German-born artist Anselm Kiefer makes work of such monumental scale and tactile energy – using molten metal, glass, concrete, tree roots, straw and other organic material – that perhaps the only way to capture it cinematically is through 3D. Which is exactly the approach director Wim Wenders takes in his documentary Anselm, which premiered Wednesday in the Special Screenings section of the Cannes Film Festival.
“There’s a man who is not afraid to paint anything,” Wenders said of Kiefer as the legendary filmmaker made an appearance at Deadline’s Cannes Studio. “He can paint the universe and he can paint mathematic formula and he can paint history and he can paint myths, biology, alchemy. He’s not afraid of any of human knowledge to go into painting or sculpture. He can use the entire knowledge of mankind, mythical and scientific, in order to produce a painting that will reveal some of that.”
German mythology becomes a reference point in some of Kiefer’s work, including the story of Parzival, a medieval knight questing for the Holy Grail. Composer Richard Wagner turned the tale into an opera in the 19thcentury. The Nazis coopted some of the same myths – and Wagner’s music too – for their own propagandistic and nationalistic purposes. For that reason, it’s a dicey proposition for any artist to tread on similar ground, but Kiefer boldly “goes there.”
“The Nazis appropriated it, abused it really, like they abused a lot of artists, and Anselm had the audacity to reclaim it and said the fact that they used it doesn’t mean it’s unclean,” Wenders noted. “It means we have to liberate that art from that embrace, and we have to liberate history. The fact that the Nazis tried to rewrite history doesn’t mean history is now full of fascism. No. History is what it was, and they have absorbed it and taken it to use… for their services. But there’s a lot of poets and painters [Kiefer] can still look at. It’s not their fault that after their lives they’ve been abused. That’s freedom again, because if we want to be free of nationalism, we have to free all those others who were victims.”
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In 1969, Kiefer photographed himself provocatively giving a Nazi salute. The gesture was meant as a critique or commentary, not an endorsement of right-wing racist ideology, Wenders says (artist Joseph Beuys, who mentored Kiefer, had done something akin to that at a public occasion in 1964).
“Actually, at the time it was of course gloriously misunderstood in the ’60s and ’70s when he did these actions,” Wenders says of Kiefer. “People were not used to artists doing actions. There was no idea of installations or public performances. Joseph Beuys was one of the first. And that an artist puts himself into his uncle’s Nazi clothes and makes his Nazi salute — the first idea of people was, well, this must be a Nazi, but only in hindsight and finally more and more understood. It was a way to tell people, ‘You did this yourself 20 years ago or 25 years ago and you didn’t think about it and now there’s somebody dressing [up] and showing you something that you all thought was so cool and your mothers and fathers thought it was so cool. How can you forget this already?’”
Wenders added, “So, Anselm was a soldier of fighting against forgetness and not many people, in Germany at least, not many people were even ready. They had so much forgotten themselves that they actually hated the messenger.”
Anselm, which premiered in the Special Screenings section, is one of two films Wenders has at Cannes. Perfect Days, his narrative/fictional film, premieres in competition May 25.
Watch the conversation about Anselm in the video above.
