Bad artist documentaries—there are many of them—breed the myth of the lone great artist, the genius who works in isolation, without the help of studio assistants, to conjure up masterpieces. Anselm, Wim Wenders’s flimsy new film, now transposes that myth onto Anselm Kiefer, the German painter and sculptor whose persona hardly needs to be built up any more than it already has.
This documentary, which was shot partly using 3D cameras, is set mainly in two palatial French towns where Kiefer has set up shop: Barjac, the southern commune where he has erected a 98-acre compound that functions as an art installation in its own right, and Croissy-Beaubourg, the Parisian suburb where he currently runs a massive studio for his oversize art. Wenders, like many others who have visited those places, is clearly in awe of what Kiefer has done at both.
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At many points in Anselm, Wenders’s camera sweeps around Kiefer’s many creations at Barjac. At dawn, it romantically encircles Kiefer’s steel sculptures of dresses, sans wearers; sometimes they are outfitted with objects like open books or metal globes for heads. In the fog, it traces Kiefer as he walks amid a suite of his towers that rise high into the air. On a sunny day, it floats godlike above it all, revealing the vast compound in all its glory.
Rarely, if ever, does Wenders show anyone other than Kiefer traipsing through Barjac, which dates back to the Renaissance. Perhaps that makes sense, given that the compound, known as La Ribaute, only opened to the public last year. (It’s also a two-hour drive from Marseille, not exactly a tourist destination itself.) But Wenders’s choice to depict a solitary Kiefer affirms this cloying film’s belief in the artist as a powerful soloist without really interrogating that line of thinking.
Witness the scenes set in Croissy-Beauborg, where Kiefer is shown creating paintings so big, they must be wheeled around. Most times, Kiefer is shown alone, slopping chunky paint onto his vast landscapes.
Yet it takes roughly half the film’s runtime to realize that Kiefer actually gets a good bit of help. We finally see assistants doing the hard stuff—melting down lead and gathering straw for Kiefer to apply to his canvases. Wenders, clearly fascinated by the artist’s sinewy body and the muscular prowess seemingly required to create such gigantic work, trains his attention mainly on Kiefer, who, donning a uniform of a black T-shirt, wields a flamethrower on these paintings to scorch them. Mostly not pictured: the people who help put out the fires, so that the works don’t burn to a crisp.
Some would prefer those paintings to be set ablaze entirely. Within the German art world, and in some cases beyond, Kiefer has been a controversial figure. During the ’80s, when his career was at its peak, Kiefer was criticized for resuscitating ideas and themes held up by the Nazis—the philosophies of Martin Heidegger, a faith in the German landscape. It did not help that Kiefer did a performance series during the ’60s in which he visited famous sites and photographed himself doing the Nazi salute while wearing his father’s Wehrmacht uniform. In 1975, art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh famously quipped that Kiefer was a fascist who thought he was an antifascist.
Wenders’s film does not elide these accusations. He features old interviews from around the time that Kiefer represented Germany at the 1980 Venice Biennale, where he showed his gigantic landscapes displaying barren fields. Were these works, with their emphasis on the greatness of the German landscape, a variation on a Nazi theme? Not quite, Kiefer tells a German journalist. “Because I was born in 1945, I have the chance to take up the subject again,” he says. Wenders doesn’t press it further.
In fact, he doesn’t press much with Kiefer, who rarely speaks on camera with Wenders. To its credit, Anselm is not a talking head–style documentary because it doesn’t have much talking at all. Twenty minutes passes before Kiefer’s voice is even heard; much of the musings about his art are intoned in a breathy, dense voiceover primarily by the artist. Instead, Wenders works observationally, conjuring the same melancholy struck through with awe that Kiefer does in the footage of him at work, sometimes in darkened spaces where he paints over images projected onto the canvas.
There are other artsy flourishes too. Anselm is being released in 3D, a format Wenders has used previously in the excellent 2011 documentary Pina, about choreographer Pina Bausch. But whereas Pina makes good use of its extra dimension to make the dancing feel more immersive, Anselm mainly feels like a further attempt to monumentalize its subject, not that he really needs it. (There are plenty of shots of Kiefer’s art in close-up, by the way, but his paintings, flat as their ideas may be, don’t require the added depth to make clear just how textured their surfaces are.)
Then there are the reenactments, which see actors playing Kiefer at multiple stages in his life. In one, a young-ish Kiefer traverses a snowy field and snaps a picture with his camera. That picture then becomes a painting that stands for a lot: the coldness of the West German psyche, the untappable past hidden beneath the snow, maybe even the Blood and Soil metaphor used by the Nazis. Wenders’s reimagining of Kiefer’s process is meant to portray his tortured mindset. But the scene comes off as overly fraught, weighted down by the same baggage that many have claimed hinders Kiefer’s art.
Wenders’s point, perhaps, is really that Kiefer cannot run away from history. Neither ought we as viewers, Wenders seems to suggest, because the past is all around us, even when we can’t see it. Spoiler alert: by the film’s end, the actors playing Kiefer commune with the artist himself in expressive interludes set at Venice’s Palazzo Strozzi, where, in 2022, he memorably mounted his paintings floor to ceiling. But if we must return to the past, is it not too much to hope for something new to be said about it? The myths peddled in Anselm are the same ones that have been repeated over and over about Kiefer. Then again, maybe this is the point. Wenders includes footage from 1991, shot on the occasion of a Neue Nationalgalerie show in Berlin, in which an interviewer asks Kiefer if he’s retreating into falsehoods about German history. “There is no such thing as escaping into myth,” Kiefer tersely responds. “Because myth is present.”