When Wim Wenders looks at Anselm Kiefer, it is also Germany that looks at itself. They were both born at the end of World War II. Anselm Kiefer, March 8, 1945 in Donaueschingen, a town in the Black Forest, Baden-Württemberg. Wim Wenders, August 14, 1945 in Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia, on the Rhine. The same age, the same culture, two perfectionist temperaments, serious beyond reason, anchored in history, but very different. One is a filmmaker, master of a romanticism that is sometimes expressionist (Wings of Desire, 1987), sometimes elliptical and haunting (Paris Texas, 1984), always nostalgic.
The other is a total artist who has built his universe around his painting, haunted by History and the voice of poets, making his workshops in Barjac, near Nîmes, and Croissy-Beaubourg, in Seine-et -Marne, the very first of his works. The meeting of the two gives Anselm (The Sound of Time), a rather silent, majestic and tender film about a biting, ironic and impatient artist. Anselm (The Sound of Time) begins with a waltz of the camera around a sculpture by Kiefer, a sort of theatrical wedding dress which would have lost its heroine, abandoned there, in the nature of Barjac, like “Nausicaa with white arms” on the island of the Phoenicians in The Odyssey.
The 3D, chosen by the filmmaker, gives an extraordinary volume to this introduction, something magical in the emerging light of day. “3D allows the viewer to have this experience of traveling with their eyes. 3D shows more than cinema has ever shown. It’s your brain that creates the space, the screen is flat, explains the filmmaker. His life responds to his places. Kiefer’s workshops, even abandoned, remained works. Anselm, as a child, always wanted to understand. I always wanted to leave.” From the foreground, which refers to Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1947), to the dream which transforms Kiefer into a funny tightrope walker, all of Wenders is there.
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As in a tale, the story is reduced to three characters. Anselm today, 78 years old, shaved hair, thin as a dancer, dressed in strict black, who crosses his studio in Croissy by bike and commands the operations when it comes to burning the branches placed on his immense formats. A young, disheveled and argumentative Anselm, who responds to the scandal caused in 1969 by his paintings, photos and performances aping the Nazi salute to force the German people to renounce oblivion. He is Olympian calm. He is reincarnated on screen by his son, Daniel Kiefer, who walks the snowy furrows of the Odenwald, the very subjects of his dark painting, like the one which was exhibited at the Pantheon in 2021.
Anselm as a child is resurrected by the young Anton Wenders, the filmmaker’s great-nephew, who diligently plays this son of the Wehrmacht officer in Anselm’s real room. After unsuccessful searches, he was chosen for “his open eyes, his curiosity and his Baden-Württemberg accent”. A chapter worthy of Hergé’s clear line, much criticized by Kiefer’s Parisian friends, resistant to this time machine. The last shot of the film, as romantic as a Caspar David Friedrich painting, shows Anselm and the child together on the banks of the Rhine.
“At the beginning, there was only Anselm and I started filming with Anselm alone, in Barjac, in winter,” defends Wim Wenders, in perfect French. I went back there in the summer. We filmed a few months later in Croissy and I realized, after ten days of filming, that I only had a small percentage of what I could have done. So, over two and a half years, we ended up filming seven times, in ten-day sessions. In the meantime, I went up and up, to find out what I was missing. Anselm told me many things about his youth and his years as an unknown painter in the Odenwald. His son, Daniel, accompanied him a lot, sitting on the easel. He was the only witness to the attic of the school where Anselm had his workshop, he knew his way of photographing, of living, of moving. I convinced him to play his father. Anselm didn’t know that. He called him crazy, but gave me carte blanche. He didn’t want to know what I was shooting. He just told me: I don’t want to read anything, know anything, you have to surprise me!”
The Note of Figaro: 2.5/4
See also: “Anselm Kiefer. Photography at the beginning”, at the LaM in Villeneuve-d’Ascq (59), until March 3, 2024.