‘Anselm’: Cannes Review

Dir. Wim Wenders. Germany. 2023. 93mins

For the last few years, German veteran Wim Wenders has pursued a quixotic project of flying the torch for 3D art cinema, in both fiction and documentary, to varying success. He scored a notable hit with 2011’s Pina, about dance/performance innovator Pina Bausch; now he applies 3D technology to another challenging modern creator. Anselm is a portrait of eminent German artist Anselm Kiefer, exploring the man’s spectacular – and often spectacularly sombre – work. Wenders also delves into Kiefer’s biography and his political, historical and literary interests, which chime with the director’s own long-term fascinations to make this arguably the director’s most personal – and certainly most German – film in some time. Whatever the practical challenges faced by 3D cinema in the current climate, the film’s stark beauty and cultural richness should make Anselm a significant niche success theatrically and online.

Arguably the director’s most personal film in some time

One of two Wenders films in Cannes this year – along with competition title Perfect Days – Anselm is an elegant, sometimes visually extravagant attempt to evoke the imaginative world of Kiefer, born in 1945, and widely considered a titan of contemporary art. This is the second theatrical feature about him, following Sophie Fiennes’ 2010 doc Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, briefly extracted here. But while Fiennes focused on Kiefer’s work at his former base in Barjac, France, Wenders casts his net much wider, taking in Kiefer’s entire lifespan and his relation to German thought and history.

The film begins with a tour of sculptures based on white dresses, with ‘heads’ formed variously by spheres, sheaves of vegetation and the metal books that are a Kiefer trademark. It then follows Kiefer through his career, structured by his progression from studio to studio – from a dark wooden attic to increasingly vast hangars – and through years of copious productivity, through his international breakthrough in the 80s, up to his monumental installation last year at the Doge’s Palace, Venice.

Franz Lustig’s 3D 6K camerawork is marvellous at conveying the textures, abrasive materiality and sheer scale of Kiefer’s often monumental creations – including the huge, eerie space he created in Barjac, comprising tunnels, cavernous galleries, whole swathes of landscape. As we see Kiefer and assistants at work with molten metals, or blasting wall-size surfaces with fire or water, what’s striking is how industrial, indeed alchemical his methods are.

But it also becomes apparent from Kiefer’s comments in front of Wenders’ camera, and from sampled TV footage, just how much they are informed by complex thought; the film emphasises Kiefer’s debt to three major modern German writers: philosopher Martin Heidegger and poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. We learn how Kiefer’s invocation of Germany’s past led him to become a divisive figure at home, suspected of being a neo-Nazi, whereas critics abroad celebrated his confrontation of historical taboos. Overall, Kiefer’s fascination with mythological and theological thought, and commitment to the ideas and images of 19th century German Romanticism, clearly make him a kindred spirit to Wenders himself.

Wenders films Kiefer in various settings – cycling around his studio, perusing photos and documents or just mooching around in a black T-shirt. But even while Kiefer elaborates articulately, if sometimes abstrusely, on his ideas, the artist seems too introspective to emerge on screen as a truly characterful figure, his physical being somehow eclipsed by his austerely expansive mind. The film attempts to bring us closer to him by dramatising moments from his past: he is played as a younger man by his son Daniel Kiefer (not surprisingly, a dead ringer) and as a child by the director’s grand-nephew Anton Wenders. Some of these sequences are highly evocative, but a few involving the boy – notably his wonderstruck exploration of a historic palace – verge uncomfortably on kitsch.

Leonard Küssner’s score is complemented by contributions from composers Laurent Petitgand and René Aubry. Occasional excess lyricism and pizzicato jauntiness sometimes incongruously undermine the gravitas – although given the thoroughgoing severity of Kiefer’s worldview, some viewers may be only too relieved to hear the solemnity leavened a touch.