2023-10-17 12:06:31
They have a lot in common, these two children from Germany, born just at the end of the war. Everyone has distanced themselves from their country. One, the director Wim Wenders, lived in the United States for several years, the other, the artist Anselm Kiefer, chose to live in France since 1992.
It was while visiting his Barjac estate in the Cévennes, transformed over the years into a gigantic work of art, that the filmmaker wanted to shoot a documentary on the painter and sculptor.
3D images
This creative space dotted with greenhouses, towers, underground passages and even an amphitheater housing works is now open to small groups, by reservation. The film Anselm (The Sound of Time), which is released in theaters on October 18, will allow a wider audience to discover it.
Wenders chose here to shoot 3D images, as in his documentary on the choreographer Pina Bausch, to magnify Kiefer’s crazy architecture and his large female plaster sculptures. The director even lends his voice to the latter, in poetic songs and whispers.
Shot over two years and in six different locations, the film also invites us to go back in time. Archival footage evokes Kiefer’s birth under Allied bombing, his childhood spent playing in the ruins.
Cleverly the filmmaker asked his great-nephew, Anton, to lend his features to this young boy, who was passionate about books and drawing from an early age. While Kiefer’s own son, Daniel, embodies the artist’s provocative beginnings, giving the Nazi salute to break the taboos weighing on this period in his country. Two youthful figures who allow us to rehumanize the man who has today become a sacred monster, collected by museums around the world.
By also returning to the artist’s first studios in Germany, in the attic of an old school, then in an abandoned brickworks, Wenders shows that they were powerful sources of inspiration for the paintings.
In Croissy, where Anselm Kiefer now works in a gigantic warehouse – where he rides a bicycle, cigar in mouth – the film observes him pouring molten lead onto his gigantic canvases, attacking other paintings with a flame thrower. As if, for this demiurge, creation could only be born from a form of destruction…
Photography, the original matrix of the work
The Lille Métropole Museum of Modern Art, the LaM, reveals another little-known part of Kiefer’s work: the importance of photography (1). Wenders had already revealed that on the reverse of the painter’s paintings there is often a small stapled cliché, having served as a reference to the composition, while thousands of other prints wait in his drawers. At LaM, nearly 130 paintings, drawings, books and sculptures bear witness to photographs incorporated directly into the works.
Here, landscape views, literally bombarded with paint stains. There, dozens of images stuck on large rolls of lead, like the film of a life, oscillating between clarity and opacity. Elsewhere, fascinating dioramas, in which, between the black trees of a snowy forest, the artist has depicted childhood memories, taken from family albums. Further on, an aerial urban view of Sao Paulo which served as a matrix for the flight over a sprawling city by a demonic figure, Lilith.
The art critic Jean de Loisy composed this journey, following the different stages of an alchemical process. It opens with the revelation of the photographic negative and the blackness, the calcination of the filthy, to end in the crucible of the workshops. Veiled with gold leaf, stitched with surgical instruments or plastered on immense sheets of lead, oxidized and blued by electrolysis, Kiefer’s memorial images thus play out multiple metamorphoses before our eyes. Where the dark matter of history seeks to transmute itself into art.
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