The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

314 The experience of space and timethan a class act of rage. The finale of the film is a scene of sheerescapism (tolerated, it should be noted, by the authorities) that leavesunchanged the plight of replicants as well as the dismal conditions ofthe seething mass of humanity that inhabits the derelict streets of adecrepit, deindustrialized, and decaying postmodernist world.In Wings of Desire, we similarly encounter two groups of actorsliving on different time scales. Angels live in enduring and eternaltime, and humans live in their own social time, and, of course, theyeach see the world very differently. The film articulates that samesense of fragmentation that suffuses Blade Runner, while the questionof the relations between time, space, history, and place is directlyrather than indirectly posed. The problem of image, particularly thatimplied by the photograph, versus the telling of a story in real time,is central to the construction of the film.The film begins with a fairy-tale-like narration of what it was likewhen children were children. It was a time, we are told, whenchildren thought everything was full of life and life was as one, whenthey had no opinion on anything (including, presumably, havingopinions, which would be totally acceptable to a postmodernistphilosopher like Rorty), and when they were not even disturbed byphotographs. Nevertheless, children ask important questions suchas: 'Why am I me and not you?' 'Why am I here and not there?' and,'When did time begin and where does space end?' These questionsare repeated at several key points in the film, and frame the thematicmateriaL Children, at various points in the film, look upwards oraround them as if they are partially aware of the angels' presence inways that the preoccupied and self-referential adults seem incapableof doing. The questions children ask are, of course, fundamentalquestions of identity, and the film explores two parallel tracks fordefining answers.The place is Berlin. In a sense it is a pity that Berlin disappearsfrom the English title because the film is a wonderful and sensitiveevocation of the sense of that place. We are quickly given to understand,however, that Berlin is one city among many in a globalinteractive space. Peter Falk, an instantly identifiable internationalmedia star (many will recognize him as the detective Columbo in amedia series of that name, and that role is directly referenced severaltimes) flies in by air. His thoughts go 'Tokyo, Kyoto, Paris, London,Trieste, . .. ' Berlin!' as he locates the place for which he is bound.Shots o-{· airliners leaving or arriving punctuate the film at variouskey points. People think their thoughts in German, French, andEnglish, with other languages occasionally used (language has notyet degenerated to the condition of 'city-speak' in Blade Runner).Time and space in the postmodern cinema 315References to the international space of the media are everywhere.Berlin is, evidently, just one place of many, and it exists in a cosmopolitanworld of internationalism. Yet Berlin is still the distinctiveplace to be explored. A moment before we listen in to Falk's thoughts,we overhear a young girl thinking about how to draw the space ofhome. The relation between space and place is early put straight ontothe agenda.The first part of the film examines Berlin through the monochromaticeyes of a pair of angels. Outside the human time ofbecoming, they exist in the realm of pure spirit, in infinite andeternal time. They can also move effortlessly and instantaneously inspace. For them, time and space just are, an infinite present in aninfinite space which reduces the whole world to a monochromaticstate. Everything seems to float in the same undifferentiated present,much as contemporary social life floats in the undifferentiated andhomogenizing stream of international money. The angels cannot,however, get inside the problem of human decision-making. Theycannot resonate with 'here' and 'now' precisely because they live in aworld of 'always' and 'forever.'The picture of Berlin that emerges from their perspective is anextraordinary landscape of fragmented spaces and ephemeral incidentsthat has no binding logic. The opening shots take us from on high,down into the inner courtyards and divided spaces of nineteenthcenturyworker housing. From there we go into labyrinth-like interiorspaces, listening in with the angels, to people's inner thoughts.Isolated spaces, isolated thoughts, and isolated individuals are all wecan see. A youth in a room contemplates suicide over a lost love,while his father and mother think quite disparate thoughts abouthim. In the underground, on a bus, in cars, in an ambulance racingwith a pregnant woman, on the street, on a bicycle, everythingappears as fragmented and ephemeral, each incident recorded in thesame monotone and monochrome as the other. Being outside humanspace and time, all the angels can do is to offer some spiritualcomfort, try to soothe the fragmented and often shattered feelings ofthe individuals whose thoughts they monitor. They sometimes succeed,and just as often fail (the youth commits suicide, and the highschool student taking to prostitution is inconsolable at the loss of herdead boy friend). As angels, one of them complains, we can neverreally participate, only pretend.This extraordinary evocation of an urban landscape, of alienatedindividuals in fragmented spaces caught in an ephemera of unpatternedincidents, has a powerful aesthetic effect. The images arestark, cold, but endowed with all of the beauty of old-style still