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So last night Jeff and I began working our way through Mark’s list, by watching Wings of Desire.

Oh, my. We have! SO! much! to! talk! about!

I started out by thoroughly enjoying myself…I felt as though I was back in college, watching Fellini and Antonioni and Bergman (maybe with a few Men in Black thrown in…), thinking that they were exploring, on my behalf, all the universal themes that I was interested in….I especially liked the sequence that portrayed lots of different folks in their cars—the sense of multiple lives, passing one another, not intersecting….and, @ first, I liked the angel’s face, and I liked his wistfulness…I understand this wistfulness.

…but the more I watched, the more I entered into the isolation and estrangement the film portrays, the more I began to wonder whether this was really the sort of film I want to be sharing with first-semester students @ Bryn Mawr. I noticed that all (or all but one, briefly glimpsed?) of the angels were male. I noticed that the film focuses on the sad displacement of an older man, who longs to hook up w/ a younger woman, who doesn’t seem as needy or lonely (?) as he is…I thought about Lolita…and I wondered if our students really will be Columbo fans….Thinking  about gender and age difference...I started to think about racial difference (I think I saw a couple of people who may have been Turkish…but it’s a very white crew).  And then I thought about the difference in era, and in geography (this is all about the angst of post-war Berlin, and seems very far away)…

I’ll watch the remake, City of Angels, to see if a more contemporary setting might address some of these questions…but I am also wondering if other city films—how about Crash?—might do the trick “better." And of course now I’m very curious to hear what trick you think Wenders is up to, Mark, and why-and-how you think his film might speak to our gals.  I’m also thinking about focusing more in particular on the experiences of women in the city—women who feel vulnerable? women who learn ways of taking up that space for ourselves…?

Also (having thought about gender and race and era and geography), I’m also thinking about class, having some second thoughts about whether our focus on “play” in the city might run the danger of exoticizing the space, making it seem as though we’ve framed it as a playground for us, coming in from the suburbs. What about the city as a place for work? As a place for family, and community, and lives lived in a grounded—a gardened?--place? A place where people are more connected with one another...?