This week we’re excited to present a conversation with Anselm director Wim Wenders, moderated by filmmaker Michèle Stephenson (Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project).
Anselm is now playing at Film at Lincoln Center in stunning 3D! Get tickets!
Oscar-nominated director Wim Wenders (Buena Vista Social Club, Salt of the Earth, Pina) traces the life of Anselm Kiefer, one of the most innovative and influential fine artists working today. For more than five decades, Kiefer’s paintings and sculptures have confronted his native Germany’s dark past through a vast network of cultural references in a dazzling mixture of 35mm and 16mm film stocks, with a distinctive focus on physical elements: from lead, glass, and textiles to found and incinerated organic matter.
As he did for his sublime portrait of Pina Bausch in 2011, Wenders (born the same year as Kiefer during the last months of World War II) employs groundbreaking stereoscopic cinematography to transport us to key chapters of Kiefer’s early life in post-Nazi Germany and throughout his 100-acre studio in France, a present-day labyrinth of the artist’s haunting obsessions. Anselm, which debuted at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is a portrait of an artist at work like you’ve never seen before—an indelible visual experience and a vivid tour of Kiefer’s imposing yet intricately textured works. A Sideshow and Janus Films release
Watch and listen below.
