Maybe 10 or 15 minutes in, I thought to myself how much I was enjoying a documentary that was stylistically 180 degrees from Ken Burns. Rather than hearing an omniscient narrator telling me things about German artist Anselm Kiefer, I was seeing his sculpture and paintings in glorious 3D and watching as he goes about his day in his studio.
I'd never heard of Kiefer but I think Wim Wenders does him justice here with a look at his art, which seems to come in one size only - large scale. Themes of German history and the Holocaust are prominent and inspiration comes from the poems of Paul Celan, another artist whom I'd never heard of until seeing this movie.
Anselm is a mix of styles. In some scenes, we see Kiefer at work in his outsized studio which is in a former brick factory. All that space is needed to create his pieces which are usually rather large. Does the size confront the viewer? Or is it meant to make the viewer feel dwarfed or, perhaps, overwhelmed? In others, the camera examines some of his art installations. At first we see them from afar, in toto, the voyeuristic camera hovering just outside their confines. It then gracefully moves into the installation and through them, stopping briefly to let us see the individual statues before moving onto the next one.
There are also reenactments showing us Kiefer as a boy and as a younger man as well as staged scenes in the present day, such as those with the artist taking a break and lying down with a volume of Celan's poetry.
But we don't get much straightforward info about the man or his work. There's no sense of working through his career chronologically with various periods where a certain media is used and/or a prominent theme emerges.
Just a wonderful mix of scenes that add up to an intriguing, impressionistic portrait of Anselm Kiefer.
The 3D brought the art to life, gave it an immediacy, and made me wish I'd seen Wenders' Pina, a previous documentary also shot for 3D.
Many thanks to UW Cinematheque for hosting the screening.
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