by Anne Gabriel
Anselm, an art film/Documentary created by German director Wim Wenders catalogs Kiefer’s history and current art practice interspliced with historical footage and current interviews as well as recreated scenes from Keifer’s youth.
This film is a bromance between Germany’s two greatest and seemingly MOST serious contemporary creators—one a filmmaker and one a painter/sculptor. The film did neither any favors. Cinematically moody and slow, Wenders’ film feels like a 10 minute video installation that was stretched out into a tortuously long 1 hour and 33 minutes.
The first time I saw Kiefer’s work–at the San Francisco’s Museum of Contemporary Art—I was awe-struck by the scale of mud mixed with straw mixed with burnt sections of canvas that encased you in wonder and dismay while the painting nee sculpture fled from the walls onto the floor and into your psyche. It was dark, emotionally charged, and I was a fan.
So when a friend invited me to watch the latest Anselm Kiefer documentary, which was technically released in 2023 but playing in my local movie theater, unsurprisingly I readily said YES. At the movie theater I procured a libation (you can get those at movie theaters these days, thank god), a snack, and sat down with my friend and a total of three other movie goers ready and willing to absorb all and everything about the legend that is Anselm Kiefer.
The lights went down. The opening sequence of a wedding dress sculpture set in nature with a soundtrack composed of opera and whispers was so dramatic that it almost bordered on comical. My first thought was “please let this just be the intro.” It wasn’t. What followed was more sweeping footage of sculptures of dresses overlaid by opera and whispers, followed by shots of Kiefer riding his lonesome bicycle, companionless, through a cavernous and empty warehouse. The film felt poetic and unreal in all the wrong ways. If you told me it was actually a caricature of a movie about a serious German artist by someone who secretly never liked him I would believe you.
Great films about heavy subjects—say, Schindler’s List or The Zone of Interest–have some comic relief as a pressure release valve. Kiefer, as portrayed here, is incapable of humor. He is very capable of narration in a low deep monotone voice over a background soundtrack of opera and whispers. I slept. But not before seeing Kiefer’s youth running through dilapidated German mansions being re-enacted and watching footage of Kiefer as a young man visiting several of the capitals that were overtaken by the Nazi regime as well as physically re-producing the Nazi salute as a performative art piece.
The footage of Kiefer’s Nazi salute was, at least, jarring. So much so that I remember thinking to myself that every time I’ve seen that salute done in the movies it was done by someone who really didn’t know what they were doing and didn’t fully commit. Watching Kiefer’s salute was as if I was seeing that salute for the first time, as it was intended to be seen, and it sent shivers down my spine. The interview footage from that time suggested that he was NOT re-creating the salute to be an activist.
I also stayed awake for Kiefer discussing one of his professors, during which he pulled out a large bound book that had belonged to said professor. As he opened the pages to reveal the highly textured and crunchy pages, I fleetingly noted that this surely was one of the places from which Kiefer must have derived inspiration for his large paintings before more whispers and monotone explanations made me fall asleep again.
Upon awakening the final time, I saw Kiefer’s assistants hosing down one of his large scale paintings/sculptures right before Kiefer took a blow torch to it. I thought to myself that Germany was throwing so much money at this man, it must pay for a lot of fuel.
Image: Courtesy Wim Wenders