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 him-
self. 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.
HervideoinstallationCountenance( 2002 )comprises 250 contemporarypor-
traitsofBerlinersdrawnfromthediversityofthecity.Thecitizensposeasif
forphotographsbutarefilmedforhalfaminuteorso,notunlikeWarhol’s
Screen Tests. Tan used the movie camera on its side to produce a portrait-
formatimage.The‘sitters’movealittleandtheworldoftengoesonbehind
them, betraying the contrivance of the whole set-up. Many of the composi-
tions 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
automatedmixer.Sander’sattempttosurveythesocialorderofhistimewas
alwaysalittlehubristicandhasevenlesscurrencytoday,whenappearances
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
102 the moving image becomes a measure of the instabilities of the present.
90 Himmel über Berlin[Wings of Desire]
(Wim Wenders, 1987), frames.
