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Anselm review – Wim Wenders’ reverent 3D portrait of artist Anselm Kiefer
news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 17 May - 15:33 · 1 minute
The director’s serious examination of the German artist’s life and work has an architectural quality as it moves around some monumental art – and studios
Wim Wenders brings a certain awe, or even shock, or even a kind of reverently docu-dramatised PTSD to his film about the German artist Anselm Kiefer. The creator of paintings, photographs, colossal installations and illustrated book artefacts is celebrated but in some quarters criticised for his engagement with German fascism and the Holocaust, mediated through his lifelong love for the poetry of Paul Celan. The film shows us his work in all its giganticism, with minimal archival interview material, though there are some fancifully conceived but successfully executed fantasy scenes of the artist in boyhood and young adulthood. The title perhaps intends the use of his first name not in any relaxed way, but in a style comparable to Leonardo or Michelangelo.
This is a film which Wenders presents in 3D, just as he did with his study of Pina Bausch in 2011 – the effect of the three dimensions there was to accentuate the physicality of the dancers. Here it has a more architectural effect, especially when we are in Kiefer’s studio areas, such as his huge 40-hectare atelier site La Ribaute in Barjac, near Nîmes in the south of France, which, with all its huge exhibition spaces and sculpture gardens is virtually this creator’s own city state. The 3D delineates the vast forms and monumental structures that loom up and out of the screen: we are immersed in this place in the way visitors would be, maybe even more so, as the camera is mounted on drones and platforms, and the film always encourages you go into cathedral-rubbernecker mode.
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