“Art is an attempt to get to the very centre of truth. It never can, but it can get quite close,” Anselm Kiefer has said. Director legend Wim Wenders’ recent personal documentary is about one of the greatest sculptors and painters of our time, Kiefer, who creates massive artworks.
Fortunately for the viewer, Wenders is in the driver’s seat. Far away are the paralysing mannerisms of conventional personal documentaries and the semi-dry “talking heads.” Wenders responds to art with art. Therefore, for an art lover, it is rewarding to watch: at the center are art and its creator, not an attempt to explain them.
In the photographs, within “protest against forgetting,” Kiefer stands in his father’s Wehrmacht uniform, right arm outstretched. Many intellectuals, says Kiefer, do not always in their quick judgments ask what they themselves would have done during the time of Nazi Germany. The purpose of the photographs is to remind of a history that, according to the artist born in 1945, Germany has tried to bury in oblivion.
Kiefer has been inspired by both Martin Heidegger’s philosophy and Paul Celan’s poetry, but above all by Vincent van Gogh. We hear Celan’s poetry being recited by himself. The magnificent music of Leonard Küßner plays throughout the film.
Joonas Nykänen