Anselm in 3-D
Wim Wenders makes 3-D movies like no others … this investigation of the life and work of the controversial artist Anselm Kiefer may be the most sophisticated use ever of stereoscopic cinema. The rough beauty of Kiefer’s work is reflected in Wenders’ filmmaking choices — he doesn’t just report on his subject, he merges with it. Paintings, sculptures, art installations are mounted on a vast scale … this isn’t a talking-head docu, but an artistic meditation on creativity, through one of the most successful artists alive.
Anselm
3-D Blu-ray
Janus Contemporaries
2023 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 93 min. / Anselm – Das Rauschen der Zeit / Street Date , 2024 / Available at Janus Contemporaries /
Starring: Anselm Kiefer, Daniel Kiefer, Anton Wenders.
Cinematography: Franz Lustig
Production Designers: Karin Betzler, Sebastian Soukup
Graphic Designer: Darius Ghanai
Costume Design and Supervisor: Heike Fademrecht
Visual Effects Supervisor: Kalle Max Hofmann
Film Editor: Maxine Goedicke
Original Music: Leonard Kußner
Produced by Karsten Brünig
Written and Directed by Wim Wenders
Janus Contemporaries is an offshoot label of Janus & Criterion that services worthy new releases. A recent title covered at CineSavant is the Christian Petzold’s excellent Afire. Unlike standard Criterion fare, Janus Contemporary discs may only include one extra, often a talk by the director. This new release is in the Blu-ray 3-D format, but is fully playable in flat 2-D Blu-ray as well.
We just reviewed Bwana Devil, the very first movie of the 1950’s 3-D craze; this 2023 movie ignores the fact that a more recent wave of 3-D popularity faded almost ten years ago. Filmmaker Wim Wenders is the last person to follow trends, although he’s started one or two. A solid member of the New German Cinema movement, Wenders has created a prodigious body of work — The American Friend, Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire, much of it filmed by his cameraman-colleague Robby Müller, who passed away in 2018.
Even more impressive is that Wim Wenders has retained control of almost all his feature film work. We got a first-hand glimpse at him when he hosted a 1997 special screening of his 3-movie version of Until the End of the World. He came off as easy-going and naturally savvy. Backers Warner Bros. had nixed Wenders’ elaborate plans for a 5-hour picture, forcing him to cut a theatrical release copy only about 2.5 hours long. To fulfill his studio contract, Wenders made a dupe negative at his own cost, to re-cut the contracted ‘digest version.’ Retaining all the original negative, he then finished his 3-movie cut as well, showed it only in special non-commercial screenings, and then waited decades for full rights to revert to his possession. Artistic and commercial integrity of that kind is rare — of such things are a super-cult made.
As with his collegue Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders never stopped making short films and full documentaries. One of his biggest theatrical hits is his music-oriented documentary Buena Vista Social Club, filmed on standard Betacam video. In 2011 he made Pina, an immersive presentation of dance concepts by choreographer Pina Bausch. 2009’s Avatar and several Pixar movies had launched a new wave of 3-D pictures, that died out due to studio mishandling and poor exhibition. Just the same, Wim Wenders thought 3-D the ideal format for the presentation of modern dance. Pina was produced in stunning digital 3-D, with artistic ambitions way beyond novelty gimmickry.
This year Wim Wenders is making big news with his Perfect Days, a highly rated blend of narrative, documentary and philosophical meditation. But last year he snuck out a second 3-D masterpiece, this time celebrating the works of a highly accomplished painter, sculptor and ‘installations’ artist. Anselm is a free-wheeling investigation into the life and work of Anselm Kiefer, one of the most successful German artists ever. It is not a conventional documentary, like Sophie Fiennes’ excellent 2010 film about Kiefer, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow. Wenders uses very little interview material or explanatory voiceovers. He employs cinematic devices (and 3-D depth) to show the world of the artist — his background, influences, his creative process. The show is one surprise after another, leading to a tour of the incredible constructions and installations the artist put together at a multi-acre art compound in rural France.
The film presents images of Anselm Kiefer’s ‘world’ at various stages of time. Not a great deal is explained in words, although text titles do come up directing us to various studios he worked at, in Germany in France, with a side trip to Venice. Wim Wenders’ prowling 3-D camera observes Anselm’s creations in what look like specially-staged situations, as with a sculpture of a dress with a flowing train, sitting in a forest clearing as the sun rises. We soon realize that these full-scale tableaux were not staged for the movie. Elsewhere in the compound, a series of rickety-looking but solid concrete towers rises above a vacant lot.
Much of the film centers at an estate in Barjac, France, where he turned an 86-acre plot of land that once housed a silk factory into a studio-museum called La Ribaute. Its many buildings house workshops and storage warehouses, but other structures and the surrounding forest are one enormous art installation. A key moment shows a down-angle on a large warehouse space (another location outside of Paris, we think), organized with large shelving and brackets holding Kiefer’s paintings. Then a human figure enters the and we realize that the space is at least three times bigger than we thought: everything Kiefer constructs or paints is enormous.
Anselm Kiefer creates on an industrial scale. A crew of workmen help Kiefer create his famous paintings. The artworks appear to be at least 15 feet tall and maybe 20 or so feet wide. He often works from photographs he has taken, but they are famous for incorporating earth, vegetation, pieces of wood, etc. We see him burning parts of paintings with a torch, with aides ready to extinguish the fires. On another ‘canvas’ he carefully pours molten lead. The film’s At Work sequences do not dominate the film. Kiefer often accompanies his works with scrawled words that may or may not be the title of the piece. Some of the ‘dress sculpture’ Femmes martyres installations at La Ribaute represent famous woman revolutionaries, like Charlotte Corday.
Whether outdoors or in buildings, Kiefer’s installations La Ribaute are a seemingly endless succession of ‘designed spaces.’ A couple of interiors resemble conventional galleries, ornate rooms suitable for a King Louis but dominated by those enormous, often disturbing paintings. Other spaces come across as fantastic movie sets for movies of the subconscious. A giant duct for the silk factory has been changed into a strange tunnel that would fit well into Tarkovsky’s Solaris. Another enormous concrete building contains giant ‘hills’ of earth that could be a set for the same director’s Stalker. No explanation is given — did Kiefer inherit some of these structures ‘as is’ from the silk factory? A multi-level pit going down who-knows-how-many floors is a warren of featureless concrete rooms (?). It makes us think of an enormous, dreamlike, multilevel film set constructed long ago for Federico Fellini’s Satyricon.
One concrete semi-ruin has retained a reinforced concrete floor. A large ragged hole in the middle reveals a view down to a lower level below. A Bosch-like complexity is present, but we’re also strongly reminded of a setting in Wenders’ own Wings of Desire, specifically, a similar ruin being used as a movie set about Nazis, the one starring Peter Falk. How much creative mental telepathy was going on between Kiefer and Wenders?
In between these ‘living exhibits’ come occasional episodes employing old film clips, visual aids that evoke a museum presentation. The first shows postwar images of a blasted German city being cleared of rubble, brick by brick. Numerous Kiefer artworks depict bleak, devastated landscapes.
The multimedia archival sequences connect this history to the artist’s personal background. Both Wim Wenders and Anselm Kiefer were born at the close of WW2. The works of both have presented a rebuilt Germany desperate to forget things that shouldn’t be forgotten. Kiefer courted controversy by publishing pictures of himself giving a Nazi salute, a gesture that had been made a crime. He also made art representing artists that had been co-opted by the Reich … not to celebrate Naziism but to liberate German culture from the Nazi shadow.
Vintage film images show a teenage Anselm Kiefer recieving an art prize and scholarship; his proposed project was to visit and work at places in France where Vincent Van Gogh painted. We see some of Kiefer’s sketches from the period, with images of sunflowers that crop up in his later paintings and installations, too. Seen in old footage as well as new 3-D sequences are Kiefer’s installations of hundreds of stacks of strange, oversized books, all mysteriously illustrated, kept on massive shelves. Does this forbidden library depict ‘unwanted’ history, or truths that someone wanted destroyed? Germans of Kiefer and Wenders’ generation know what utter obliteration means … there’s no guarantee that our world and its works are in any way permanent.
We are also given a quick audiovisual introduction to artists and thinkers that inspired Kiefer, like the controversial philosopher Martin Heidegger and the social theorist Joseph Beuys. Given the most emphasis is poet Paul Celan, a holocaust survivor with a short, haunted life. Anselm presents artworks inspired by Celan’s poem Todesfuge, which Kiefer recites. Also present, reciting her poem Exil in a vintage film clip, is Ingeborg Bachman, a poet and author who associated with Paul Celan and author Günter Grass.
For transitional scenes, Wenders restages scenes of Kiefer setting up certain artwork shots and moving from one studio to another. Anselm’s son Daniel Kiefer represents him at an earlier age, tooling down a country road in a Volkwagen beetle with rolled-up artworks on the roof. For even more evocative sequences, the director’s grand-nephew Anton Wenders plays Anselm as a young boy. In a loft bedroom, young Kiefer is inspired by the story of Jason and the Argonauts. Wim Wenders uses him as a figurative Anselm alter-ego, a memory creation roaming the giant galleries of his own work. ‘Young Anselm’ investigates strange rooms, climbing down rope ladders like a boy explorer in a Jules Verne fantasy by Karel Zeman. Drifting through the galleries and finally meeting ‘himself,’ this young Anselm also reminds us a bit of the boy in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining … in a less sinister context.
Anselm vividly communicates the forces driving an influential artist. Wim Wenders’ accomplishes this with a cinematic approach in harmony with Kiefer’s own mostly nonverbal, visually aggressive artworks. The movie is like a tour through an art gallery, in which every new turn reveals a new discovery. The 3-D images are conceived and executed like little artworks, as with the opening view of one of the Femme martyre statues in the forest. The delicate detail of color and light is almost overwhelming. A camera move is timed to concur with dawn peeking through the trees — a light that seems bright and alive in 3-D. (Top Image) ↑ Much of the rest of the film’s ‘3-D scape’ impresses us with the scale of Anselm Kiefer’s works, his shops, and his warehouses. No starving artist, he is one of a few individual creatives who sells works for astronomical figures. That much is obvious, seeing how the artist can indulge his private artistic whim project of transforming a rural factory into his giant La Ribaute studio/museum compound.
Did Wim Wenders make any other 3-D movies? Between this one and his earlier Pina, his work is already at the top of the list of features that explore 3-Dimensional cinema for artistic purposes, in this case, showcasing the achievements of great artists. Pina is 3-D in action, and Anselm is a gloriously ornate study in meditative appreciation.
Janus Contemporaries’ 3-D Blu-ray of Anselm will bowl over anyone with a sliver of an interest in 1) great art, 2) the potential of 3-D cinematography, or 3) the fine artistry of Wim Wenders himself. Seen in Blu-ray 3-D, it jumps out as one of the most attractive discs we’ve seen this year. Cameraman Franz Lustig manages the achievement of making images that are jaw-droppingly beautiful yet simultaneously unfussy. We’re told that clever digital effects help with the storytelling, but everything has an organic look. Some historical footage from archives are seen on vintage televisions, or are rephotographed projections onto a slightly-billowing curtain. Interiors are rich and exterior views of artworks are clearly captured at special times of day. The moving camera helps with the feeling of being in a 3-D continuum, not a diorama box with planes of focus.
The presentation is not a full special edition. The keep case has one 3-D Blu-ray disc and one 2-D Blu-ray. Both contain the film, a welcome featurette-talk with Wim Wenders, and a trailer.
The picture content is basically the same in 2-D, but naturally without the immersive experience. Until the industry again makes 3-D Blu-ray fully available, those without home setups might keep their antennae tuned to hear of special 3-D screenings, perhaps in repertory theaters or museums. Anselm and Pina would make a sensational double bill.
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Anselm
3-D Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Featurette Meet the Filmmakers with director Wim Wenders
Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: July 24, 2024
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Text © Copyright 2024 Glenn Erickson
I’ve seen both “Pina” and “Anselm” in 3D at The Academy Museum. Their 3D presentations are flawless. I’ve had the Criterion 3D Blu-ray of “Pina” for a few years and just got “Anselm” this week. I’m looking forward to watching it again.
Wenders directed a drama, Every Thing Will Be Fine, in 2015. It was shot in 3D and released in Germany by Warner Bros. His use of 3D to emphasize spatial and psychological relationships enhances the drama.