The tied-back wings of the angel represent no real loss, but constitute the angel's very 'movement' - these wings, in all their obsolete appearance, are hope itself, and there is no other hope but this.

[...]

Kafka's novels are not screenplays for experimental theatre, since they lack in principle the very spectator that might intervene in such experiments. They represent rather the last and disappearing connecting texts of the silent film [...]; the ambiguity of gesture lies somewhere between sinking into speechlessness (the destruction of language) and the emergence from the latter in music ...

(Adorno till Benjamin, 1934)