Cinematic Reconciliation of Romantic and Historical Time: Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire

Abstract

Both director Wim Wenders and female lead actress Solveig Dommartin have championed the character Marion’s centrality to Wings of Desire, though their reasons differ. In a 1995 interview, Dommartin claims, ‘[i]n Wings of Desire, there is a real turning point in Wim’s career in relation to the role he gives to the woman…you feel that Wim is ready to consider love for the first time. That’s what he does in Wings of Desire.’ In a 1988 interview, Wenders claims that Marion ‘was the reason this angel wanted to become a man, so she was going to have to be very much alive. Most important, I had already been living with this woman [Dommartin] for three years.’ Just as Marion’s concluding love declaration (as will be described) rewrites time and selfhood relative to the ‘now’—the heightened moment—of the romantic union, Dommartin’s claim that this film marks Wenders’ new consideration of love perhaps becomes her own projection of desire, her own wiping clean the slate of Wenders’ personal past to accommodate if not accentuate her own pivotal role within his personal romantic history.¹