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.
Once you have seen it
Watch the film change genre once Cassiel falls to earth. (structure)
The contemplative, observational first half hardens into a crime thriller of arms dealers and a kidnapping, a seam critics flagged as jarring rather than intentional.
Payoff: The awkward seam is the film enacting, not just describing, a being crossing from watching into a world that forces action. In the reading: crisis of the action-image. The reading calls this the crisis of the action-image: a character who perceives everything and still cannot act adequately once he falls.
Watch Sander's Cassiel struggle with ordinary tasks once he is mortal. (performance)
Cassiel shifts from serene watchfulness to bewildered, dissolute helplessness, a being built for perceiving and now failing at simply living.
Payoff: His fumbling is not comic relief. It is what the loss of angelic distance actually costs.
Notice Emit Flesti shadowing Cassiel across his mortal years. (camera)
Dafoe's character, whose name spells Time Itself backward, walks alongside Cassiel through his whole human span, indifferent and constant.
Payoff: A figure this abstract is given a body and a face, and simply keeps pace with you. In the reading: chronosign. The reading calls this a chronosign: time presented directly as a character, not measured by anyone's actions.
Watch for the late, fragile reconciliations among the elderly characters. (structure)
Figures who carry the weight of the twentieth century's separations move toward a late peace in the film's closing passages, threaded quietly through the crime plot.
Payoff: The film's real ending is about repair between generations, not about the crime plot resolving.
Carry this in: Watch for the moment black and white turns to color: that is the cost of choosing to live, made visible.