Wim Wenders working on "Wings of Desire"

Wim Wenders treatment at Criterion


Got this from the Criterion Collection newsletter. The treatment by Wim Wenders as he first wrote plans for "Wings of Desire." An excerpt:


Even though the angels have been watching and listening to people for such a long time, there are still many things they don’t understand.

For example, they don’t know and can’t imagine what colors are. Or tastes and smells. They can guess what feelings are, but they can’t experience them directly. As our angels are basically loving and good, they can’t imagine things like fear, jealousy, envy, or hatred. They are familiar with their expression but not with the things themselves. They are naturally curious and would like to learn more, and from time to time they feel a pang of regret at missing out on all these things, not knowing what it’s like throwing a stone, or what water or fire are like, or picking up some object in your hand, let alone touching or kissing a fellow human being.

All these things escape the angels. They are pure CONSCIOUSNESS, fuller and more comprehending than mankind but also poorer. The physical and sensual world is reserved for human beings. It is the privilege of mortality, and death is its price.

So it can’t come as a complete surprise that one day an angel has the extraordinary notion of giving up his angelic existence for a human life!

It’s never been done. Perhaps the angels know as much. But the consequences are unknown.

The angel who had this astounding idea was falling in love with a woman, and it was his desire to be able to touch her that gave him the idea, with all its unpredictable consequences. He talks it over with his friends. To begin with they are shocked. But then they think about what it might entail, with the result that several of them agree to take the step together: to exchange their immortality for the brief flame of human life.

What persuades them is not the new experience they might have, or wanting to put an end to their troublesome impassivity, but the hope that something important might flow from their “changing sides”: the hope that by renouncing everlasting life they might cause prodigious energies to be released, which they hope to be able to collect and invest in one of their number, the most respected of them, an “archangel,” whom banishment reduced to the same level of powerlessness as all the others. He is the angel who lives in the Angel of Peace, and the great hope is that by releasing this energy, he might become a real “angel of peace” and help to bring peace to the world.

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Anyway, the first (black-and-white) half of the film takes us to this point: a group of angels go over to human life and leave a transcendent, “timeless” city for the actual Berlin of today.

One night, during a terrible storm, these new arrivals turn up in the city. Each in his own way, as befits his new human identity: one of them spins his car round a corner into a mercifully empty street, another finishes up on a roof, a third in a packed bar, others in a cinema, in the gutter, a bus, a backyard . . .

So now they are there, finally and irrevocably there. And it’s in the second half of our story that the most extraordinary and thrilling things happen. For a start, everything is in color. Not that it’s “more real” than previously. On the contrary. Perhaps the “all-seeingness” of the angels was “truer” than the colorful, three- rather than four-dimensional vision they have now. Anyway, their new type of seeing excites these recent earthlings. In fact, everything is thrilling, all these fresh sensations of the things they thought they were familiar with but had never felt. Like Berlin itself.

As angels, they knew it better than any human did, but now they learn that it’s all really completely different. Suddenly there are obstacles, distances, regulations and restrictions, among them the wall itself, which has never previously been a barrier to them. That takes some getting used to.

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But first come the “sensations” of living. Breathing. Walking. Touching things. The first bite of an apple, or perhaps a hot dog at a corner stall. The first words addressed to a fellow human, and the first response. And finally, far into that first night: the first sleep. The bewilderment of dreams! And waking to the reality of the following morning.

All these “feelings”!

They assail our adventurers like viruses attacking a man with no immunity.

There is fear, previously unknown to them. Nothing in their angelic existence had prepared them for it. In eternity, there was no fear; now, in this death-shadowed world, it’s there. Several of the angels despair at it, one in fact almost goes mad, and another soon takes his own new life. But most adapt. Especially when they remember there was one human faculty that, as angels, they had had a particular admiration for: a sense of humor. “You’ve just got to laugh”; now they understand why, and they feel liberated by it. They realized earlier that it does no good to a man to take everything seriously.