The Rauschen der Zeit
"Anselm Kiefer doesn't just paint history; he excavates it from the lead, ash, and straw of our collective consciousness."
'Anselm' documentary is a thrilling portrait of an artist at work'
Every now and then you come across an artist — Aretha Franklin, say, or Marlon Brando — who radiate such raw, undeniable force that they feel as immense as the Amazon. One of them is the painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer. The first time I saw his work in person, its sheer power all but knocked me back against the far wall.
Kiefer is the subject of Anselm, a new movie by Wim Wenders, a filmmaker who's almost his exact contemporary: They were born a few months apart in the war-ravaged Germany of 1945. Because Wenders is himself a figure of considerable gifts — he's won the top prize at Cannes, Venice and Berlin — this documentary is not a traditional "great artist" doc.
Shot in an astonishingly vivid 6K 3D — which captures art with dazzling clarity — Anselm offers both a thrilling portrait of the artist at work and, with the aid of terrific archival footage, lets us see what infuses his work with such intensity.
The movie begins with a long, gorgeous sequence at La Ribaute, Kiefer's studio/art installation in the southern French town of Barjac. Wenders' camera moves through, around and above mysterious white plaster statues of what appear to be brides — the heads are made of metal or vegetation — that are set out among trees and strangely formed buildings. Just as you fear that Wenders may be indulging his sweet tooth for beautiful imagery, the film begins exploring what gives Kiefer's art its wallop.
Kiefer was born into a country buried beneath post-World War II rubble, fostering a lifelong awareness of destruction. This helps explain why his paintings so often include actual burnt vegetation, shards of metal, hunks of earth, fragments of clothing.
Focusing on the artist, not the man, the film makes us feel Kiefer's art in all its beauty, bleakness and moral weight. Wenders doesn't get into stuff like Kiefer's marriages or discuss how, thanks to the craziness of the art market, his net worth is estimated at more than $100 million dollars and he can afford to buy tracts of land to build and display his art. He does occasionally dramatize moments from Kiefer's life and these re-creations are the film's one flaw. Not a calamitous one, but hokey and unnecessary.
What has always made Kiefer's art necessary is his sure instinct for what's essential. In what he calls his "protest against forgetting" of Germany's dark history, he got in early on the themes that people continue to explore in films like the upcoming The Zone of Interest, about a family who live happily outside the barbed wire fences of Auschwitz. If you know Kiefer's work, Wenders will show you his artistry in a way you've never before seen it, and if you don't know it, Anselm will make it clear why you should.
Release date: December 8, 2023 (USA) German: Anselm – Das Rauschen der Zeit
Anselm Kiefer. German, born 1945. Works. Exhibitions. Publication. Wikipedia entry ... MoMA 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan · MoMA ...
Exploring the landscapes of the soul through cinema and photography.
Wim Wenders is a central figure of the New German Cinema. Originally studying medicine and philosophy, he found his true calling in the visual arts, first through painting and then film. His work is defined by a profound sense of place, the "road movie" genre, and themes of alienation, memory, and the search for identity. From the dusty highways of the American West in Paris, Texas to the divided skies of Berlin in Wings of Desire, Wenders captures the quiet, often melancholy moments that define the human experience
Few directors capture the textures of space, memory, and existential drift quite like Wim Wenders. As a central pillar of the New German Cinema movement, Wenders transformed the traditional road movie into a canvas for deep internal exploration, examining the post-WWII European psyche, the seductive ache of American mythos, and the quiet beauty found in isolation.
He is equally a master of the lens in his narrative work and his poetic, deeply humanistic documentaries.
Core Pillars of Wenders' Filmography
The Road Trilogy
In the mid-1970s, Wenders established his signature cinematic language through three films focused on rootless protagonists wandering through transitional landscapes:
Alice in the Cities (1974): A stark, beautiful exploration of a blocked writer traveling with a young girl, captured in high-contrast 16mm black-and-white.
Wrong Move (1975): A loose adaptation of Goethe, tracking a detached writer's journey across Germany.
Kings of the Road (1976): A sweeping, melancholic epic following a cinema mechanic repairing projectors along the East/West German border, acting as an elegy for the dying art of celluloid.
The Masterworks
Paris, Texas (1984)
Perhaps his most visually arresting feature, written alongside Sam Shepard. It tracks Travis, an amnesiac man who emerges from the desert to reconnect with his son and estranged wife.
The Visuals: Lensed by Robby Müller, the film is a masterclass in color theory—drenched in neon greens, deep desert reds, and cobalt blues that visually isolate the characters within the vast, lonely American landscape.
The Sound: Ry Cooder’s haunting, sparse slide guitar score serves as an emotional compass for Travis’s internal state.
Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin) (1987)
A breathtaking love letter to a still-divided Berlin. The film follows invisible, immortal angels who listen to the inner monologues of the city's distressed human inhabitants.
The Cinematography: Legend Henri Alekan shot the angels' perspective in a luminous, sepia-toned black-and-white. When an angel chooses to become mortal for love, the film bursts into vivid, tactile color, shifting how we perceive the texture of ordinary life.
The Soundscape: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds feature prominently, cementing the film's roots in the late-80s European avant-garde and punk subculture.
The Documentaries
Wenders' non-fiction work is rarely standard biography; it is an act of deep creative communion with other artists:
Buena Vista Social Club (1999): A vibrant, celebratory capture of Cuba's legendary, forgotten son musicians.
Pina (2011): A breathtaking use of 3D technology to capture the raw, physical poetry of choreographer Pina Bausch's dance ensemble.
The Salt of the Earth (2014): A profound look at the life and socio-political weight of photographer Sebastião Salgado's monumental black-and-white imagery.
A Common Thread
Whether examining a lonely man in a Texas peep-show booth (Paris, Texas) or a Tokyo toilet cleaner finding sublime poetry in the daily routine (Perfect Days, 2023), Wenders' cinema is fundamentally preoccupied with the act of looking. His frames ask us to slow down, to observe the interplay of light on concrete, and to recognize the profound weight behind silent spaces.
Key Themes and Narrative Structure
The film explores Kiefer’s work, which is famous for its massive scale, "abrasive materiality," and its unflinching confrontation with German history and mythology.
Confronting the Past: Born in 1945, Kiefer belongs to a generation that grew up in the silence of post-WWII Germany. The film details how his art—sometimes utilizing Nazi iconography—forced his country to look at its "open wounds."
Literary & Philosophical Roots: Wenders incorporates the poetry of Paul Celan and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, both of whom are central to Kiefer’s intellectual landscape.
The Creative Process: The camera captures Kiefer’s unconventional methods, including using flamethrowers to scorch canvases, pouring molten lead, and working across his 200-acre studio complex in Barjac, France.
A Personal Mirror: The film highlights the parallel lives of Wenders and Kiefer; both were born in the ruins of 1945 and have spent their careers grappling with what it means to be German.
Wenders, who previously used 3D to great effect in his dance documentary Pina (2011), pushed the technology further here:
6K Resolution: Shot over two years in Germany, France, and Italy.
Immersive 3D: Used not for "jump scares" but to provide a visceral sense of the depth, texture, and overwhelming scale of Kiefer’s monumental installations.
Cinematography: Franz Lustig’s camera often glides through the artist's cavernous warehouses, following Kiefer as he rides a bicycle among his towering works.
Historical Controversy: "Besetzungen" (Occupations)
The film addresses the 1969 controversy when Kiefer photographed himself performing the Nazi salute in various European locations.
The Intent: Kiefer intended it as a provocation to force Germans to confront the Nazi past they were trying to forget.
The Reaction: At the time, he was widely misunderstood and accused of being a neo-Nazi. The film contextualizes this as a pivotal moment in his artistic development—the moment he decided that art could not be "innocent" in Germany.
Anselm Kiefer’s work doesn't just hang on a wall; it threatens to collapse under its own historical and physical weight. Emerging in post-WWII Germany, Kiefer became one of the most vital figures in Neo-Expressionism by doing what many of his contemporaries avoided: directly confronting the trauma, myths, and architectural ghosts of the Third Reich, alongside deep dives into Jewish mysticism, alchemy, and the poetry of Paul Celan.
When you look at a Kiefer canvas, like the one pictured above, you are looking at an archaeological dig as much as a painting. Notice how the neoclassical columns—evoking both ancient Rome and the chilling, authoritarian architecture of Albert Speer—seem to be actively decaying or scorched by fire. Kiefer frequently incorporates three-dimensional objects directly into the surface; here, a heavy, sculpted lead snake and a spectral, tattered garment break the boundary between painting and sculpture.
The Alchemy of Materials
Kiefer is famous for abandoning pure paint in favor of raw, symbolic matter. Every material he burns, glues, or welds onto the canvas carries its own conceptual history:
Lead: His signature material. Heavy, malleable, and historically associated with alchemy (the quest to turn base metal into gold). For Kiefer, lead represents the weight of history and a physical shield against radiation or memory.
Straw: Flammable, fragile, and golden. It references agriculture and life, but also destruction and ash. It famously evokes "Margarethe's golden hair" from Celan's Holocaust poem Todesfuge (Death Fugue).
Ash and Charcoal: The literal remnants of burning. They give his landscapes a barren, post-apocalyptic texture where everything has already been consumed.
Sedimentation: He builds up surfaces over years, sometimes leaving huge canvases outside in rain, snow, and sun to let nature corrode the materials naturally before bringing them back into the studio.
Core Thematic Obsessions
Beyond the scale—which is almost always monumental—Kiefer’s work revolves around a few deeply interconnected ideas:
Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Deliberately confronting the past): In his early career, Kiefer shocked the German public by photographing himself giving the Nazi salute in various European locations. It wasn't an endorsement; it was a confrontational performance meant to force a silent country to look at its recent history.
Ruins as Beginnings: For Kiefer, a ruin is not just an end; it is a clean slate from which something new can grow. His massive landscapes often feature deep, linear perspective furrows in plowed fields, suggesting both a scorched earth and a site prepared for future germination.
The Interlocking of Mythologies: He seamlessly blends Germanic legends (like the Ring Cycle) with Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), Egyptian mythology, and Christian theology, looking for universal patterns of catastrophe and rebirth.
Anselm Kiefer's Margarethe and Sulamith paintings
In 1981, Anselm Kiefer encountered "Death Fugue" (Todesfuge), a haunting 1945 poem written by the Romanian-Jewish poet Paul Celan while imprisoned in a labor camp. The poem describes the routine horrors of a concentration camp, overseen by a German guard who writes letters home. Celan structures the text around the counterpoint of two female archetypes:
“dein goldenes Haar Margarete / dein aschenes Haar Sulamith”
(your golden hair Margarete / your ashen hair Sulamith)
Margarete is the Aryan ideal—the blonde German woman straight out of Goethe's Faust, representing German romantic purity.
Sulamith is the Jewish woman—named after the beloved figure in the biblical Song of Songs, whose hair has been turned to ash by the crematorium smoke.
Kiefer realized that these two figures were the keys to unlocking the fractured post-war German psyche. Between 1980 and 1983, he created a massive cycle of paintings dedicated to them, using his signature alchemical approach to give Celan’s metaphors devastating physical weight.
Margarethe: The Fragility of Golden Straw
In his Margarethe paintings, Kiefer translated Celan’s lyricism into literal substance by gluing raw, yellow straw directly onto the canvas.
The raw material behaves on the surface like thick tufts of hair, but it also carries layered historical meanings:
Agriculture and Ideology: Straw represents the German soil (das Land), farming, and traditional ideas of nationalist purity that the Nazi regime co-opted.
Flammability: Straw is exceptionally fragile and highly combustible. By using it to represent the "ideal" German woman, Kiefer underscores that this romanticized myth of national purity is inherently dangerous and easily consumed by fire.
The Inevitable Shadow: In these canvases, Kiefer scrawls her name in a fragile, graffiti-like script. Notice the heavy black lines and charcoal smudges overlapping the golden straw. Kiefer is visually demonstrating that Margarethe's identity cannot be separated from the black smoke of the camps; Sulamith's forced absence leaves a permanent burn mark on Margarethe’s gold.
Sulamith: Subverting the Architecture of the Reich
If Margarethe is represented by organic material on open, scarred fields, Sulamith is defined by heavy impasto, deep shadows, and claustrophobic interior spaces.
In his towering 1983 masterpiece Sulamith, Kiefer does not paint a portrait of a woman. Instead, her "ashen hair" is evoked through thick layers of oil, acrylic, shellac, and literal wood-ash smeared across a colossal canvas.
The visual strategy here is a brilliant, subversive act of architectural hijacking:
The Source Material: The perspective lines trace a cavernous, brick-lined crypt. This space is a direct copy of Wilhelm Kreis's design for the Soldatenhalle (Hall of Soldiers) in Berlin—a grand, neo-classical monument planned by the Nazis to glorify their military dead.
The Subversion: Kiefer takes this architectural space meant to honor the oppressors and coats it in soot, charcoal, and ash. He transforms the hollow "hero's hall" into a somber, subterranean columbarium, an industrial oven, or a massive tomb.
The Reclaiming: By writing the name Sulamith in white paint in the upper left corner, he forces the viewer to recontextualize the entire structure. The Nazi monument is defaced and reclaimed as a giant, weeping memorial to the millions of Jewish victims who were systematically erased. Deep at the back of the perspective, a small, flickering flame acts as a solitary memorial candle, offering a quiet, defiant glimmer of remembrance amid the absolute darkness.
The Alchemical Counterpoint
What makes Kiefer's dialogue with Celan so profound is how he links the two figures materially. Straw, when exposed to fire, inevitably turns to ash. By showing Margarethe as straw and Sulamith as ash, Kiefer reveals that they are part of the exact same tragic cycle. Germany’s attempt to sever the two and purify itself only resulted in a scorched, ruined landscape where both the golden hair and the ashen hair were ultimately consumed by the same flames.
