This post is about an artist named Wim Wenders, who directed a movie called “Wings of Desire” in 1987. I am using him as an artist, because his direction of this movie directly relates to my own work. The movie is based in Berlin, and focuses on angels that hear all the thoughts of the city, and watch over the city, sometimes whispering thoughts inside of other people’s heads. The main characters are two angels, which have been alive and together since the beginning of time. One starts to question his life as an angel, completely devoid of time, place, and touch. He starts discussing thoughts of joining the real side, an analogy of crossing the wall. He falls in love with a human, who can feel his presence, but does not see him, and she herself is looking for someone to fill that empty space. What eventually convinces him is his encounter with a human who recognizes his presence, and shakes his hand. The human talks to the angel, though the angel can’t respond and cannot be seen. The way this is shown is through the use of color, and the absence of color. When looking through or in the angel’s life, the world is a sepia tone, and devoid of all other colors, but in the real world, the color is normal and vivid. The human convinces him of all the things he is missing out on, and the angel decides to make the crossing into the human world. He finds the girl, and they fall in love, but the human who convinces him also turns out to be an ex-angel as well, which helps him understand an angel’s presence in the world.
This movie stood out to me because it uses color in very similar ways, as well as discusses a variety of worlds that are separated. I started to pay attention to subject matter that seemed to be recurring in the movie that might help explain this separation of space, and found out that a lot of the shots had the Berlin Wall, or a type of barrier presented, in representing a blockade or separation. This could pertain to my own work, in focusing on my own technique of photographing. I could include more barriers of sort that separate the two of me in each image, not necessarily blatantly sitting in the middle, but have a type of separation other than reflection and color. The use of a barrier, even if it does not split both of me and if repeated, should be picked up by a viewer in my work, and can take context clues to place that type of object as having significance in my work.
Below is the IMDB website, and the preview shows a little example of the story, and the separation of color.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093191/
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