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Anselm
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The career of director Wim Wenders has wobbled badly since Until the End of the World (1991), wandering between corny fictions (Land of Plenty, 2004) and sanctimonious documentaries (Pope Francis: A Man of His Word, 2018). Glimmers of hope for diehard fans of his 1970s classics (Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road) are few and far between: Buena Vista Social Club (1999) and Pina (2011) have genuine qualities, Don’t Come Knocking (2005) has some lovely moments, but none of them can hold a candle to his last major, fully cohesive work, Wings of Desire (1987). What a surprise, then, when Wenders shunted back on track in 2023 with the one-two punch at Cannes of the delicately fictional Perfect Days, plus (less impressively) an imaginative documentary-portrait of German artist Anselm Kiefer. As in Pina, Wenders uses 3D to bring to life the vast studios in which Kiefer works, and to emphasise (with an ever-roving camera) the material layers of the artist’s canvases and sculptural installations. Other affectations – such as stylised, biographical re-enactments featuring Kiefer’s son and Wenders’s grand-nephew – are less successful, if always easy on the eye. There’s an odd gender tussle going on across Anselm. On the one hand, apart from a few old photos of a dear Mother, women are entirely absent from Wenders’s depiction of the artist in his past as in his present. (Hauling around these giant, heavy works, and hosing down the ones that Kiefer gingerly sets aflame, seems to be very manly work: every assistant we glimpse is male.) On the other hand, as if struck by a crisis of conscience, Wenders occasionally inserts on the soundtrack, by way of compensation, staged voices of spectral women whispering eternal complaints about patriarchy, and he superimposes a 1961 clip of the great Ingeborg Bachmann reciting a pained, melancholic poem. But such (re)conciliatory gestures are never enough! Wenders sincerely intends the film as a gateway to appreciating the artist’s work – and a means to ‘immerse’ (the contemporary artworld’s damn favourite word in an age of ‘immediacy’!) ourselves in it as viewers. By the end, however, it generates an undoubtedly unintended, contrary effect. Anyone who is or aspires to be a regular artist can only gaze enviously – or in rage – at the immense, indeed obscene level of privilege exhibited by Kiefer (rated among the ‘1,001 richest individuals in Germany’ according to Wikipedia) in his unlimited access to real estate and expensive materials. When he turns the grounds of his former workspace into the Eschaton Foundation (also featuring, according to the institution’s website, the work of ‘5 other artists’ – how kind of him!), we intuit – beyond all the public blather about alchemy and natural decay – that Kiefer has ingeniously laid the grounds for his own immortality. (Something that Wenders is working hard to secure for himself, too, via the Foundation set up in his name.) In this regard, Wenders picks up and amplifies a specific motif from Kiefer’s art: a figure (representing Anselm) lying flat on the ground, looking up. Maybe he’s contemplating the cosmos. Or taking the opportunity afforded by his vast wealth to kick back, relax and have a snooze. Or perhaps he’s already dead, and somehow enjoying posthumous fame as an eternal monument to himself. MORE Wenders: The Brothers Skladanowsky, The End of Violence, Hammett, The Blues, The Million Dollar Hotel, Paris, Texas © Adrian Martin October 2024 |
