and did all the work herself, without a stunt double. During production, the filmmakers called German police after Falk went missing. Falk had been spending hours exploring West Berlin and was discovered in a café. Post-production Peter Handke arrived in West Berlin during the editing process, led by Peter Przygodda. Handke believed it bordered on a silent film, aside from some music, and lacked much of the notes he had sent to Wenders during filming. Handke thus proposed adding his writings via voice-over. After Falk left Berlin, he recorded much of his voice-over in a sound studio in Los Angeles. Much of this was improvised, though Wenders still supervised by telephone. With the filming performed in lengthy takes, and the camera used as "the eye of the angel", much of the movement was conveyed in the camerawork rather than in editing effects. There was five hours of footage to edit down to the final cut. A pie fight between the stars was filmed for the final scene, but later edited out. Composer Jürgen Knieper assumed harps and violins would suffice for a score for a film about angels, until he saw a cut of the film. Seeing the angels were discontented, he wrote a different score employing a choir, voices and whistling. Laurent Petitgand contributed the circus music, an ensemble work performed with accordions, saxophones and keyboards. Themes and interpretations The concept of angels, spirits or ghosts who help humans on Earth had been common in cinema, from Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) to the 1946 works It's a Wonderful Life and A Matter of Life and Death. Many earlier U.S. and U.K. films demonstrate high amounts of reverence, while others allow reasonable amounts of fun. Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death presents an early example of spirits being jealous of the lives of humans. The shift from monochrome to colour, to distinguish the angels' reality from that of the mortals, was also used in Powell and Pressburger's film. While Wings of Desire does not portray Berliners as living in a utopia, academic Roger Cook wrote that the fact that people have pleasure "gives, as the English title suggests, wings to desire". God is not mentioned in the film, and is only referred to in the sequel Faraway, So Close! when the angels state a purpose to connect humans with "Him". Scholars Robert Phillip Kolker and Peter