Page 69 - WTP Vol. V #5

Sutherland, looming large on the screen, black cape dragging the ground behind him, or Lina Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties, and Giancarlo Giannini who expanded the definition of tragic- comic hero of the silver screen, as irritating and sometimes
cowardly as he was often handsome and endearing.
Not until Wim Wenders’ masterpiece Wings of Desire, or Der Himmel Uber Berlin, shot by Henri Alekan, who also was the cinematographer for Jean Cocteau, and who provided
the grain of the black and white scenes by using a remnant of his grandmother’s silk stockings from the 1930s. This film
being the definition of what cinema can be, reflecting upon my own life and its myth and fairy tale assemblage, written
by Peter Handke, often giving the actors lines sounding as if they might have been written by Rilke; with Bruno Ganz, who abdicated his immortal angelhood by throwing down his angelic breastplate for the nubile trapeze artist, Marion, played by
Solveig Dommartin, true and perennial erdengel; how you must look down on us now from your heavenly nimbus, having died too young. If we are so very lucky, in our hours of alarm, should
we awaken to find around our mortal shoulders your dear arms.
Swist’s books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012); The Daodejing: A New Interpretation, with David Breeden and Steven Schroeder (Lamar University Press, 2015); Invocation (Lamar University Press, 2015), and The Windbreak Pine (Snapshot Press, 2016). Forthcoming books include: The View of the River (Kelsay Books, 2017), Candling the Eggs (Shanti Arts, LLC, 2017), and Singing for Nothing from Street to Street: Selected Non ction as Literary Memoir (The Operating System, 2018).
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