Faraway, So Close! · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Faraway, So Close! is built around one of cinema's most sustained instantiations of the time-image: Cassiel and his fellow angels are Deleuze's seers made literal — beings who absorb everything yet are permanently excluded from the sensory-motor chain. Jürgen Jürges's gliding, gravity-defying camera, passing through ceilings and drifting above crowds, gives this condition its visual form: we perceive with the angels, drawn into the layered inner-voice soundtrack of eavesdropped human thought, but there is no action to resolve what we see, only the endless accumulation of witnessing. The post-Wall Berlin through which they drift is itself any-space-whatever — a city reunified in name but hollowed out, swarming with American interlopers, weapons traffic, and the sediment of twentieth-century catastrophe; the angels move through rooftops and transit hubs as through a topology that has lost its connective tissue, all adjacency and no community. When Cassiel falls to earth — triggered by pure reflex, catching a child tumbling from a balcony — the film inherits, and immediately stress-tests, the crisis of the action-image: embodiment should restore a hero's capacity to act, but the human world he enters is so mired in corruption and despair that purposeful action barely holds, and what agency he finally recovers costs him everything. The craft debt running through all of this leads directly back to Wings of Desire (1987): where Henri Alekan invented the shift from black-and-white angel-vision to saturated color upon incarnation, Jürges preserves that grammar as self-citation, the sequel continuing its predecessor's visual language the way Cassiel continues his own story — unable, even in flesh, to fully leave behind the view from above.