Anselm: Hope Remains for 3D as an Art Form, Especially When the Subject is Art

By Chris Knight

Rating: A-

If I asked you to name the best 3D filmmaker working today, you might instinctively reach for James Cameron, who practically reinvented the technology for his two Avatar movies to date.

Or you might gravitate to Ridley Scott, who shot several of his films, including Prometheus and The Martian, with 3D cameras.

But to my mind, it’s Wim Wenders, who has now made four films using the technique. They include the luminous 2011 documentary Pina, about the dance company of Pina Bausch, and two dramas: 2015’s Every Thing Will Be Fine (saw it and loved it) and 2016’s The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez (missed it and heard it was bad).

His newest Anselm is another documentary, which might be the genre to which 3D is the most natural fit.

His subject, Anselm Kiefer, is a German painter, sculptor and philosopher, and Wenders’ contemporary. They were born just five months apart in 1945, on either side of the fall of the Third Reich.

That historical happenstance looms large in Kiefer’s work, which often deals with themes of German history and the horror of the Holocaust, and is heavily influenced by the writings of Paul Celan, a Romanian Jewish poet. (Kiefer himself was raised Catholic but has made a study of Judaism.)

His work is large-scale, so big that we see him riding a bicycle from one piece to another inside a warehouse big enough to hide the Ark of the Covenant.

This setting also allows Wenders to play a trick of perspective on the viewer. When we first look at the space, empty of people, there is no sense of scale, and the paintings might be postcards. Then a new piece of art slides into the frame, and when we finally spy the tiny worker pushing it, we realize it’s the size of a billboard.

Anselm isn’t quite as accessible as Pina, which spent much of its runtime merely capturing the dancers doing their routines in unusual places, including a suspension railway. In contrast, this new doc spends time trying to get into the mind of the man who grew up amid the rubble of a defeated military power, and who has at times tried awkwardly to reclaim philosophers whom the Nazis fêted for their own shallow reasons.

But even this Kiefer neophyte found much to enjoy. We witness the artist at work, his process seemingly equal parts creation and destruction, as he wields a flamethrower or uses molten metal to create texture and relief in a work.

And we see the finished product, as the camera takes a stately pass past sculptures and paintings, delivering a real you-are-there sensibility to the audience. It’s almost as if 3D was made for this.

Anselm. Directed by Wim Wenders. Starring Anselm Kiefer. In theatres December in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal.