What happens when Art meets History, Nature, Memory, Truth, and Guilt?
‘Anselm,’ Wim Wenders’s impressively modest documentary about the artist Anselm Kiefer, offers an answer
You notice that man on the bicycle in the photograph? That’s the renowned artist Anselm Kiefer, who’s the subject of Wim Wenders’s documentary “Anselm.” The space where Kiefer’s riding that bicycle? It’s his workshop, outside of Paris. Yes, the space is immense. It has to be, since the art Kiefer makes is immense, immense in ambition no less than scale. Wenders shot “Anselm” in 3-D, which Kiefer’s reliance in his work on scale and space more than justifies.
“Anselm” offers many pleasures. One of them is how the film being itself so unassuming and modest — it lasts barely an hour and a half — makes for an excellent way to approach an artist whose work is anything but unassuming and modest.
Kiefer employs Art to confront History, Nature, Memory, Truth, Guilt. The list of mighty abstractions goes on. Interested as Wenders is in the Art, he’s even more interested in the man (not Man) who’s spent decades wrestling with all those capital letters. Wenders does not fail to notice, for example, that Kiefer is whistling as he rides that bike. The whistling humanizes him, as does the frequent sight of a cigar planted in his mouth.
Love it or hate it, Kiefer’s art is never less than overwhelming. In appearance, Kiefer is as hipster-mundane as a guy going into Starbucks. He’s usually seen in black T-shirt and jeans. Trim, bald, and bearded, he looks a bit like a subdued Patrick Stewart. Also a very serious Patrick Stewart. Playful Kiefer is not. In a clip from a ‘70s interview, he tells a sort-of joke, then smiles, and it’s sort-of shocking.
As a further humanizing touch, Wenders includes a few reenactments of key moments from Kiefer’s life. Reenactments are a plague upon the land. But here Wenders may get a pass, since the reenacting is genetic as well as filmic. Kiefer as a boy is played by Wenders’s son and Kiefer as a grown man is played by his own son. Important as History, Nature, Memory, Truth, and Guilt are, so’s Family.
Wenders and Kiefer, both 78, were born within a few months of each other, in Germany. Both are well aware they belong to that generation which grew up in the shadow of World War II in a society tainted by Nazism. Underscoring that point, the film includes newsreel footage of rubble-filled streets.
For Wenders, the burden of that cultural/moral legacy inspired a wondrous cosmopolitanism: his love of Hollywood and Japanese culture and rock ’n’ roll: a restless, outward-looking curiosity. For Kiefer, it has meant a direct and unrelenting confrontation with what it means to be German and (not quite the same thing) Germanic.
In a clip from an English documentary about him, we hear the narrator note that Kiefer has “prodded incessantly at the open wound of German history.” The language may sound overheated, but it accurately describes his ongoing artistic program. In dealing with his country’s past, is Kiefer truly condemnatory or is he trying to have it both ways? Diverging answers to that question have made his art controversial.
In some ways, Kiefer is his own worst enemy. The work constantly, even proudly, flirts with bombast. Titanic ambition will do that to art. It’s solemn, portentous, humorless, and utterly alien to irony. It’s also unfailingly serious, muscularly imaginative, and possessed of an unswerving moral intensity that keeps that flirtation with bombast from consummation. Kiefer’s quality as an artist is like the nature of his relationship to German history: It’s open to debate. His greatness as an artist is not.
“Anselm” does not shirk from such weighty matters. We get Kiefer cogitating and Kiefer pontificating. But more often get him working, and that’s when “Anselm” is at its best. Using a blow-torch to temper a canvas (an assistant then douses the flames). Pouring molten metal on to another canvas. Applying paint from a very big vat with a very big stick. Thwacking a canvas. Using a scissor lift to reach the top of a very large canvas — large even by Kiefer standards. This goes beyond artmaking on a heroic scale. It’s at once imperial and industrial. Andy Warhol famously called his atelier the Factory. He meant the name figuratively. Kiefer could use it, too, only the meaning would be literal.
Wenders is most commonly thought of as a narrative filmmaker, thanks to such films as “Kings of the Road” (1976), “The American Friend” (1977), “Paris, Texas” (1984), “Wings of Desire” (1987). Notice, though, how distant in time those titles are. Really, he’s become just as much of a documentary director: “Buena Vista Social Club” (1999), “Pina,” about the modern-dance choreographer Pina Bausch (2011), “The Salt of the Earth,” about the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado (2014). All three were Oscar nominees. “Anselm” is very much in their line — and maybe at the head of it.