Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Faraway, So Close!
1993 · Wim Wenders · Faraway, So Close! on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the camera drift through walls with no one steering it. (camera)
Jürges keeps the floating, weightless movement Wenders built for the angels, gliding through solid walls and over rooftops as if perceiving without a body.
Payoff: The camera shows you vision detached from any person doing the looking. In the reading: the plane of immanence. The reading calls this the plane of immanence: vision freed from any body, so the world seems to film itself.
Watch for color arriving into black and white photography. (light)
The angels' Berlin is silvery monochrome; when the human world blooms into view, color and gravity enter with it.
Payoff: The image itself tells you when a being crosses from watching life to living it.
Listen for whispered inner voices layered under traffic and music. (sound)
The angels hear the private thoughts of the living, and the soundtrack mixes that whispered interior speech with ambient noise and music into one continuous texture.
Payoff: You are made to hear a world no single person inside it can hear.
Notice angels perched high while humans stay down at street level. (staging)
Wenders stages angels on rooftops and monuments looking down, against the cluttered bars, cars, and warehouses where the human story actually happens.
Payoff: The staging separates who can only watch from who has to live inside the mess.
Watch for real people, not actors, appearing as themselves. (performance)
Mikhail Gorbachev and Lou Reed appear playing themselves inside the fable, alongside the invented angels and mortals.
Payoff: The film keeps letting the actual world intrude on its own fairy tale.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the camera drift where no person could stand. Wenders gives the angels a way of seeing before he gives them a story.