David R. Walker

Archive for June 1st, 2025

Anselm

Director: Wim Wenders

Cast: Anselm Kiefer

Running Time: 1 hour and 33 minutes

Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Language: German with English Subtitles

Festival: Encounters Documentary Film Festival – Johannesburg, Cape Town

Please note this film is a documentary.

Oscar nominated German film maker Wim Wenders who directed the critically acclaimed Buena Vista Social Club in 1999 returns to the documentary format in his new avant-garde film simply titled Anselm focusing in an unusual way on the work of Neo-Expressionist contemporary German artist and sculptor Anselm Kiefer who will not be very well known in the English Speaking world.

Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 just as the Third Reich came crashing down and grew up in a post war Germany which was divided and mistrusted by the rest of Europe. His fame grew in the art world when he created these massive mixed media paintings featuring oil, lead, woodcut, shellac and other materials with names like The Brandenburg March 1974 and Painting the Burnt Earth also created in 1974. The artist also produced the beautiful wood carving in 1978 entitled The Way of the World’s Wisdom: The Battle of Tuetoburg Forest.

Becoming extremely famous in Germany in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Anselm Kiefer also represented Germany at the Venice Biennale art fair in 1980 through his Neo-expressionistic works.

What better film director to create a vivid and fascinating documentary about Anselm’s life than Wim Wenders.

Wenders started off his film career making art house classic films like 1984’s Paris, Texas starring Harry Dean Stanton and the fabulous Natassja Kinski and 1987’s Wings of Desire with Bruno Ganz.

After the 1997 film The End of Violence starring Andie Macdowell and Gabriel Byrne, Wenders made the ground breaking Oscar nominated documentary The Buena Vista Social Club and effortlessly switched to documentaries.

In Anselm, Wenders creates a complex portrait of an artist who is now 80 years old and living within his own art installation in Barjac, South of France after initially producing his work in Waldurn in Germany.

Anselm’s preoccupation with Germany’s own post World War II recovery as a country and of restoring a sense of national pride amidst a sense of anger and blame is evident in his conceptually ambitious paintings which all speak to a protest against forgetting. This artist went around Europe and photographed himself doing the Heil Hitler salute in various key European sites. Very brave and contentious.

As a documentary, Anselm is an intriguing post-modern approach to a complicated artist whose life as a young boy, as an emerging artist and now as an established artist is expertly told through the lens of Wim Wenders who creates an elegant tribute to a contemporary German art legend, whose works feature in major galleries around the world from Venice to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Anselm is a beautiful and thought-provoking documentary which is recommended viewing for contemporary art lovers. Anselm gets a film rating of 7.5 out of 10 and is worth seeing although I would suggest that potential viewers read up about this artist’s life and work.

As usual auteur director Wim Wenders never disappoints.