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Since 1969, the collaborative efforts of the German filmmaker Wim Wenders and the Austrian writer Peter Handke have dealt with aspects of contemporary malaise: communication breakdown, loneliness and spiritual homelessness, the German identity crisis, the burden of history on youth, American cultural colonization, and empty family life all belong to the litany. Handke has even made his own film, The Left-Handed Woman, in which urban life is presented as "a long-lasting catastrophe."
A Berlin film such as Der Himmel über Berlin (Heaven/Sky Over Berlin; Wings of Desire is the title used outside Germany) would seem an ideal vehicle for continuing to develop these themes. Instead, the two artists have shifted further into what Eric Rentschler calls "[Handke's] outspoken sympathy for an aestheticism characteristic of earlier epochs" for whose protagonists "seeing is being" (167). Indeed, not only are Handke and Wenders avowedly Rilkean in sensibilities and in specific motifs; this aestheticism is put to use to depart from the modern world entirely, to follow a route back to archaic and primeval forms, to replace narrative with a ritual which begins by depicting "long-lasting catastrophes," but comes out on the other side as a vision of new beginnings. A recent Handke article by Lothar Pikulik associates Handke's prose with the "New Age" phenomenon, and points to the post-engagé (Tendenzwende) writing which since the mid-70s has returned to myth and used the archaic as something future-oriented (239).
I have approached the film through: (1) the recent works of Peter Handke, the co-author of the screenplay (it seems that Handke is responsible for more of it than Wenders credits Handke in his interview with Ciment and Niogret, [14]); (2) the poetry of Rilke, since Wenders was reading Rilke at the germination of the project, and Handke's works have been influenced by Rilkean themes as well (Ciment 12; Eifler 105); and (3) patterns of archaic culture which link aspects of Berlin to Rilke's poetic motifs.
Peter Handke's aesthetic carries the label New Subjectivity, or New Sensibility, which according to Linda DeMeritt and Eric Rentschler is characterized, in part, by a turning inward, and the use of new cultural and artistic perception models to open the subject's eyes to the multiplicity of the outer world (The second shot of Wings of...