The art gallery is a sacred space, or at least it should be. On occasion, the act of viewing art can be quite dull, even misleading. Acquiring a notable or thought-provoking work is one thing, but the way it’s positioned in relation to other pieces does much to inform how viewers will perceive it (e.g. Hannah Gadsby’s disastrous Picasso exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum earlier this year). Curators bear a significant responsibility in this respect – how do you present a piece of art in a way that allows the viewers to come to their own interpretation while also respecting the artist’s original intent? Documenting a work through film further complicates this aesthetic and intellectual dilemma, since dimensionality and space can become irrepressibly muddled by the camera’s lens. It’s a question that yields no easy answer. For Win Wenders, whose latest documentary, Anselm, attempts to deconstruct and honor the artmaking philosophy of German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer, the answer is 3D.
Kiefer, a longtime friend of Wenders, is undoubtedly a worthy subject for a film. Over the course of his multi-decade career, the artist has courted admiration and controversy for his willingness to invoke taboo and troubling subjects from Germany’s past, especially Nazism and the subsequent effort to erase its insidious influence from the country’s cultural history, which Kiefer sees as problematic. Born in 1945, Kiefer grew up amid the process of “denazification,” and his captivation with confronting and analyzing his country’s sordid history has produced some fascinating and daringly confrontational work. The documentary is largely wordless, at least in a conventional sense. Through the use of archival interviews, Wenders has obviated the need for doing them himself. Instead, we are treated to slightly over an hour-and-a-half of pure audio-visual immersion, as the now 78-year-old Kiefer wanders through his cavernous studio and explores the annals of his life and career. Pristine 6K three-dimensional photography permits the viewer to feel every inch of this space, situated largely on 200-acre compound in Barjac, France. The work on display is so texturally tangible you can practically feel it brushing against your fingers.
Post-Avatar, most efforts at 3D filmmaking have been largely worthless, if not outright miserable in execution. It’s a very difficult gimmick to make work on-screen, since the frequent effect of converting an image into 3D is, ironically, to make it flatter. But Anselm is the real deal. Wenders previously experimented with 3D cameras for his 2011 dance documentary, Pina, and the results here are some of the best that the format has ever seen. Because much of Kiefer’s work relies on its spatial positioning and harsh, sometimes crude deformations, it is complemented wonderfully by Wenders’ wandering camera. Tall structures dotted throughout his large French compound take on the effect of cities, and Kiefer is often dwarfed by the mammoth stature of these sculptural works. Even inside his studio, gigantic shelves containing decades of work transform into monuments to the passage of time. In extended tracking shots, Wenders captures Kiefer bicycling through this ocean of archives, navigating the ever-evolving maze of his own creation. In Avatar, 3D was used to make an imaginary world feel more real. In Anselm, it transports us from the real world into the realm of myth.
This technique also makes for an engaging exploration of the artistic process. In one sequence, Kiefer takes a flamethrower to a large mosaic, burning black splotches into his work that are extinguished with an industrial hose. The destructive violence integral to his process feels visceral when captured in this format, and effectively conveys its relationship to the brutal history of fascism in WWII Germany. This does mean that the cumulative effect of Anselm is more experiential than educational, which could be a problem for those not previously familiar with the artist’s work. Granted, the film won’t teach you much about Kiefer, but it will help you understand him.
When Wenders does rely on archival footage, it’s in chronologically ordered fragments projected from an antique television. There’s no sense of an info dump, but it is enough to ground the otherwise experimental documentary in at least some semblance of structure. It’s fascinating to see how audience and critical perception to Kiefer’s work, especially his most overtly political pieces, has changed over time. One of his most contentious creations is a series of photographs from 1969, titled Heroic Symbols, depicting the then-young artist performing the Seig Heil salute in a series of public and private European locations. Because Wenders has provided the proper context, the intellectual and emotional purpose behind this provocation is instantly understandable.
Not all of the documentary’s various gimmicks play out with aplomb. Particularly ineffective are the film’s attempts at historical reenactments, which alternately feature Anton Wenders (the grand-nephew of the director) and Daniel Kiefer (Anselm’s son) as younger versions of the artist. These sequences, mostly non-verbal, are bizarre and add very little to the overall effect of the film. Obviously limited in their scope and budget, these are also the only passages of the documentary that feel visually cheap. On occasion, Anselm can also be quite boring. When Wenders highlights texts informative to Kiefer’s practice, such as poetry by Paul Celan, visualizations of these pages are literally brought to the forefront of the screen. It’s like a slightly more stimulating PowerPoint presentation. Warts and all, Anselm still feels quite radical, both as borderline-oneiric exploration of its subject’s creative process and an act of pure artistic meditation. In his second film of 2023, the other being the blissfully introspective Perfect Days, Wenders has very little to prove. Watching a seasoned filmmaker experiment with compelling ways to reinvent a well-trodden format is undeniably enjoyable, even if the final product won’t have much outside appeal. It’s a stimulating approach to exploring an artist that defies boundaries, and in that sense, Kiefer and Wenders are very much alike.
Photo courtesy of Sideshow / Janus Films
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