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World War. The man is old enough to have been one of the three young farmers on their way to a dance in 1914 in the famous image reproduced on the cover of the book.12 As he browses the pages he ruminates on the nature of history and his own life, and we are given to see Sander’s project not as an uncomplicated historical record, but as a set of images to be read in dialogue with their own time and their own people, to be measured against their experience. ‘What is wrong with peace that its inspiration doesn’t endure and that its story is hardly told?’ the old man asks himself. Wenders cuts briefly to old newsreel footage of the carnage left by a wartime bombing raid. Over time the generations caught up in the war are dying out and direct experience of that inter-war period has all but disappeared. As a result, Sander’s photographs have become much more of a factual record than they were in their time or were perhaps intended to be. For younger people who gaze upon them now they are a definitive record of the period and of ‘the way things were’. But in this brief and simple scene, of a man weighing the pictures against his own memory, something of the provisional nature of Sander’s images is permitted to resurface in a sliding between present and past.13 Sander’s project was revisited more recently by the artist Fiona Tan. Her video installation Countenance (2002) comprises 250 contemporary portraits of Berliners drawn from the diversity of the city. The citizens pose as if for photographs but are filmed for half a minute or so, not unlike Warhol’s Screen Tests. Tan used the movie camera on its side to produce a portraitformat image. The ‘sitters’ move a little and the world often goes on behind them, betraying the contrivance of the whole set-up. Many of the compositions reference Sander’s own. His famous portrait of a baker with his great pudding bowl is restaged, this time with the baker’s bowl rotating on an automated mixer. Sander’s attempt to survey the social order of his time was always a little hubristic and has even less currency today, when appearances generate as much doubt as certainty and the demographics of our cities are so volatile. Tan accepts this. In the voice-over to her own filmed portrait she speaks of the antagonism between the inexplicable desire to make such a project and its inevitable shortcomings. The poses, compositions and lighting may echo Sander’s order, but the shift from photography to the moving image becomes a measure of the instabilities of the present.
90 Himmel über Berlin [Wings of Desire] (Wim Wenders, 1987), frames.