DIR. WIM WENDERS | 1987 | GERMANY & FRANCE | 128 MIN - German, English and French with English subtitles
Join us for a post screening panel discussion follow the Wed Jan 19 screening.
Garnering Wenders the Best Director Award at Cannes in 1987, the world of Wings of Desire is war-scarred Berlin. The city is full of gentle, trenchcoated angels who listen to the tortured thoughts of mortals and try to comfort them. Damiel wishes to become mortal after falling in love with Marion, a beautiful trapeze artist. Peter Falk assists in the transformation by explaining the simple joys of a human experience, such as the sublime combination of coffee and cigarettes. Told from the angel's point of view, the film is shot in black and white, blossoming into color only when the angels perceive the realities of humankind.
Our presentation of this rare 35mm print of Wings of Desire
is generously sponsored by the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of
Architecture, Departments of English and Film & Theatre and the
upcoming Mediated Cities Conference Feb 3 – 5.
Panelists will include:
Brenda Austin-Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Film and Theatre at the University of Manitoba. She writes about melodrama, Canadian cinema, weeping and cinema memory, Henry James, and adaptations. She is a past president of the Film Studies Association of Canada and sits on the editorial board of the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. She recently co-edited the book The Gendered Screen: Canadian Women Filmmakers which is the first major study of Canadian women filmmakers. The Gendered Screen updates the subject with discussions of important filmmakers such as Deepa Mehta, Anne Wheeler, Mina Shum, Lynne Stopkewich, Léa Pool, and Patricia Rozema, whose careers have produced major bodies of work.
Jonah Corne is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Film and Theatre at the University of Manitoba. Research areas include international and experimental cinema, film theory, twentieth-century literature, intellectual history of modernism, representations of architecture across media.
Ralph Stern, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture has taught on urban representation in cinema at Columbia, MIT, the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics, and the University of the Arts Berlin among other institutions. He has lectured on urban representation in film at Cambridge University, the Architectural Association London, and Yale University. He has published on German film in a number of venues, including Cinema Journal (2007); and just received a request to republish a text on German cinema in an anthology to appear with MIT Press.