The Representation of the Limit in Wim Wenders’ The Wings of Desire

Abstract

Berlin has gone down in history for the construction of an internal physical boundary that, far from protecting the population from external agents, protected the city’s inhabitants from themselves. This article analyses how Wim Wenders tells the story of the divided city in his film The Wings of Desire (1987), studying how he looks at the boundary that constructs the forced coexistence of two cities, how he conveys the reality of a city divided by a physical and ideological border, which locations in the city he selects, which actors he chooses as vehicles to narrate the story, and what relationships they maintain with the urban space. He uses the gaze of the angels as a vehicle, for whom a physical boundary does not exist. They have an unprejudiced and intense gaze, capable of getting close to people’s souls, which allows them to see “how each of us lives.” Wenders constructs a narrative of the city that is articulated around two central themes: memory as a collective experience and perception as a vital and individual act. The reflections contained in this article aim to explore the mechanisms that allow us to discover and experience cities.