A Look Into 'If I Had Wings'

I watched the 2013 drama If I Had Wings and just like every other movie, it serves as a demonstration through style/cinematography as a mean of narrative.

First, the run-down. Let’s keep it simple. A junior felon is partnered up to run with a blind student, wanting to join the track team. Together, they become better…better runners, better friends, and better people.

In regards to the article to which I’m assessing this movie, we first have to figure out what, message-wise, the movie is trying to bring into the universe. Then, we will depict the frames themselves that help bring forward that meaning.

For example, Adam Ganz says his article "Digital Cinema: The Transformation Of Film Practice And Aesthetics." It is significant that this film,” (referring to Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme film Festen), “which dealt with incest in an apparently successful bourgeois family, is about re-remembering and revealing. The digital allows the representation of multiple yet fractured points of view, which gives a sense of privileged yet partial access,” (Ganz 26). I’d like to produce the same analyzation of If I Had Wings.

Because one of our protagonists, Alex, is blind, I find that there are many digital shots consulting sight. For instance, there is a shot where Brad’s (the rebel) father shows up at the track coach’s door. When we learn this, we see him from the door peephole.

 It’s a sight thing, such as this shot that we see through a camcorder lens filter.

Maybe the shot variations themselves, angle wise, don’t contribute much in uniqueness to the film, though the different variations of sight and lenses is what connects to Alex’s blindness. This is just like the above quote from Ganz. The digital camera and the art itself in Festen furthered the movie with the theme of incest and revealing through partial access. In If I Had Wings, the multiple lenses straying from the human eye reminds us that Alex is blind, yet we (the audience, the fortunate seers) are lucky and privileged to even be viewing this film.

Again, this following quote is explaining just that – the relationship between the characters and the audience…

“The audience is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. A comparatively conventional screenplay (which could almost have been written by Terence Rattigan and has been a success throughout Europe as a theatre piece) is transformed through the prism of the digital cinema and it’s different relationship between the audience the performers and their stories. We have a different kind of access. We never watch the story directly, instead we are present where it occurs, we overhear it,” (Ganz 26).

We are obviously not living either Alex or Brad’s life; we are onlookers, just like we always are when viewing any form of art.

We are strictly viewers, yet that doesn’t mean the film doesn’t try to include us in the same emotions portrayed by the characters in cinematographic ways/styles. The scene above starts off with a black screen, where as soon as the bedroom door is open and the hallway light floods into the room, we realize Alex was sitting in his room with the lights off. At first, that is strange to us. Then it quickly clicks that it makes no difference for him. After his mother closes the bedroom door again, we are lost again in the darkness of Alex’s room.

I could have focused on how we are introduced to Alex in a school environment (starting with his legs and his guide/pole reaching out in front of him. We are not positioned to see his face yet, as if none of his classmates see him as a friend/equal. Though, besides that, there were honestly just regular shot variations; nothing too telling of the story in a different way that hasn't already been discussed in this blog before. 

Adam Ganz focuses on the emergence of digital cinema, with details of enhancement of storyline and audience connection through said digital cinema. I simply connected that idea/structure to the film If I Had Wings. As sight in every film is important, it was just a little extra important in this movie.

Works Cited:

Ganz, Adam, and Lina Khatib. "Digital Cinema: The Transformation Of Film Practice And Aesthetics." New Cinemas: Journal Of Contemporary Film 4.1 (2006): 21-36.