Anselm - das Rauschen der Zeit / Anselm (3-D) (revisited, Helsinki, 2024)

 

Wim Wenders: Anselm - das Rauschen der Zeit / Anselm (DE 2023). 

Anselm [Finland] / Anselm [Sweden].

    Master format: 6K - Source format: 6K dual-strip 3-D - colour and black and white - 1.50:1 - release format: 4K DCP.

    Finnish premiere: 28 June 2024, released by ELKE, 3D version with English subtitles, 2D version with Finnish subtitles, 2D version with Swedish subtitles.

    Viewed in the 3D version with English subtitles at Finnkino Tennispalatsi 10, Helsinki, 10 Aug 2024.

I first blogged about Anselm on 1 Sep 2023. While watching I knew I soon want to see it again.

In Anselm, Wim Wenders for the first time takes stock of German history. It is like he has waited all his life for the right approach to do justice to the enormity of the subject.

The approach is art documentary. Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, those friends and lovers long gone, are key witnesses, reading their poems in extenso in archival inserts. They are soulmates and fellow travellers for Anselm Kiefer, the protagonist.

I have returned to Adorno's "poetry after Auschwitz" question on the occasion of my most powerful art experiences this year: a Mark Rothko exhibition and the film noir dimension in an Anthony Mann retrospective.

Anselm the movie is all about it, too: the life's work of Anselm Kiefer, and the fellow poets Celan and Bachmann.

The risk is to be crushed under the heaviness, and there are moments where Wenders's view of the demiurge creator is on the verge of the bombastic.

The suspense stems from our anxiety: will Wenders survive the challenge? Humour and comedy are not his strengths, but a sense of play is, and that is his way of transcendence on this passionate journey into German history and the artists' struggle to make sense of it.

Having overcome my concerns over demiurge poses and bombastic moments I'm thrilled by the grandeur. Wenders is known for intimism, but he excels also in the epic. I belong to the admirers of even Bis ans Ende der Welt, to say nothing about Der Himmel über Berlin and Das Salz der Erde.

Anselm raises a lot of questions, thoughts and associations. One of the most important is the end of art, The Question in art criticism since WWI. Traditional categories of aesthetics, valid since classical antiquity, turned meaningless in 1914-1918. What we have is no longer about the beautiful and the sublime.

In the modern and the post-modern eras it is not wrong to speak about Anti-Art or Negative Aesthetics. Also in the wastelands in Anselm Kiefer's monumental work. Such is his horror mirror.

Wim Wenders is a master of 3-D, and 3-D is essential to the vision of Anselm Kiefer and Wim Wenders. The 3-D projection at Tennispalatsi was brilliant and perfect. Viewing the film today I again felt the urge to revisit it soon.

BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: MY PROGRAM NOTE FOR LOVE AND ANARCHY, THE HELSINKI FILM FESTIVAL:

BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: MY PROGRAM NOTE FOR LOVE AND ANARCHY, THE HELSINKI FILM FESTIVAL:

CAPSULE IN FINNISH:

Vuonna 2023 Wim Wendersille osui tuplajättipotti, kaksi vastakkaista mestariteosta: intiimi Perfect Days ja monumentaalinen Anselm Kiefer -dokumentti, joka on myös kaikkien aikojen parhaita taiteilijamuotokuvia.

PROGRAM NOTE IN FINNISH:

Ensi kertaa urallaan Wim Wenders tekee tiliä Saksan historiasta, ja on kuin hän olisi koko ikänsä etsinyt oikeaa lähestymistapaa siihen. Kun se nyt on löytynyt, tuloksena on muotokuvadokumentti taiteilija Anselm Kieferistä. Wenders ja Kiefer syntyivät molemmat vuonna 1945 toisen maailmansodan raunioilla, Reinin vastakkaisilla rannoilla. Daniel Kiefer ja Anton Wenders esittävät Anselmia nuorena. Anselm Kiefer on aikamme suurimpia taiteilijoita, mutta Suomessa hänen monumentaalista tuotantoaan on harvoin tarjolla. Wendersin elokuva antaa meille siis kaivatun katsauksen Kieferistä kaikilla vuosikymmenillä ja monissa maissa. Seuraamme henkeäsalpaavaa luomistyötä, jossa mittakaavana on esimerkiksi lentokone. Ateljeet on kustomoitu oikeista tehtaista. Haasteena on hahmottaa henkistä ja aineellista katastrofia, joka käynnistyi Saksassa Weimarin tasavallan jälkeen. Kieferin innoittajat, runoilijat Paul Celan ja Ingeborg Bachmann esiintyvät arkistoinserteissä, samoin taiteilija Joseph Beuys ja filosofi Martin Heidegger, joka vältti menneisyyden kohtaamista. Anselm on Wendersin parhaita teoksia, ja se kohoaa parhaiden taiteilijamuotokuvien joukkoon siinä missä Picasso – mysteeri, Andrei Rublev ja Hän rakasti elämää.

PROGRAM NOTE:

For the first time on his career, Wim Wenders settles accounts with German history, and it feels like all his life he had sought for the right approach. Now he has found it in art documentary, and the subject is Anselm Kiefer. Wenders and Kiefer were both born in 1945 on the ruins of the second world war, on opposite banks of the Rhine. Daniel Kiefer and Anton Wenders portray Anselm as a youngster. Anselm Kiefer is one of the greatest contemporary artists, but in Finland his monumental works are seldom on display. Wenders’s movie thus provides a much needed overview of Kiefer on all his decades and many countries. We are invited to follow breathtaking processes of creation in which the scale can be for instance that of an airplane. His ateliers have been customized from actual factories. The challenge is to make sense of the spiritual and material catastrophe launched in Germany after the Weimar Republic. Kiefer’s great inspirers, the poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, appear in archival footage, as well as the artist Joseph Beuys and the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who avoided facing the past. Anselm is one of Wenders’s greatest works, and it is one of the cinema’s finest portraits of an artist along with Le Mystère Picasso, Andrei Rublev and Lust for Life.

CAPSULE:

In 2023, Wim Wenders brought us a double whammy, two completely different masterpieces: the intimate Perfect Days and a monumental documentary on Anselm Kiefer, which is also one of the best ever portraits of an artist.