Chicago – Patrick McDonald of HollywoodChicago.com audio film review for “Anselm,” a new documentary by director Wim Wenders highlighting the career of artist Anselm Kiefer … now showing in the latest Digital 3-D tech at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre beginning February 2nd. For additional screenings, see local listings.
Rating: 4.0/5.0
Artist Anselm Kiefer is a controversial and dynamic painter, sculptor and provocateur. Emerging from the modern art movement of the late 1960s, the documentary illuminates his work, life journey, inspirations, creative process and his own history of fascination with the myth of humanity. He is depicted in three parts of his life, child (Anton Wenders), Young adult artist (Daniel Kiefer) and contemporary self. His incredible evolution, fraught with controversy and ultimate acceptance, moves forward in his journey to create art in an old, massive silk factory in the South of France. This was his “Gesamkunstverk” … total art in location and form.
Rating: 4.0/5.0
Artist Anselm Kiefer is a controversial and dynamic painter, sculptor and provocateur. Emerging from the modern art movement of the late 1960s, the documentary illuminates his work, life journey, inspirations, creative process and his own history of fascination with the myth of humanity. He is depicted in three parts of his life, child (Anton Wenders), Young adult artist (Daniel Kiefer) and contemporary self. His incredible evolution, fraught with controversy and ultimate acceptance, moves forward in his journey to create art in an old, massive silk factory in the South of France. This was his “Gesamkunstverk” … total art in location and form.
- 2/2/2024
- by adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
- HollywoodChicago.com
The Oscar-contending documentary Anselm marks an encounter between two of the world’s great artists – one renowned for cinema, the other for painting, installations, and sculpture.
The filmmaker, Wim Wenders, began his career more than 50 years ago, with credits that include Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire, Buena Vista Social Club, The Salt of the Earth, and Pina, and two this year alone – Anselm and the narrative feature Perfect Days. His protagonist in Anselm – the German-born artist Anselm Kiefer, may not be as well known among the public as Wenders, but his work stuns in its power, erudition, and scale. Simply put, Kiefer makes art of monumental dimensions.
Anselm Kiefer in ‘Anselm’
“We were in the landscape of his own studio [outside Paris],” Wenders tells Deadline, “this huge depot, bigger than airplane hangars — and several of them.”
Capturing the size of the workspace and the individual artworks, Wenders concluded, called for something different than a standard 2D approach.
The filmmaker, Wim Wenders, began his career more than 50 years ago, with credits that include Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire, Buena Vista Social Club, The Salt of the Earth, and Pina, and two this year alone – Anselm and the narrative feature Perfect Days. His protagonist in Anselm – the German-born artist Anselm Kiefer, may not be as well known among the public as Wenders, but his work stuns in its power, erudition, and scale. Simply put, Kiefer makes art of monumental dimensions.
Anselm Kiefer in ‘Anselm’
“We were in the landscape of his own studio [outside Paris],” Wenders tells Deadline, “this huge depot, bigger than airplane hangars — and several of them.”
Capturing the size of the workspace and the individual artworks, Wenders concluded, called for something different than a standard 2D approach.
- 12/18/2023
- by Matthew Carey
- Deadline Film + TV
The first sculpture seen in Wim Wenders’s documentary Anselm is a wedding dress, its long train strewn over a massive bed of fallen leaves, perched in a lush forest on a cliff’s edge. All the while, the film cuts between intimate close-ups and long shots that take in the totality of the piece. More sculptures emerge across an expansive outdoor atelier in Croissy, on the outskirts of Paris, each subsequent wedding dress overflowing with harsh textures due to the various hard materials used within them. As if mimicking the experience of an in-person encounter with Anselm Kiefer’s confrontational work, the 3D camera glides past them all.
First glimpsed in the film cycling in his vast warehouse in Barjac, France, the seventysomething Kiefer appears as if he’s sprung from one of his enormous paintings. As Wenders’s mesmerizing portrait of the Austrian-German multimedia artist progresses, the experience...
First glimpsed in the film cycling in his vast warehouse in Barjac, France, the seventysomething Kiefer appears as if he’s sprung from one of his enormous paintings. As Wenders’s mesmerizing portrait of the Austrian-German multimedia artist progresses, the experience...
- 10/25/2023
- by Greg Nussen
- Slant Magazine
Updated with latest: The Cannes Film Festival kicked off this year with opening-night movie Jeanne du Barry, and concluded Saturday evening with Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall scooping the Palme d’Or. Deadline was on the ground to watch all the key films. Here is a compilation of our reviews from the fest, which last year saw Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness win the coveted top prize on its way to an Oscar Best Picture nomination.
Check out the reviews below, click on the titles to read them in full, and keep checking back as we add more.
About Dry Grasses ‘About Dry Grasses’
Section: Competition
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Cast: Deniz Celiloglu, Ece Bagci, Merve Dizdar, Musab Ekici
Deadline’s takeaway: For Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s many fans, this is another opportunity to slip into his world, spot his sly political references and subside for a...
Check out the reviews below, click on the titles to read them in full, and keep checking back as we add more.
About Dry Grasses ‘About Dry Grasses’
Section: Competition
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Cast: Deniz Celiloglu, Ece Bagci, Merve Dizdar, Musab Ekici
Deadline’s takeaway: For Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s many fans, this is another opportunity to slip into his world, spot his sly political references and subside for a...
- 5/27/2023
- by Pete Hammond, Damon Wise, Matthew Carey, Stephanie Bunbury and Valerie Complex
- Deadline Film + TV
Shot stereographically on ultra-high resolution rigs, Wim Wenders’ latest documentary Anselm offers a mesmerizing, cinematic catalogue of German painter-sculptor Anselm Kiefer’s deeply tactile, maximalist oeuvre.
As with Pina, Wenders’ luminous 2011 tribute to the late dancer-choreographer Pina Bausch, Wenders makes here the best case yet for arthouse theaters to keep their 3D projection kit up to date. For this is one of those rare movies that’s actually enriched by the use of the format, and not an excuse for a gimmicky thrill ride for the easily amused or very young.
As a career survey of its subject, Anselm overlaps with Sophie Fiennes’ exquisitely austere doc Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, which also debuted at Cannes, albeit back in 2011. Wenders’ film, however, broadens its focus to take in Kiefer’s earliest and more recent work, and not just the monumental installation that is his former studio-cum-city-state in Barjac, France,...
As with Pina, Wenders’ luminous 2011 tribute to the late dancer-choreographer Pina Bausch, Wenders makes here the best case yet for arthouse theaters to keep their 3D projection kit up to date. For this is one of those rare movies that’s actually enriched by the use of the format, and not an excuse for a gimmicky thrill ride for the easily amused or very young.
As a career survey of its subject, Anselm overlaps with Sophie Fiennes’ exquisitely austere doc Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, which also debuted at Cannes, albeit back in 2011. Wenders’ film, however, broadens its focus to take in Kiefer’s earliest and more recent work, and not just the monumental installation that is his former studio-cum-city-state in Barjac, France,...
- 5/18/2023
- by Leslie Felperin
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Though he is still mostly known for his lyrical, America-set road movie Paris, Texas, which won the Palme d’Or in 1984, Germany’s Wim Wenders does most of his best work when he’s back on home turf. The Berlin Wall, for example, provided the backdrop for his 1987 masterpiece Wings of Desire, in which philosophical angels roamed a divided city that was still trying to reckon with the shame of the Second World War. His new documentary, Anselm, is ostensibly the biography of a fellow artist, but it doesn’t take too much imagination to read it as a veiled autobiography, in that its subject isn’t so much a person as the way that life experience and intelligence combine to create art.
In that respect, Wenders’ film, a Special Screening at the Cannes Film Festival, will not do much to generate a whole new audience for artist Anselm Kiefer...
In that respect, Wenders’ film, a Special Screening at the Cannes Film Festival, will not do much to generate a whole new audience for artist Anselm Kiefer...
- 5/17/2023
- by Damon Wise
- Deadline Film + TV
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