- Anselm
- Written and directed by Wim Wenders
- Featuring Anselm Kiefer, Daniel Kiefer and Anton Wenders
- Classification N/A; 93 minutes
- Opens in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver theatres Dec. 22
Critic’s Pick
In the first few moments of Anselm, Wim Wenders’s new documentary about the German artist Anselm Kiefer, the camera offers a high view over a warehouse/studio where racks of paintings are stored. As the artist himself slowly wheels another painting into view from the bottom right corner of the screen, the viewer has to quickly readjust their perception of the scene. That painting is twice the height of the man who made it; this studio must be the size of an airplane hangar.
Big scale, both physical and philosophical, seems to define Kiefer’s career. Beginning with scenes of German children playing in the rubble of bombed cities in the aftermath of 1945, the film makes the source and import of Kiefer’s art fairly obvious. Born in 1945, scarred by the deprivation, guilt and secrecy of those immediate postwar years, Kiefer painted the charred remains of a great civilization gone murderously wrong. In later scenes he is shown setting fire with a blow torch to straw that has been glued to his canvases while an assistant stands by with a hose, or pouring molten lead on the paintings. In an archival interview, he asks how one should paint a landscape after tanks have driven through it.
Anselm Kiefer and Wim Wenders.Mongrel Media
And yet, as this film explores, Kiefer’s art was highly controversial when he first achieved international attention representing Germany at the Venice Biennale of 1980. The work referred to figures of European culture and legend who had been appropriated by the Nazis and if Germans didn’t particularly want to consider their recent history, international critics felt Kiefer was not clearly denouncing fascism. In another archival interview he makes the point that to stand in front of the work and identify himself as an anti-fascist would be to dishonour those who actually fought the Nazis before he was born. Which of us can know what we would have done under the circumstances?
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By the time the Museum of Modern Art mounted a major retrospective in 1989, the effect of this work, dealing with the festering wound of European history, was becoming clearer, Kiefer’s reputation was by then unassailable and the film follows him to larger and larger factory-studios. Eventually, he moved to the South of France where he has turned a 40-hectare estate into an artistic site with a series of connecting installations in rough towers, glass houses, deep pits and long tunnels, all built by the artist and his assistants.
It is there that this 3-D film begins with eerie visions of bridal gowns, topped with razor wire, straw or a bronze orb, representing the women of myth and history. The film builds on the great success Wenders had with his 2011 3-D dance film Pina, a tribute to choreographer Pina Bausch, and initially the effect, as we travel through a studio so large Kiefer rides his bike around it, is spectacular. But, in truth, as this film observes more and more of his compelling oeuvre, the viewer becomes more engrossed in the art than its cinematic presentation and the 3-D effect seems to fade into the background, necessary rather than impressive.
The film features no narration aside from the interviews and includes a few staged scenes, without dialogue, where Wenders’s great-nephew Anton Wenders plays the child Anselm and Kiefer’s adult son, Daniel Kiefer, plays the artist in his early career. The young Wenders’s appearance is particularly haunting in final scenes where the little boy who has lived among the ruins visits an ornate baroque palace, awed by the glory of its densely painted walls and ceilings.
Kiefer’s project is massive and complex, a cleansing fire that confronts history, both destroying and resurrecting, as it seeks to renew the world through art.
Mongrel Media