Anselm

Anselm

German film maker Wim Wenders is now in his seventy-ninth year and hotter than ever. His meditative, warm, “Perfect Days” is set in Tokyo, and it’s about a trash collector there in late middle age. It seems to be his best fictional narrative feature in quite some time for dogs’ ages all around. In the US anyhow, it follows one of Wenders’ always odd documentaries (indeed he has seemed much more reliably prolific in this mode over the past two decades or so). This one is on the great and perhaps forgiving artist Anselm Kiefer. And boy does he make a lot of art.

Kiefer was born in 1945. The war ended six months later; Donauschingen, his home town, was severely bombed. A child art prodigy of sorts, he started out in a conceptual rather than figural vein: “Heroic Figures,” an early project from 1969 or thereabouts, consists of photographs showing the artist giving a “Seig Heil” salute at various locations around Germany.

This sort of thing got him into trouble. Later Kiefer created big work about the metaphysics of fascism and war out of organic materials like straw and hair on huge canvases that were then burned. He uses the same technique on his handmade books, each page as thick as a brick or two. The guiding texts are often poems by Holocaust survivor Paul Celan; dense lines suffused with quiet grief.

It would take a pretty dense person to see any pro-Nazi sentiment or even nostalgia for once upon a time when that would have been possible anything other than deeply anti-fascist about Kiefer’s work (he himself is not unsophisticated: you don’t leave this portrait particularly impressed by the man’s modesty), but there are many such people around and they condemn him anyway; at which he responds in what can only be called an elliptical manner.

How does Wenders depict this guy? In 3D. Over the years the director has worked with exemplary acuity, if not always great success, in this shooting format for documentaries (the thrilling dance picture “Pina,” about choreographer Pina Bausch) and at least one fiction film (the odd “The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez,” an adaptation of a stage work by his “Wings of Desire” co-scenarist Peter Handke).

Here it gives an illusion of tactility to Kiefer’s often-outdoor installation art a powerful blend of near-conventional sculpture and earthworks. You see the artist biking around cavernous studios, dwarfed by stark dark visions. Cinematographer Franz Lustig’s 3D camera is unusually mobile; you have a sense of floating before the work. We also see younger versions of Kiefer himself in dramatized scenes as played by Daniel Kiefer, the artist’s son, when he was in his 20s; and Anton Wenders, the director’s great-nephew, as a boy standing or sitting or taking things in in wide-shot landscapes

These reenactments show one thing: Kiefer was born at a time when people were expected to walk through the past every day but never discuss it. In some ways, then, Kiefer’s mind was made up for him: he decided as an artist not to talk about anything else.

There is some archival footage used in this film, but it is not a documentary that seeks to explain Kiefer through criticism or personal anecdote. There are no interviews with people who knew him when he was young or critics who championed his work before anyone else did. However, this does not come off as evasive on Wenders’ part.

The director chooses instead to illuminate indirectly, and so forces us to ask our own questions about what we’re seeing and why it’s important. The only frustrating thing about the movie is Wenders’ decision to elide money; everything in it appears to have sprung full-blown from Kiefer’s skull, which of course is not the case. It is fair to wonder how such an ambitious vision gets funded but like many art world documentaries, “Anselm” seems almost snobbishly unwilling even to bring up the fact that artists need money too.

Watch Anselm For Free On Gomovies.