Abstract

VAZ, Alexandre Fernandez. In praise of anachronism: affections, memories, experience, in Wings by Desire, of Wim Wenders. Educ. Rev. [online]. 2019, vol.35, n.73, pp.117-134.  Epub Jan 25, 2019. ISSN 1984-0411.  https://doi.org/10.1590/0104-4060.62755.

Taking Wim Wenders' film “Wings of Desire” as an object, this paper analyzes some aesthetic and political issues of our time, considering, paradoxically, the anachronistic character of that artwork. It looks for a diagnosis of present time in two moments, that of the Cold War and that of subjective conditions in the city of Berlin, which synthesizes the post-utopian spirit. To do so, the paper analyzes the figure of the angels, reinstalling the relation between desire and materiality, from which emerges the issue of experience. The angels live in ethereal condition; they remember everything, despite the absence of body, which leaves them in eternal present, away from history. Methodologically, the paper dialogues with Walter Benjamin, whose texts on Berlin articulate social memory and literature. While the angels are the thread that leads the narrative, other characters are also essential: the old storyteller, the children's open senses, and the desire for the trapeze artist. Observing the double sense of error and the desiring condition of one of the angels, the paper concludes with the idea that it is the desire that inscribes the human being in history.

Keywords : Art and Education; Education of the Senses; Wenders, Wim; Benjamin, Walter; Memory and History..

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