Wenders: In Weiter Ferne, So Nah! (Faraway, So Close!) (1993)

Picking up some six years after Wings of Desire left off, Faraway, So Close! returns to the angels over Berlin, weaving between their black-and-white world and the coloured world of the city’s citizens. In the interim, the Berlin Wall has been demolished, meaning that Faraway is even more vortical and vertiginous than its predecessor, at least in the angelic segments. Buoyed up with utter incredulity that Berlin can now be captured in a single sweep, Wenders crafts tracking-shots that yearn to compensate for the Wall in retrospect, fulfilling all the dreams of flight that floated around it while it was still up. Those were also the dreams of Wings of Desire, but these revamped tracking-shots are so voracious that they spill over into the past, slide into flashbacks that were completely absent from the first film, as if only a properly unified Berlin can begin to truly remember the atrocities it weathered as an entire city. And with the Cold War’s stranglehold on history suddenly evaporated, memories of Nazism come flooding back, spilling over into the colour segments, which revolve around a crime narrative set in the bowels of Nazi infrastructure, a video duplication business buried deep in the Third Reich film archive. As in Wings of Desire, that transition from black-and-white to colour follows an angel who decides to become earthbound – in this case, it’s Cassiel (Otto Sander), who joins his friends Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Marion (Solveig Dommartin) – but his experience of mortality is much looser and more picaresque than those of the first film, if only because the promontories and figureheads he descends from feel so much more epically skybound here. Perhaps that’s why the return to capitalism also feels so pointedly anticlimactic, so attuned to Wenders’ peculiar fusion of arthouse and stadium rock tactics, as the frisson of eavesdropping recedes and the angels retreat back amongst their own kind, haunted by a future that seems to have arrived all at one, leaving nothing to be continued.