Anselm (2023) | Dir. Wim Wenders
Courtesy of Cinetic Media
Written by: Belle McIntyre
From the surrealism of the opening image of an uninhabited wedding dress with a long train trailing over a mound of rocky rubble in a clearing in wooded area, the camera slowly glides and circles the figure and pulls back to reveal other ghostly wedding dresses as if they are wandering but lost without their bodies. The effect is sublimely haunting and serenely beautiful and just one of many immersive dives into the monumental creative output of one of contemporary art’s most towering figures. Anselm Keifer, who grew up in the devastating aftermath of WWII, has clearly been imprinted by the grim and painful reality of the brutally shattered city of Berlin.
Courtesy of Cinetic Media
As the film is organized around the various immense studios where the magic happens, we are treated to a private tour through the his art and trajectory in the places where it happened. The vastness and multifariousness of mediums into which he delves deeply and prolifically is simply staggering. In stark contrast to the haunted romanticism of the disembodied brides, there are strange, tall slender jerry-rigged rough-hewn towers that could have been built by a child giant. He made fanciful flying forms out of metal wire. And then there are the paintings which started as large canvases and evolved into gargantuan metal slabs impastoed with various layers of other materials or molten metal. They are torched and pounded and ferociously distressed until the right balance is found between creation and destruction. He does not seem to discard anything which could be repurposed.
Although there are a few inserted flashback re-enactments of a younger Anselm, we learn more about him through his art. A voracious reader of literature, poetry, philosophy, science and religion, he wrestled with the “open wound” of Germany’s political and social history. His work is emphatically a “protest against forgetting”. And to that end, it is increasingly monumental, in the broadest meaning of the work. Most often made from scavenged materials cobbled together in random ways implying a temporary condition on the way to disintegration; the cyclic nature of things.
Courtesy of Cinetic Media
Wenders, who has known Keifer for years spent two years making this film. The richness of the studio spaces which he has created from entire factories or built from scratch are austerely beautiful and filmed with superb detail. He had two in Germany and then moved to France and transformed a group of adjacent industrial buildings in Barjac, near Nimes in the south of France with exhibition spaces and sculpture gardens. It has been referred to as his own city state. The scope and quantity of the work is overwhelming and mind-boggling. I would have to posit that Wenders was the perfect partner for this film about this artist. There is an appropriate reverence for the work and one is tempted to make a pilgrimage to Barjac which has been abandoned for his more practical one outside of Paris. The film itself is a ravishing piece of work.
