Anselm review – a per­fect com­bi­na­tion of direc­tor and subject

When it comes to pro­file doc­u­men­taries, it’s always nice when a film­mak­er opts to talk about their sub­ject in terms that they would not only respect, but wel­come. Wim Wen­ders dusts down his 3D cam­eras – the ones that served him so well for 2010’s Pina – and heads to Bar­jac in south­ern France to embed him­self with Ger­man con­cep­tu­al artist, Anselm Kiefer. With a bot­tom-spank­ing pad­dle caked with paint in one hand and a flame-throw­er in the oth­er (and a fat sto­gie between his teeth), Keifer is our unsmil­ing (albeit it play­ful) host on a mul­ti-dimen­sion­al behind-the-scenes tour of his own pri­vate Xanadu – the sprawl­ing stu­dio com­plex, stor­age facil­i­ty and all-ter­rain gallery space, La Ribaute.

The 3D aspect is often used to mes­meris­ing effect, and dove­tails per­fect­ly with an artist whose work often demands the view­er inspect it from mul­ti­ple angles and van­tages. Wen­ders is also can­ny in his use of cross-dis­solves and the lay­er­ing of text over image to cre­ate mul­ti­ple planes of per­cep­tion that pop from the screen. The neo-clas­si­cal sound­track selec­tions, too, com­prise over­lap­ping ambi­ent sounds and whis­pered vocals which, again, empha­sise the col­lage-like struc­ture of the film.

It’s worth not­ing that this is less a film about Kiefer the per­son, but more a biog­ra­phy of the art itself. The artist game­ly plays the part of poet­ic medi­um, and the inten­tion appears to be a chron­i­cle of cre­ativ­i­ty rather than a banal biog. Any infor­ma­tion we’re giv­en about Kiefer’s life and career relates to the mean­ings and sym­bol­ism of the art itself, which makes for a much more rich and unique film than one which allows fawn­ing talk­ing heads to do the heavy expo­si­tion­al lifting.

Two key influ­ences that run through the artist’s work are the poet­ry of Paul Celan, a Ger­man-Jew writ­ing crit­i­cal­ly of the Holo­caust as it was hap­pen­ing, and Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger, the giant of Ger­man phi­los­o­phy who, in lat­er life, neglect­ed to acknowl­edge his own par­tic­i­pa­to­ry acts dur­ing the war. Know­ing this both dif­fus­es and reframes the idea that, ear­ly in his jour­ney, Kiefer was labelled a provo­ca­teur by the art world cognoscen­ti for a work in which he pho­tographed him­self in var­i­ous locales around Ger­many giv­ing the banned roman salute of the Nazis.

Rather than iron­i­cal­ly appro­pri­at­ing fas­cist iconog­ra­phy, Kiefer was mak­ing a state­ment about the moral imper­a­tive to engage with the past, how­ev­er che­quered it may have been. His response to his fix­a­tion with ruins, destruc­tion, des­o­la­tion, is to state that, unlike one of his for­ma­tive heroes, Van Gogh, he paints land­scapes after the tanks have rolled over them.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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