There’s a beautiful photograph here, taken by German filmmaker Wim Wenders on his first trip to the US: shot through the windscreen of a car at a gas station, the pumps glow slightly, surrounded by heaps of snow. It has all the atmosphere and melancholy of an Edward Hopper painting. That’s not how Wenders remembers the trip though; he felt his journey through the small towns of East Coast America was a disappointment. But five years ago when he rediscovered the photo – along with a heap of other Polaroids he’d taken – he couldn’t believe how beautifully they had aged and how succinctly they captured the lost America he’d been looking for but thought he’d failed to find.
‘Instant Stories’ is all about the beauty of Polaroid images. Not just what they capture but the medium itself; the joy of taking them then having them in your hand a second later, the magic of seeing the image appear slowly, ghostlike. Many of the photos here aren’t spectacular: cityscapes at night, empty roads, a perfect cloudy sky. They’re not so far away from your own holiday snaps. There are some standouts though: that snowy gas station, New York skyscrapers through a pair of spectacles, a girl in a diner framed by plastic seats. Others offer serious fans an insight behind the scenes of Wenders’s films – there are Hamburg buildings you’ll recognise from ‘The American Friend’ and pictures of Dennis Hopper in his stetson. For cinephiles and Wenders obsessives it’s an essential experience (make sure you listen to his guided tour as you walk around), but if you’re new to his work it might not be so immediate. Either way, make sure you pop into the doc playing behind the curtain: it’s a mixture of a voiceover from Wenders and clips from ‘Alice in the Cities’. It cements the line between the Polaroids and the director’s films. And there’s the resonant moment where the main character, played by Rüdiger Vogler, Polaroid camera in hand, mutters the line ‘It just never shows what you’ve seen’.