colours that can see for the first time and joyously drinks coffee as if it was ambrosia. Suddenly each minute, hour, and day are precious gems measured by morality. He is no longer an immortal being who exists out of time but someone within, who can feel and love the world better than anyone else because of his integration into being. 

Whoever's homeless now, will build no shelter;
who lives alone will live indefinitely so,
waking up to read a little, draft long letters,   
and, along the city's avenues,
fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.

Final Stanza of ‘Day in Autumn’ by Rainier Maria Rilke 

Wenders, Murdoch, and Rilke provoke us to ask: How often are we properly attuned to reality? How often do we take the time to “unself” and engage in the world? How often do we see the truth? Heidegger makes a similar point about being-in-the-world in his proto-existentialist philosophy. I think that Murdoch is more indebted to Heidegger than she would care to admit (she infamously describes him as “Lucifer incarnate” given his Nazi and anti-Semitic leanings but that is a subject for another essay.)

Wings of Desire is an important film to watch as we slowly return to the world. Like Damiel or any of Rilke’s angels, we have been forced to watch the world from afar, always just out of touch, only able to contemplate and never  relish the taste of real living. When we return to normality let us take the time to see the beauty that is in the world before we inevitably busy ourselves with endless tasks and selfish expectations that cloud our perception of reality and of each other. 

Not Angels: not men,
and the resourceful creatures see clearly
that we are not really at home
in the interpreted world. Perhaps there remains
some tree on a slope, that we can see
again each day: there remains to us yesterday’s street,
and the thinned-out loyalty of a habit
that liked us, and so stayed, and never departed.