93 min | NR | December 8, 2023 | Sideshow / Janus Films
Wim Wenders builds a 3D portrait of Anselm Kiefer, the German painter who turns lead, ash, and straw into monuments to his country’s buried history. The camera does not explain the work. It walks inside it.
Anselm Kiefer makes enormous paintings out of lead, ash, straw, and dried sunflowers. Wim Wenders films him at work in cavernous studios in France, where Kiefer treats whole buildings as canvas. The film is a documentary, but it refuses the talking-head format that documentaries about artists usually adopt. It is really about how a German born in the rubble of 1945 spends his life dragging his country’s buried history back into the light. Kiefer paints the ruins of the Reich and the myths it stole. Wenders builds a film that lets you stand inside that obsession.
Anselm Kiefer plays himself as an old man who moves through his own work without sentiment. He rides a bicycle through warehouse-sized installations and scorches his canvases with a flamethrower. Daniel Kiefer plays the artist as a young man, staging the early provocations that made his name. He recreates the photographs in which Kiefer performs the Nazi salute in front of European landmarks, a deliberate act meant to force Germany to look at what it wants to forget. Anton Wenders plays Anselm as a child, wandering the wreckage of the postwar landscape that shapes everything that follows. The reconstructions never feel like dress-up because Wenders keeps them silent and observational.
Wim Wenders writes and directs in 3D, and the format is the argument of the film. The camera glides past Kiefer’s canvases close enough to read the cracked lead and the texture of burned paint. Depth turns the paintings into terrain you could walk across. Wenders moves between the present and the reconstructed past without title cards or narration to mark the seams. The score leans on low drones and sparse piano that let the images breathe. Sound design treats the studio as a physical space, where footsteps and wind carry weight that dialogue would otherwise have to supply.
Anselm works because Wenders trusts the art to speak and trusts the audience to keep up. The film does not explain what Kiefer’s paintings mean or rank them or build a case for his importance. It puts you in the room and lets the scale do the work. Wenders has spent decades making films about people who see the world differently, and here he finds a subject whose entire practice is an act of looking. The result is a portrait of an artist that becomes an argument about memory itself. It asks what a nation does with its worst history, and it answers by refusing to look away.