Superimpositions: How Wim Wenders’ Anselm (2023) Merges Cinema and Museum

Neue Deutsche director Wim Wenders and Neue Wilde contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer, fellow German artists whose works plumb similar themes of postwar decay and rebirth, formed their enduring friendship at Kiefer’s 1991 Neue Nationalgalerie exhibition. Early on, Wenders and Kiefer sensed that an artistic partnership was imminent. “Anselm knew that I had always wanted to be a painter,” remarked Wenders, “and I knew that Anselm secretly wanted to make movies – so we shook hands on the idea of making a film together eventually.”

Their artistic vow culminated in Wenders’ sublime 2023 documentary Anselm, a collaboration not just between Wenders and Kiefer, but their offspring as well – the 80-year-old Kiefer occasionally interacts with himself as both a ten-year-old boy (portrayed by Wenders’ grandson Anton) and a middle-aged man (played by Kiefer’s son Daniel). While the film’s heartfelt moments are clearly informed by Wenders and Kiefer’s mutual admiration, Wenders still manages to exercise necessary restraint in editorializing, thus allowing Kiefer’s artwork itself, juxtaposed with the historical and artistic frameworks he drew inspiration from, to speak to his artistic depths.

Wenders’ use of dissolves and his iconographic (as opposed to chronological) organization of the film evokes an art historians’ approach to Kiefer's works and methodologies, uniquely eschewing linear structure for a more emblematic exploration of Kiefer’s artistic career. A scene that showcases Wenders’ editing begins with the carved-out floor of an otherwise organized art gallery within Kiefer’s La Ribaute studio complex. The camera lingers on some of Kiefer’s Femmes Martyres sculptures, mannequins wearing white dresses with objects signifying their distinct identities in place of their heads, in the lower level surrounded by piles of collapsed ceiling. Another shot fades in, layering above the installation–grainy home video footage of German women clearing the mountainous ruins of World War II, interspersed with footage of children playing in the rubble.

This one-minute long shot is the first of many superimpositions Wenders implements in Anselm. A contemporary extension of the cross-dissolve, an editing technique commonly employed to convey the passage of time, superimpositions are amalgamations of images, textures and motifs, representing anything from multiple actions occurring at once to a character’s cluttered subconscious. In this case, while the two images (of Kiefer’s installation and the women clearing rubble) are of completely different subjects and were captured over seventy years apart, Wenders’ editing pinpoints the visual and thematic inspiration Kiefer drew from his fraught upbringing in postwar Germany. Later, we see filmed sunflower landscapes dwindling into Kiefer’s own paintings of sunflowers, the US Army exploding a swastika off Nuremberg Stadium match cut to Kiefer immolating one of his own canvases, and a map of Kiefer’s childhood bedroom labeled “The Bad Children’s Cell” fading into Kiefer’s present-day studio.

While layering two images to draw parallels between them is not a practice unique to Anselm, Wenders’ decision to keep both shots and time periods running simultaneously for nearly thirty seconds elevates the superimposition to meditation, almost hypnosis. Both shots of Kiefer’s installation superimposed with footage of postwar rubble are monochromatic, creating an interplay of nuanced values emphasized by the dynamic camerawork.

Wenders’ use of layered lights and shadows is reminiscent of the “distinct world of shadows” present in the 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows, in which author Jun’ichiro Tanizaki argues that Japanese architecture intentionally casts shadows, transforming living rooms into mysteriously enshrouded, magical recesses. Although Wenders has not publicly cited Tanizaki’s essay as a source of inspiration, Hirayama, the protagonist of Wenders’ other 2023 release Perfect Days, cultivates his own “world of shadows'' through obsessively photographing sun-dappled trees, which Wenders gorgeously depicts as lengthy, hallucinatory monochromatic superimpositions. In true artistic fashion, Hirayama, like Wenders and Kiefer, dreams in veiled values and textures.

Jacques Derrida later applied Tanizaki’s framework to the language of art analysis, dubbing grayscale photography “skiagraphy, the writing of light as the writing of shade,” in his 1993 essay Aletheia. Here, Derrida refers to Tanizaki’s “light” as a shorthand for the photograph’s objective documentation and its subject’s appearance and interiority, while “darkness” is the interiority assigned to the photograph’s subject by both the artist and viewers. Once the subject’s likeness has been captured, it is permanently affixed to paper yet malleable with time, leaving the viewer with a myriad of impressions, even forming false memories, rendering the photograph’s subjects spectral–people existing in their own right and forming many new identities on celluloid. It is at once haunting and comforting, reflecting the cyclical and inevitable nature of art interpretation.

In Aletheia, Derrida invokes a stanza of Paul Celan’s 1967 poem Ashglory: “No one / bears witness for / the witness.” In Ashglory, Celan’s “the witness” refers to victims and survivors of the Holocaust, including Celan himself, while “witness for” refers to those who have meaningfully intervened in such atrocities and their aftermath, meaning the complete stanza lays bare the dehumanization and isolation of consistently being deemed unworthy of being fully “witnessed.” Kiefer, who was born months before the end of World War II to a wermacht father, has been consistently inspired by Celan’s poetry. Both Celan and Kiefer’s works “bear witness” to Germany’s postwar Holocaust denialism and Kiefer’s artwork carries Celan’s verses and meaning to the present.

If Kiefer’s artwork embodies Celan’s notion of “bearing witness,” then Wenders’ documentary encapsulates Derrida’s. Derrida’s “witness for” is the objective truth of a photograph’s contents, or “lightness,” while his “the witness” is the viewer’s interpretation of the photograph’s meaning independent from the subject, or “darkness.” Wenders’ superimpositions “bear witness” to Kiefer’s body of work by juxtaposing it with Kiefer’s lexicon of visual, historical, theological and philosophical references, a technique which naturally mimics the multistep process of viewing art in museums. Assuming the visitor is viewing an artwork they naturally gravitate towards, they initially focus on the painting’s visual elements (form, shape, value, color, texture). Once they learn more about the artist’s life from accompanying labels, they apply this context to the art, gaining a greater understanding about the circumstances that shaped the artist’s understanding of or proclivity toward their chosen subject matter. Like Tanizaki’s conceptualization of shadows, encountering an unfamiliar work of art (and its accompanying substantial subtleties of content and form) is a reflective undertaking, measured yet rewarding. And, like Derrida’s transmogrification of Tanizaki’s argument, analyzing art involves reconciling, and sometimes synthesizing, the viewer’s elucidations with the artist’s intent.

By virtue of its ninety-three minute runtime and prioritization of sensation above adherence to documentary conventions, Anselm does not paint a detailed portrait of Kiefer’s illustrious fifty-year career. However, it accomplishes something far more ambitious and impressive by tangibly conveying the intimate connections we form with Kiefer’s art, merging cinema with museum and reflecting the privilege of being able to bear witness to, and visually transform, Kiefer and Wenders’ collective genius.