Anselm
Screened at Cannes, this portrait of German artist Anselm Kiefer is like his large-scale sculptures: although monumental, it does not abandon the human perspective. Neither is it a classic documentary with 'talking heads'. After the memorable Pina, Wim Wenders delivers another immersive film experience that allows us to enter the world of the artist and his work.
Fictionalised scenes, archive footage and 3D shots taken from a giant artist’s studio add up to a nuanced picture of a man struggling with post-war collective amnesia. Born in 1945, Kiefer, a pupil of Joseph Beuys – at the beginning of his career considered to be a mere provocateur and even a Nazi sympathiser – has evoked Germany’s difficult past in his works, just as Heinrich Böll did in literature.
Wenders wanders with his camera through a multi-hectare site in Barjac, France: an artist’s studio and at the same time an entropic exhibition. Construction and decay, myth and fact, testimony and fading are the fascinations seen in the objects Kiefer creates: concrete towers several storeys high or underground tunnels. At the same time, the director allows himself an affectionate cinematic gesture: a meeting of little Anselm (played by Wenders’ cousin) and the revered artist.
