Anselm
Directed by Wim Wenders
Running time: 1hr33 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Anselm
3D is, it seems, what bootcut jeans are to fashion: it comes back in style once in a blue moon, proceeds to be exhaustingly ubiquitous for a couple of years, and then quietly retreats to its default status of roundly agreed-upon naffness. After hogging the multiplexes for much of the 2010s, the technology is safely in what the kids would call its flop era, which is for the best: currently, the only filmmakers employing 3D are those who have a genuine passion and vision for it. James Cameron is the most famous example; Wim Wenders, for my money, is the most exciting, using that dizzy third dimension not for (literally) in-your-face spectacle but an enhanced awareness of space, texture, movement and flux.
That was a clear coup for Wenders’ gorgeous 2011 dance documentary Pina, where 3D permitted us to move in and around choreographed setpieces, but transferring the technique to a less obviously kinetic artform in Anselm yields equally stunning results. Though it immerses us in both the intellectual and physical process of groundbreaking German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer, as he labours of various vast-scale installations at his hangar-like studio in rural France, the film primarily considers the act of observing and absorbing visual art, so often given a disruptive additional perspective by the camera. In shooting Kiefer’s imposing, landscape-like canvases of mixed organic media, Wenders and his regular cinematographer Franz Lustig aim to shrink the equivalent distance between seeing a painting in a gallery and buying a print of it in the gift shop; their camera is alive to the depth and near-aggressive tactility of the work at hand.
Kiefer, whose creations of fused mud, metal, plaster and plant matter have always rejected genteel aesthetic conventions and passive spectatorship — in person, they almost tauntingly beg you to defy the '“do not touch” rule — is the ideal subject for such treatment. His bristly paintings (not to mentions his sculptures, including bodyless clay brides dotted across a scrubby landscape, or towers of concrete building blocks both severe and teeteringly playful) always seem in motion even when fixed in place, a trick of the eye that rather complements 3D’s whizzy running-in-place effect. Even the lushest coffee-table monograph of Kiefer’s oeuvre feels close to pointless; among other things, Wenders’ film is a state-of-the-art alternative.
Still, Anselm is more than just a fancy cinematic display case. There’s thoughtful engagement here with the sometimes controversial politics of Kiefer’s life and work, on which the now 78-year-old artist proves a thorny but compelling interviewee; moving dramatised interludes bridge his past and present selves in ways that, like the 3D presentation, elegantly shave just shy of their gimmicky potential. But it is a film that invites you first to look, even gawp, and marvel — not emptily so, as the sights here stimulate ideas and anxieties aplenty.
ANSELM (2023) Written by Wim Wenders | Shot by Franz Lustig | Edited by Maxine Goedicke