Frontiers of Screen History: Imagining European Borders in Cinema, 1945-2010
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Frontiers of Screen History: Imagining European Borders in Cinema, 1945-2010
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783201525 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect Books |
| Publication date: | 01/06/2013 |
| Series: | ISSN |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 350 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Kimmo Ahonen and Heta Mulari are research fellows in the Department of Cultural History at the University of Turku, Finland.
Rami Mähkä is a university teacher and researcher at the University of Turku. His research interests include film, television and popular music, history culture and popular culture, with a special focus on comedy and humour. He is currently studying materiality and productization in popular culture.
Bruce Johnson is adjunct professor of communications at the University of Technology, Sydney, visiting professor of music at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and docent and visiting professor of cultural history at the University of Turku.
Kari Kallioniemi is a researcher, adjunct professor and the leader of the ‘Thatcherism, Popular Culture and the 1980s’ project at the Cultural History department, University of Turku. His research interests focus on the relationships between different notions of nationality, neo-right and popular culture. His recent book on this subject is Englishness, Pop and Post-War Britain (Intellect, 2016). His current project deals with the themes of fascination with fascism in popular culture.
Read an Excerpt
Frontiers of Screen History
Imagining European Borders in Cinema, 1945-2010
By Raita Merivirta, Kimmo Ahonen, Heta Mulari, Rami Mähkä, Marja-Leena Hukkanen
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2013 Intellect LtdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78320-152-5
CHAPTER 1
Imagining West Berlin: Spatiality and History in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, 1987
Hannu Salmi University of Turku
Warum bin ich hier und warum nicht dort? Wann begann die Zeit und wo endet der Raum?
— Peter Handke
'Today, the endangered frontier of freedom runs through divided Berlin. We want it to remain a frontier of peace.' These famous words by President John F. Kennedy were spoken on 25 July 1961, at the time of the Berlin crisis, in his radio and television report for an American audience (Mur 2004: 7; Brager 2004: 68; Schwarz 2004: 188). At the end of World War II, Berlin had been a battleground, and soon after the war it became the scene of another kind of battle: the Cold War. Five weeks before Kennedy's speech, First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party and GDR State Council chairman Walter Ulbricht had stated that 'no one has the intention of erecting a wall!' (Gedmin 1992: 25). Two months later, however, the building of the Berliner Mauer had started. The year 1961 marked the drawing of a physical barrier between East and West; in the end, the 155km-long Wall enclosed the city of West Berlin, separating it completely from East Berlin – and from East Germany.
The emerging ideological gap of the Cold War was etched into the material world by the Wall, but it was to a large extent also a construct in the realm of the imagination. The divided city of Berlin was frequently used as a film location, beginning already in the late 1940s, but it can be argued that the most influential cinematic depiction of the city of the Wall was that directed at the very end of the Cold War era by Wim Wenders. This film was Der Himmel über Berlin (1987), known in English as Wings of Desire.
Wings of Desire can be interpreted as a film about the dividedness of Berlin, in which the Wall itself plays a crucial role. It is also of interest because Berlin changed radically once again after its filming; just a few years later, the Wall, which had had such a strong presence in Wings of Desire, was dismantled and torn down. Wim Wenders' cinematic homage to Berlin also serves as an access point to how borders and spatiality were imagined in Cold War Europe. It is noteworthy that the reception of the film was intertwined with political changes at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. It was filmed in Berlin in 1986 and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1987. The West German premiere was on 29 October 1987. In many European countries it was released in 1988, the same year in which Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the concept of 'glasnost' in the Soviet Union. The Berlin Wall began to collapse on 9 November 1989. In Germany, Wings of Desire was re-released in July 1993 and was also circulated in the eastern parts of the reunited country.
In this chapter, I explore the ways in which Wings of Desire portrays the German metropolis and its topography: how it imagines the city space and draws maps of its own, and how this imagination relates to the notion(s) of history. In moving about in space, within the borders of West Berlin, the film describes the routes and sites of the city. My argument is that it refers to maps and itineraries that recalled pre-war – and pre-Wall – Berlin in the memories of its inhabitants. Here it is important to recognize that (deferring to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), maps are always superimposed upon one another: old maps are not replaced by new ones but are rather stratified over each other. In his Cartographic Cinema, Tom Conley has argued that cinema works like a map: both are forms of locational machinery. A film creates boundaries, transgresses borders, navigates in space, excludes some places by portraying others and shows places to identify with. The film, like a map, tells spectators where they are situated, directs their actions and shapes their understanding of where they are – and, simultaneously, who they are (Conley 2007: 1–22). It is important to see film not only as a narrative form of expression but also as a performative one. Films imagine and construct our visual – and aural – understanding of the environment. In this chapter, I analyse the transformations of Berlin city space on the screen from the perspective of one particular focal point offered by Wings of Desire. The following discussion emphasizes five aspects, all of which contribute to the ways in which the film intermingles spatiality and history: Berlin places and the idea of the 'angel of history', ruins and wasteland, maps and itineraries and, finally, the Wall. It is essential to note that Wenders' film did not merely reflect political changes: it participated in creating the dividedness of Berlin and in connecting the city's sites, maps and itineraries with memories of the past.
Cinema of place and angels of history
Wings of Desire is a film in which time and space are inextricably bound together. It can be characterized as an instance of cinema of place, and in that sense does not diverge from Wim Wenders' previous productions. Think, for example, of such films as Alice in den Städten/Alice in the Cities (1974), Paris, Texas (1984) or Tokyo-Ga (1985). Furthermore, one can argue that in Wenders' films the problem of spatiality is connected with the way the films have been made: the director is well known for his inclination not to use a tightly planned shooting script. Thus the outcome is enriched by ideas arising on location, inspired by places and by the overall circumstances of the shooting. When a film is not dominated by a temporally ordered, straightforward plot, spatial performativity comes to the fore perhaps more than temporally organized narrativity. An important background factor in Wings of Desire was also the fact that Wim Wenders, having been away from his home town and from Germany for a long time, wanted to make a film specifically about Berlin – and in Berlin. In the early 1980s he had had a painful experience in Hollywood in trying to work with the big studios on Hammett (1982), in a completely different production system. As Roger F. Cook (1997: 163–64) has pointed out, Wenders' time in the United States strengthened his views on the importance of improvisation and inspiration.
Right from the start, Wings of Desire makes it clear where the film is actually situated. In the beginning, the angel Damiel (Bruno Ganz) stands at the top of an important landmark, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church). This church has become a symbol of the traumatic history of Berlin: it was built at the end of the nineteenth century, but was severely damaged by bombing in 1943. After the war the city was about to demolish the ruins, but the people of Berlin sought to defend their memories of the past. This was especially important because the war had wiped out almost everything; there was not much left to preserve in the built environment. Finally only the main tower remained standing, and it is no coincidence that this tower in particular is a suitable place for the angel to watch over the actions of the citizens. Later in the film, the angels guard the golden ornament at the top of the Siegessäule. This victory column was a monument to the Reichsgründung, the unification of Germany in 1871, and at the same time a reference to the unity that was lost because of the war.
These two monuments, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche and the Siegessäule, were essential components in the skyline of West Berlin. In fact Wenders had actually planned to use a third symbolic place, the Brandenburger Tor, as a gathering place of the angels, but this was replaced by a modern piece of architecture, the Staatsbibliothek (Lindström 2010: 44). Little wonder that Wenders used this location in his sequel to Wings of Desire, In weiter Ferne, so nah!/Faraway, So Close!, released in 1993. Obviously, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche and the Siegessäule referred to the glorious past, to a time when Berlin was the capital of Germany. These monuments had become important points of identification for the people of the city; in particular the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche alluded to the Eigensinn, the obstinacy or persistence of the people, the insistence on preserving a connection with the past. Still, there were other points of identification in the city space, the Wall itself being the most important factor in directing everyday experience and reframing memories of Berlin. While the Gedächtniskirche and the Siegessäule refer to a Grand Narrative, a longe durée, the Wall seems to stop time, to bind people to the earth, to fragments rather than to narratives.
An important clue to understanding Wings of Desire was given by Wim Wenders himself. In 1991, four years after the release of the film, Wenders described the background of the project:
The genesis of the idea of having angels in my Berlin story is very hard to account for in retrospect. It was suggested by many sources at once. First and foremost, Rilke's Duino Elegies. Paul Klee's paintings too. Walter Benjamin's Angel of History. There was a song by The Cure that mentioned 'fallen angels', and I heard another song on the car radio that had the line 'talk to an angel' in it. One day, in the middle of Berlin, I suddenly became aware of that gleaming figure, 'the Angel of Peace', metamorphosed from being a warlike victory angel into a pacifist. There was an idea of four allied pilots shot down over Berlin, an idea of juxtaposing and superimposing today's Berlin and the capital of the Reich, 'double images' in time and space. (Wenders 1991: 77)
As the quote reveals, by referring to Walter Benjamin's famous Theses on the Philosophy of History Wenders has himself exerted considerable influence over the interpretation of his work and has offered us a theoretical clue. Since the early 1990s, Walter Benjamin has been repeatedly connected with Wings of Desire (see Casarino 1990: 167–81; Cook 1997: 163–90; Perry 1998: 4–5). It is difficult to define when exactly the Benjaminian approach became intertwined with the film, but in an 1988 interview Wenders does not mention these origins: 'I was not all that conscious of it in the preparation, but as soon as we started shooting it became obvious how vast the possibilities of innovation were because of the invention of the guardian angel and the point of view it implied' (Paneth 1988: 5). The Benjaminian connection was certainly not noticed by the critic of the New York Times, Janet Maslin, who asked: 'Men have envisioned angels in many forms, but who besides Wim Wenders has seen them as sad, sympathetic, long-haired men in overcoats, gliding through a beautiful black-and-white Berlin on the lookout for human suffering?' (Maslin 1988).
In his later reminiscences, Wenders also mentions Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus. Klee's image was in fact an inspiration for Benjamin as well, who wrote in his ninth thesis on history:
A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin 1992: 257)
Benjamin's thesis is one of the most widely cited interpretations of modernity. Many scholars have seen the similarity between Benjamin's contemplative angels and Wenders' 'long-haired men in overcoats' (Casarino 1990; Perry 1998; Raskin 1999). There is certainly a melancholy view of history right from the start, when the audience sees Damiel standing at the top of the Gedächtniskirche and looking down. On the other hand, the storm is not 'blowing from Paradise' and the angels of history are not being propelled 'into the future'. While Benjamin's angels 'would like to stay', Wenders' angels have to stay among the inhabitants, making observations and recording history. It can be argued, perhaps, that the wind of modernity has already blown and has brought history to a standstill. It is also intriguing that in 1991 Wenders referred to the idea of 'pilots shot down over Berlin', as though these pilots remained in the city as guardian angels, angels of peace. In the 1988 interview, before the fall of the Wall, Wenders emphasized the message of peace:
I knew, before I even knew the story, that it was going to take place in Berlin and the city of Berlin carries the idea of peace very powerfully. It needs it more than other cities and also the desire for it is stronger than in other cities. Just as the freedom of the city is limited and its sense of freedom is more intense and almost unlimited. It is an extremely tolerant city. The peace movement in Germany started in Berlin and that's no coincidence. (Paneth 1988: 4)
In the pre-Wall interpretation, the angels of history are first and foremost angels of peace. Instead of Walter Benjamin, Wenders' words allude to John F. Kennedy's notion of the 'frontier of peace'. Berlin was the dividing line between East and West, and questions of freedom and peace were therefore of paramount importance. It is interesting to see, however, how the idea of peace is simultaneously undermined by the ruptures of history, which again, almost as though in parentheses, emphasise Benjaminian visions of history in Wings of Desire.
City of ruins and wasteland
In the opening scene, Damiel is standing at the top of the ruined church. The point of departure is to describe angels 'über Berlin', angels who can follow the lives of the people and listen to their worries and concerns but are at the same time helpless and unable to become involved with them. Roger F. Cook (1997: 164) has crystallized this setting: 'angels living in Berlin preserve the memory and even presence of Germany's history, while helping the inhabitants bear the burden of their nation's past'. This opening can be regarded as symptomatic in the sense that it also carries a reference to the history of Berlin as a history of ruins; after the war, the city was a true Trümmerstadt. This is also emphasized repeatedly later in the film, using documentary footage from World War II. These inserts portray the city in its sad appearance in 1945: mere heaps of stone and collapsed buildings. During the Cold War people were expected to concentrate on reconstruction, but traumatic memories intermingled with each other, including huge material destruction, war crimes and their treatment after the war and the construction of guilt. The ruined city was soon also echoed on the silver screen, when several films were made in the midst of the misery. If the ruins had somehow vanished from personal memory, they would have been renewed by the cinema again and again.
Already the first fiction film made in the GDR, Die Mörder sind unter uns/Murderers among Us (Wolfgang Staudte, 1945), opened with images of destruction. When the main protagonists appear on the screen, they are plunged brutally into the harsh reality of the present day. The Holocaust survivor and photographer Susanne Wallner (Hildegard Knef) returns to Berlin, only to find that her apartment is occupied by the alcoholic Hans Mertens (Ernst Wilhelm Borchert), a military surgeon who cannot escape his traumatic memories of the war. The surrounding ruins of Berlin become almost a symbol of their disturbed minds; everything has been shattered to pieces. In so doing, as Anton Kaes has pointed out, the film draws on the expressionist style of the Weimar cinema as well as features of post-war Italian neorealism (Kaes 1989: 12).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Frontiers of Screen History by Raita Merivirta, Kimmo Ahonen, Heta Mulari, Rami Mähkä, Marja-Leena Hukkanen. Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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