Wings of Desire and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Difference between pages

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[[Image:Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's marble sculpture 'Ugolino and his Sons', Metropolitan Museum of Art.jpg|thumb|right|400px|Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's marble sculpture 'Ugolino and his Sons', Metropolitan Museum of Art]]
{{Infobox Film |
[[Image:Jean-Baptiste_Carpeaux_La_Danse.jpg|thumb|right|400px|La Danse (The Dance), Opera Garnier in Paris]]
name = Wings of Desire |
{{Commonscat}}
image = wings of desire.jpg |
director = [[Wim Wenders]] |
producer = [[Wim Wenders]] <br /> [[Anatole Dauman]] |
writer = [[Wim Wenders]] <br /> [[Peter Handke]] |
starring = [[Bruno Ganz]] <br /> [[Solveig Dommartin]] <br /> [[Otto Sander]] <br /> [[Curt Bois]] <br /> [[Peter Falk]] |
cinematography = [[Henri Alekan]] |
distributor = [[MGM]] ([[United States of America|US]] only) |
released = [[23 September]] [[1987]] |
runtime = 127 min. |
language = [[German language|German]], [[English language|English]] and [[French language|French]] |
budget = [http://www.toni-luedi.de/himmel_hl_1_en.html € 2,500,000] |
music = [[Jürgen Knieper]] |
awards = [[Blue Ribbon Awards]] <br /> [[Cannes Film Festival]] <br /> [[European Film Awards]] <br /> [[Independent Spirit Awards]] |
website = http://www.wim-wenders.com/movies/movies_spec/wingsofdesire/wingsofdesire.htm |
imdb_id = 0093191 |
|}}
[[Image:Smichov andel wings of desire.jpg|right|thumb|Building ''Angel'' by [[Jean Nouvel]], an angel from the film observes the people of [[Prague]]-[[Smíchov]] district.]]
'''''Wings of Desire''''' is a [[1987 in film|1987]] [[film]] by the [[Germany|German]] [[Film director|director]] [[Wim Wenders]]. Its original German title is '''''Der Himmel über Berlin''''', which can be translated as ''Heaven over Berlin''. [[Rainer Maria Rilke]]'s poetry partially inspired the movie; Wenders claimed angels seemed to dwell in Rilke's poetry. The director also employed [[Peter Handke]], who wrote much of the dialogue, the poetic narrations, and the film's recurring poem "Song of Childhood."


'''Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux''' ([[May 11]], [[1827]], [[Valenciennes]] –[[October 12]], [[1875]], [[Courbevoie]]) was a French sculptor and painter. His early studies were under [[François Rude]]. Carpeaux won the [[Prix de Rome]] in [[1854]], and moving to [[Rome]] to find inspiration, he there studied the works of [[Michelangelo Buonarroti|Michelangelo]], [[Donatello]] and [[Andrea del Verrocchio|Verrocchio]]. Staying in Rome from [[1854]] to [[1861]], he obtained a taste for movement and spontaneity, which he joined with the great principles of [[baroque art]]. In [[1861]] he made a bust of [[Mathilde Bonaparte|Princess Mathilde]], and this later brought him several commissions from [[Napoleon III]]. He worked at the pavilion of [[Flora (goddess)|Flora]], and the [[Opéra Garnier]]. His group La Danse (the Dance, [[1869]]), situated on the right side of the façade, was criticised as an offence to common decency.
''...When the child was a child, it didn’t know that it was a child, everything was soulful, and all souls were one.''[http://www.wim-wenders.com/movies/movies_spec/wingsofdesire/wod-song-of-childhood.htm]


He never managed to finish his last work, the famous Fountain of the Four Parts of the Earth, on the Place Camille Jullian. He did finish the terrestrial globe, supported by the four figures of [[Asia]], [[Europe]], [[North America|America]] and [[Africa]], and it was [[Emmanuel Frémiet]] who completed the work by adding the eight leaping horses, the tortoises and the dolphins of the basin.
== Plot ==


== Sculptures by Carpeaux ==
Set in [[Berlin]] in the late 1980s, toward the end of the [[Cold War]], it follows two [[angel]]s, Damiel ([[Bruno Ganz]]) and Cassiel ([[Otto Sander]]), as they roam the city, unseen and unheard by the people, observing and listening to the diverse thoughts of [[Berliner]]s: a pregnant woman, a painter, a broken man who thinks his girlfriend no longer loves him. Their [[raison d'être]] is not that of the stereotypical angel, but as Cassiel says, to "assemble, testify, preserve" reality. In addition to the story of two angels, the film also is a meditation on Berlin's past, present, and future. Damiel and Cassiel have always existed as angels; they existed in Berlin before it was a city, and in fact before there were even any humans.


* Ugolin et ses fils - [[Ugolino della Gherardesca|Ugolino]] and his Sons (1861, in the permanent collection of the [[Metropolitan Museum of Art]])[[http://www.insecula.com/oeuvre/photo_ME0000009025.html]] with versions in other museums including the [[Musée d'Orsay]]
Among the Berliners they encounter in their meanderings is an old man named Homer ([[Curt Bois]]), who, unlike the Greek poet of war [[Homer]], dreams of an "epic of peace". The angel Cassiel follows the old man as he looks for the [[Potsdamer Platz]] in an open field, where all he finds is the [[graffiti]]-covered [[Berlin Wall]].
* The Dance (commissioned for the [[Palais Garnier|Opera Garnier]])
* Jeune pêcheur à la coquille - [[Naples|Neapolitan]] Fisherboy - in the [[Louvre]], [[Paris]] [[http://www.insecula.com/oeuvre/photo_ME0000034255.html]]
* Girl with Shell
* [[Antoine Watteau]] monument, [[Valenciennes]]


==Neapolitan Fisherboy==
Although Damiel and Cassiel are pure observers, invisible to all but children, and incapable of any physical interaction with our world, one of the angels, Damiel ([[Bruno Ganz]]), begins to fall in love with a circus trapeze artist named Marion ([[Solveig Dommartin]]), who is talented, lovely, but profoundly lonely. Marion lives alone in a trailer, dances alone to the live music of [[Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds]], and drifts through the city.


Carpeaux submitted a plaster version of ''Pêcheur napolitain à la coquille'', the Neapolitan Fisherboy, to the [[French Academy]] while a student in [[Rome]]. He carved the marble version several years later, showing it in the Salon exhibition of 1863. It was purchased for [[Napoleon III]]'s empress, [[Eugénie de Montijo|Eugènie]]. The statue of the young smiling boy was very popular, and Carpeaux created a number of reproductions and variations in marble and bronze. There is a copy, for instance, in the Samuel H. Kress Collection in the [[National Gallery of Art]] in [[Washington D.C.]]
A subpart of the film follows [[Peter Falk]], cast as himself, who has arrived in Berlin to make a film about Berlin's [[Nazi]] past. As the movie progresses, it turns out that Peter Falk was also once an angel, who renounced his immortality to become a mortal participant in the world after he grew tired of always observing and never experiencing.


Some years later, he carved the Girl with a Shell, a very similar study.
Eventually, Damiel too longs for physicality, and to become human. When he sheds his immortal existence, he experiences life for the first time: he bleeds, sees colors for the first time (the movie before then is filmed in a [[Sepia tone|sepia]] tinted [[monochrome]], except for brief moments when the angels are not present), tastes food, drinks coffee. Meanwhile, Cassiel inadvertently taps into the mind of a young man just before he commits suicide by jumping off a building; Cassiel tries to save the young man but is unable to do so, and he is left haunted and tormented by the experience. Eventually Damiel meets the trapeze artist Marion at a bar, and they greet each other with familiarity as if they had long known each other. In the end, Damiel is united with the woman he had desired for so long with the echoing music from Nick Cave.


Carpeaux sought real life subjects in the streets and broke with the classical tradition. The Neapolitan Fisherboy's body is carved in intimate detail and shows an intricately balanced pose. Carpeaux claimed that he based the Neapolitan Fisherboy on a boy he had seen during a trip to [[Naples]].
''...All the truths I tried to tell you Were as distant to you as the moon Born 200 years too late And 200 years too soon I'm a child of this age'' [http://www.seeklyrics.com/lyrics/Nick-Cave-And-The-Bad-Seeds/The-Singer.html]


==External links==
The story is continued in Wenders' 1993 [[sequel]], ''In weiter Ferne, so nah!'' (''[[Faraway, So Close!]]''.)


*[http://cartelfr.louvre.fr/cartelfr/visite?srv=rs_display_res&critere=jean+baptiste+carpeaux&operator=AND&nbToDisplay=5&langue=fr A page on the official Louvre site giving access to some of Carpeaux's works (French language only)]
== Method ==
*[http://www.insecula.com/contact/A005511_oeuvre_1.html A page from insecula.com listing more views of Carpeaux's works (also in French;] it may be necessary to close an advertising window to view this page)
The movie was made with a minimal script; it is a mood piece exploring people, the city, and a concept: a longing for and love of life, existence, reality. Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander were cast because they were old friends, who had known each other for decades; they played angels who had been together through eternity. Solveig Dommartin was Wenders' actress girlfriend; although the circus part required extensive and risky acrobatics, she was able to learn the trapeze and rope moves in only eight weeks, and did all the work herself, with no stunt doubles.
*[http://www.studiolo.org/MMA-Ugolino/Ugolino.htm A page analysing Carpeaux's ''Ugolino'', with numerous illustrations]


[[Category:French sculptors|Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste]]
== Cinematography ==
[[Category:1827 births|Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste]]
The movie, shot by [[cinematographer]] [[Henri Alekan]] at the age of 77, who famously worked on [[Jean Cocteau]]'s ''[[Beauty and the Beast (1946 film)|La Belle et la Bête]]'', shows the angels' sepia-tinted monochromatic point of view and switches to color to show the human beings' point of view. During filming Alekan used a unique, very old and fragile silk stocking that belonged to the his grandmother as a filter for the monochromatic sequences.
[[Category:1875 deaths|Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste]]


[[de:Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux]]
The shift from monochrome to color, to distinguish the angels' reality from the mortals', was first used in ''[[A Matter of Life and Death (film)|A Matter of Life and Death]]'' by [[Powell & Pressburger]] in 1946.
[[fr:Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux]]

[[nl:Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux]]
== Awards ==
[[pl:Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux]]
The film won the prize for Best Direction at the 1987 [[Cannes Film Festival]].
[[pt:Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux]]

[[zh:让-巴蒂斯·卡尔波]]
== U.S. remake ==
In 1998 a [[United States]] [[remake]] called ''[[City of Angels]]'' was made. The setting was [[Los Angeles]] and starred [[Meg Ryan]] and [[Nicolas Cage]]. Aside from the basic premise of angels watching humans and a love story the 1998 film bears little relation to the original.

== Theatrical adaptation ==
The first theatre adaptation of Wings of Desire was created by Northern Stage theatre company in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK in 2003. This particular adaptation (which entailed film footage of the city and stories from the community) was then re-created at Bette Nansen Theatre in Copenhagen in 2005.

In 2006, the [[American Repertory Theater]] in Cambridge, Massachusetts and [[Toneelgroep Amsterdam]] presented a
stage adaptation of the movie, created by [[Gideon Lester]] and [[Dirkje Houtman]] and directed by [[Ola Mafaalani]].

== External links ==
{{wikiquote|Wings of Desire}}
* [http://www.wim-wenders.com/movies/movies_spec/wingsofdesire/wingsofdesire.htm Official site]
* [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093191/ Wings of Desire] at the [http://www.imdb.com Internet Movie Database] ([[IMDB]])
* [http://members.tripod.com/~Petrafax/wod.html Fansite]
* [http://www.toni-luedi.de/himmel_hl_1_en.html Page by the film's art designer]
* [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19980412/REVIEWS08/401010374/1023 "Great Movies" review by Roger Ebert]
* [http://artsandfaith.com/t100/2005/entry.php?film=34 Wings of Desire] at the [http://artsandfaith.com/top100/ Arts & Faith Top100 Spiritually Significant Films]
* [http://www.nathanwolfson.com/scholarship/wings/Wings-PoMo-Wolfson.pdf PoMo Desire?: Authorship and Agency in Wim Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) by Nathan Wolfson]
* [http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_08/POV_8cnt.html POV Wim Wenders's WINGS OF DESIRE (interviews and articles)]
* [http://pov.imv.au.dk/pdf/pov8.pdf POV n°8 pdf version]
* [http://www.amrep.org/wings/ American Repertory Theater]

{{Wim Wenders}}
[[Category:1987 films]]
[[Category:English-language films]]
[[Category:French-language films]]
[[Category:German-language films]]
[[Category:French films]]
[[Category:German films]]
[[Category:Films directed by Wim Wenders]]
[[Category:Films set in Berlin]]
[[Category:Romantic fantasy films]]

[[bg:Криле на желанието]]
[[de:Der Himmel über Berlin]]
[[es:Cielo sobre Berlín]]
[[fr:Les Ailes du désir]]
[[it:Il cielo sopra Berlino]]
[[he:מלאכים בשמי ברלין]]
[[nl:Der Himmel über Berlin]]
[[ja:ベルリン・天使の詩]]
[[no:Himmelen over Berlin]]
[[pl:Niebo nad Berlinem]]
[[ru:Небо над Берлином (фильм)]]
[[sv:Himmel över Berlin]]
[[zh:柏林蒼穹下]]

Revision as of 01:07, 19 June 2007

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's marble sculpture 'Ugolino and his Sons', Metropolitan Museum of Art
La Danse (The Dance), Opera Garnier in Paris
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux.

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (May 11, 1827, Valenciennes –October 12, 1875, Courbevoie) was a French sculptor and painter. His early studies were under François Rude. Carpeaux won the Prix de Rome in 1854, and moving to Rome to find inspiration, he there studied the works of Michelangelo, Donatello and Verrocchio. Staying in Rome from 1854 to 1861, he obtained a taste for movement and spontaneity, which he joined with the great principles of baroque art. In 1861 he made a bust of Princess Mathilde, and this later brought him several commissions from Napoleon III. He worked at the pavilion of Flora, and the Opéra Garnier. His group La Danse (the Dance, 1869), situated on the right side of the façade, was criticised as an offence to common decency.

He never managed to finish his last work, the famous Fountain of the Four Parts of the Earth, on the Place Camille Jullian. He did finish the terrestrial globe, supported by the four figures of Asia, Europe, America and Africa, and it was Emmanuel Frémiet who completed the work by adding the eight leaping horses, the tortoises and the dolphins of the basin.

Sculptures by Carpeaux

Neapolitan Fisherboy

Carpeaux submitted a plaster version of Pêcheur napolitain à la coquille, the Neapolitan Fisherboy, to the French Academy while a student in Rome. He carved the marble version several years later, showing it in the Salon exhibition of 1863. It was purchased for Napoleon III's empress, Eugènie. The statue of the young smiling boy was very popular, and Carpeaux created a number of reproductions and variations in marble and bronze. There is a copy, for instance, in the Samuel H. Kress Collection in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

Some years later, he carved the Girl with a Shell, a very similar study.

Carpeaux sought real life subjects in the streets and broke with the classical tradition. The Neapolitan Fisherboy's body is carved in intimate detail and shows an intricately balanced pose. Carpeaux claimed that he based the Neapolitan Fisherboy on a boy he had seen during a trip to Naples.

External links

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