Long-time MIFF patrons may find themselves with comparatively few opportunities for a first-time experience. Wim Wenders’ new film Anselm is one such opportunity.
As they’ve entered the cinema at two previous showings and one final one this Saturday, all held at Hoyts Melbourne Central for reasons that will soon become obvious, this new experience involved receiving an object as you walked into the cinema. If you didn’t have this object, there were MIFF volunteers shouting up the aisles to be sure you got one, and even then, after the film started, people were heard exclaiming that they were unequipped to watch the film in their current state, and were seen running out front to get the object in question.
That object was a pair of 3D glasses, as indeed, Wenders has brought the Melbourne International Film Festival into the third dimension.
We at ReelGood aren’t festival veterans enough to say that this is the first appearance of 3D at MIFF; in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. But it is indeed a unique experience, especially when the film is not the latest release from James Cameron starring blue aliens, but rather, a voyage through a series of art installations – and by extension, the mind of the artist himself.
That artist is Anselm Kiefer, a German painter and sculptor who is now 78 years old, and appears here as the current version of himself, with Wenders employing actors to recreate the man during two more formative periods of his life. (They’re also contemporaries, with Wenders just six months younger than Kiefer.) Kiefer has been on the scene since the late 1960s, and his work consistently explores the torment of the German soul vis-à-vis the country’s role in World War II – though rarely in forms that are quite so obvious in their signifiers.
Yes there are images that do seem to align fairly closely with the guilt over war atrocities, such as the desolate fields of tombstones, painted on a massive canvas with a straw surface that has first been burnt and doused with water. We see this process, with Kiefer himself donning the flamethrower and shouting instructions to men carrying hoses. It’s fascinating.
However, perhaps Kiefer’s most arresting series is the one that opens the film, which involves antique dresses resting on armatures. Except instead of where a head might be, if a person or mannequin were wearing this dress, there are unexpected replacements blossoming from the neckline – a sundial here, a stack of bricks there. Kiefer’s work boasts a kind of harmony between beauty and chaos that may effectively summarise the contradictions of any thinking person’s life.
The 3D places the viewer in the shoes of someone who might have actually attended a Kiefer art installation, which have been hosted in various European locales throughout the decades of his art world fame, as well as the current French estate where he lives and houses many of his newer creations. As there is an essential tactility and third dimension to his work – even the surfaces of his canvas might be rough or charred – it’s engrossing to be ensconced in a way that makes you feel like you could reach out and touch it.
If there’s any minor complaint to be had about Anselm, it might be an aspect that Wenders almost certainly intends as a strength. The acclaimed director is probably the last one who would want to make a typical talking head documentary, and as such, he only very slowly orients us within Kiefer’s personal narrative or his influences. Instead of Kiefer talking much about himself, he prefers to quote the Romanian poet Paul Celan. The abstractions of the narrative, such as it is, can frustrate on occasion, and deprive the film of some of its momentum toward a definitive conclusion. To cram all the nitpicks into one paragraph, there are times when it feels like this is something you’d be more likely to see in a museum than at the cinema.
MIFF patrons, though, are distinguished by being drawn to experimental and non-narrative filmmaking, and in Kiefer they will find a kindred spirit, as well as the maker of some truly jaw-dropping art. And with that pair of glasses they finally procured from the friendly MIFF volunteer out front, they’ll get to experience that kindred spirit in all his dimensions.
Anselm has one remaining performance at MIFF on Saturday, August 19th at 4:15 at Hoyts Melbourne Central. You can purchase tickets here.