The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

320 The experience of space and timetries to define a way of coming together that has a universal meaningbeyond this particular plac , e and ti , e, There I1a'y not b, e ,any ,desti y,she says, but there is certamly declSlon, And It IS a declSl r: m whIchall the people of the city, even of the world, can pa tlClpate, Sheimagines a square full of people, and that she and Damiel are so fullof that place that they can make a decision for all. It is a decisio r: toforge a bond between a man and a woman around a common projectof becoming, in which a woman can say 'my man' in such a way asto open up a whole world to fresh insight and interpretation. , Itmeans entering the labyrinth of happiness through the tran formatlonof desire into love, so that she can finally be truly alone wIth herself,because to be truly alone presupposes a wholeness that can comeonly through a non-contingent relation to another. It seems she nowhas answers to the compelling questions: 'Why am I me and notyou?' 'Why am I here and not there?' and 'Where did time begin andwhere does space end?' What is born of their coming togethe : ,reflects Damiel as he helps her to practise her trapeze act after theIrfirst night together, is not a child but an immortal image that all canshare and live by.It is hard to prevent this ending slipping into banality (presaged bythe kitschy dream sequence in which the angel comes to Marion inresplendent silver costume). Are we to conclude, after all, that it ismerely romantic love that makes the world go round? A charitablereading might be that we should not let our jaded experience ofkitsch and pastiche stand in the way of liberating romantic desire andundertaking major projects. But the final shots are portentous indeed.The film switches back into the monochrome of enduring time. Theold man, with whom we have lost all contact in the coloured sequencesof the film, shuffles towards the Berlin Wall, saying, 'Whowill look for me, their story-teller? They need me more than ever.'The camera suddenly zooms past him and up into the clouds, as iftaking off in flight. 'We are on our way,' says Marion. More is tofollow, the final credit assures us.I read this second part of the film as an attempt to resurrectsomething of the modernist spirit of human communication, togetherness,and becoming, out of the ashes of a monochromatic anddead-pan postmodernist landscape of feeling. Wenders is plainlymobilizing all his artistic and creative powers in a project of redemption.He proposes, in effect, a romantic myth that can redeemus 'from the formless universe of contigency' (see above, p. 206). Thefact that many angels, according to Falk, have chosen to come toearth, suggests that it is better always to be inside than outside theflow of human time, that becoming always has the potential to breakTime and space in the postmodem cinema 321with the stasis of being. Space and time are constituted in radicallydifferent ways in the two parts of the film, and the presence ofcolour, creativity, and, we should not forget, money as a form ofsocial bonding, provides the necessary framework within which somesense of common purpose can be found.Yet there are serious dilemmas to be resolved. Damiel has nohistory, and Marion is cut off from her roots, her history reduced toa set of photographs and a few other 'objects of memory' of the sortthat now constitute the sense of history both in the home (see above,p. 292) and in the museum (see above, p. 62). Is it possible to setabout the project of becoming a-historically? The old man's persistentvoice seems to question the viability of that. The sheer romanticismof the ending, he seems to say, has to be tempered by areal sense of history. Indeed, Marion's image of a whole 'Platz' ofpeople participating in their decision, raises the spectre of when thePotsdamer Platz turned ugly as it filled with flags. Put more formally,there is a tension in the film between the power of spatial images(photographs, the film itself, the striving of Damiel and Marion atthe end to make an image the world can live by) and the power ofthe story. The old man (described as Homer, the story-teller in thecredits) is in many respects marginalized within the film, and complainsexplicitly at that very fact. Becoming, according to him, has tobe more than creating just another set of depth less images. It has tobe situated and understood historically. But that presupposes thathistory can be captured without the use of images. The old man leafsthrough a book of photographs, wanders into the Pots darner Platztrying to reconstitute its sense of place from memory, and remembersit when it turned ugly, not conducive to that epic of peace that heseeks. This dialogue between image and story provides an underlyingdramatic tension in the film. Powerful images (of the sort thatWenders and his brilliant cameraman, Henri Alekan, know how towield only too well) can both illuminate and obscure stories. In thefilm they overwhelm the verbal messages the old man tries to communicate.It is almost as if the film gets caught in the circularity(known in the postmodernist lexicon as 'intertextuality') of its ownimages. Within this tension lies the whole issue of how to handle theaesthetic qualities of space and time in a postmodern world ofmonochromatic fragmentation and ephemerality. 'Perhaps,' saysMarion, 'time itself is the sickness,' leaving us to wonder, as in thefinal sequence of Blade Runner, 'how much time we've got,' Butwhatever that may mean to the participants, the monochromaticlandscape of eternal time and infinite but fragmented space plainlywill not do.