I wanted to do a film score for the film Wings of Desire because it left a profound impact on me growing up. Wings of Desire is a movie set in Berlin. The movie revolves around the story of two angels, Damiel and Castiel. Angels are invisible, wandering the streets and houses in Berlin, listening to people's thoughts, and watching their solitude and sadness. Daniel and Casiel are deeply interested in human life, but at the same time, they cannot directly feel human emotions and experiences. Through the eyes of angels, it captures the city of Berlin in divided West Germany and various images of people living in it since World War II ended. He experiences the depth and complexity of emotions that human life brings for the first time. The film explores the beauty and essence of human existence through these changes by Daniel.
I first watched this film in my old German school through a Blu-ray that I borrowed from the library. I was 16 at the time. Director Wim Wenders showed the loneliness and solitude hidden in the memories of war, and economic growth in the 1980s. This made me think of my native country, South Korea. Where the borders are still separated and where one nation is pointing a gun at each other divided by two different ideologies.
The scene I chose for the rescore was the scene where Daniel wandered endlessly as an angel in love. He listens to the old man who went through the disastrous war, he listens to a youthful guy who is separated from his lover, possibly by the border. He commits suicide. Daniel is perplexed. He is in agony.
I wanted to capture this feeling of detachment as an angel not being able to feel the emotions of humans while being in love with a human. I wanted to capture Daniel’s disillusionment. I did so by inviting a saxophone player to play my ideas. I directed his performances. I made a document about each scene and some musical ideas for him to improvise. As the saxophone could play all kinds of saxophones (tenor, alto, soprano) and a clarinet, I recorded around 4 takes of each instrument’s improvisation for each scene. After that I cut each part I liked about the take, and I conjured it all together to make a line of melodies. This sense of clear melody gets more and more watered down by more and more instruments being introduced and building up for the final controlled chaos. After building the language I added foley sounds and sound effects on top and mixed the whole piece. After the master bus, I ran the whole composition into the tape machine and recorded the piece on tape. I recorded that back into my DAW and again and put another limiter on top.
