2023-05-17 17:02:28
ZTwo months before the end of the Second World War, the son of the art teacher and Wehrmacht officer Albert Kiefer, known as Anselm, was born in the air-raid shelter of a hospital in Donaueschingen. Three months after the end of the Second World War, the son of the surgeon Heinrich Wenders, known as Wilhelm, was born in a Düsseldorf hospital.
At the age of 20, the two could have met for the first time in Freiburg, when Kiefer was studying law there and Wenders was studying philosophy. But their paths did not cross. The two could also have visited the philosopher Martin Heidegger at his hut in nearby Todtnau, as had Hannah Arendt and Paul Celan. This didn’t happen either. And then both became famous independently of each other, world famous, Anselm Kiefer as a painter and sculptor and Wim Wenders as a filmmaker.
There have been a lot of films about German painters since the noughties, not least because these painter princes are among the most expensive artists in the world’s auction houses and not only do their works sell well internationally, but also documentaries about them. The films are then called “The Painter” (about Albert Oehlen), “Georg Baselitz – the Film” or “Gerhard Richter – Painting”; Richter’s life was also the template for the feature film “Werk ohne Autor”.
Tablets in “Exile”
The rule is that a seasoned documentarian turns to the artist and suggests a film. This was different with “Anselm”. Wenders and Kiefer finally met in 1991, in the run-up to the big Kiefer exhibition in the New National Gallery in Berlin. The two dined almost every evening in “Exil”, the legendary artist’s restaurant on Kreuzberg’s Paul-Lincke-Ufer; “We smoked, drank and talked a lot,” remembers Wenders. They forged film plans that came to nothing because both were busy with their own projects.
Luckily, because Wenders still lacked the element in his palette that now makes “Anselm” so sensational: 3D technology. With his Pina Bausch portrait “Pina” twelve years ago, Wenders pioneered the use of three-dimensionality for an artist portrait. Since then he has continued to work on the technique in short films, and he is now reaping the rewards.
Ode in grey: Anselm Kiefer’s studio landscapes
Quelle: Anselm © 2023, Road Movies/photograph by Wim Wenders
“Anselm” is the film of a friend and admirer. Wenders does not tell a biography, but about a work, based on a journey through the studios that Kiefer has used over the past five decades. Kiefer’s work worked its way deep into the story, was fascinated by its terror and its myth, direct, gigantic, physically absorbing. In this he was the opposite of Wenders, whose work is more of an escape from German history, to the music of the jukeboxes, to the French cinematheque, to the Hollywood of his dreams and the culture of Japan; he memorializes the latter in his second Cannes film “Perfect Day”, which will be shown next week.
The room as a subject
In “Anselm” he tackles it head-on – because the artist takes it head-on. By the time Kiefer appeared on the scene, abstraction had dominated art for half a century. Anselm Kiefer went back (or forward) the way to the figurative and his creations are a dream for every 3D cinematographer. Franz Lustig, whose collaboration with Wenders goes back almost two decades, constantly circles Kiefer’s creations as if he wants to look into their souls.
His camera is constantly in motion and there is often a second movement in the picture when Kiefer measures his huge studio halls on a bicycle or flambés a painting with a flamethrower or drives to lofty heights with the lifting platform. Straw, sunflowers, sand, lead, wood, branches, earth – Kiefer incorporated all kinds of materials into his works, and Wenders’ camera does nothing else, it tries to eat its way into the Kiefer’s spaces. He does the same with quotations, such as from Celan’s “Todesfuge”, whose writing inevitably protrudes from the two-dimensional film space.
In this ambition to subjugate space, Kiefer’s work and Wenders’ 3D meet. It’s not just about giant paintings. Kiefer’s work includes pavilions, underground vaults, bizarre towers, a covered amphitheater: all basically invitations to shoot a film there.
We don’t know much about this language called 3D yet; she has more or less given up the cinema – with the exception of Wenders and James Cameron; the shock effects some action films use them for are little more than grunts of a language in its early stages of development. Wenders has evolved the language compared to “Pina”, what we see speaks to different parts of our brain than the flat image of normal films.
Wenders is obviously overwhelmed by what Kiefer has created and he uses 3D technology to convey his overwhelm to us viewers. It’s about mediation, it’s about understanding, it’s not about an art-historical critical view of Kiefer’s work. Wenders is as affirmative towards Kiefer as the artist’s attitude towards the German past has long been criticized as affirmative. Anselm Kiefer has fallen somewhat out of fashion lately because he wanted to overwhelm and not master, because he did not subject German history to a clear judgment but to doubt. Doubt is grey, and gray is the dominant color in Wenders’ film.
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