Anselm (F/F)

Wim Wenders | Germany | 93 min | 2023 

With Anselm, master filmmaker Wim Wenders returns to the medium of 3D cinema that he used to such extraordinary effect in his much acclaimed Pina. Looking at the life, work, and processes of the seminal German artist Anselm Keifer, Wenders takes a layered and abstracted approach, slowly building a portrait of the man, his art, and the spaces in which he makes his often monolithic works. Including  just a few fragments of conventional interviews with the artist, the film is an exquisitely controlled collage of archive material, seamless re-enactments and beautifully choreographed cinematography that gives Anselm’s work centre stage. As with Pina, Wenders once more reinvigorates the much-abused immersiveness of 3D, displacing the usual spectacle of the medium with an architectural delicacy that points to new ways that film can engage and intersect with fine art, particularly in the case of large-scale works. Anselm also highlights the fact that sculpture – and all large-scale work which requires that the viewer move around to survey it – is a kind of cinematic expression, the works inseparable from the always-moving human lens of perspective.