Anselm2023

"Anselm" is a hypnotic, immersive experience that, much like its subject, is an invitation, provocation, and confrontation. Unmoored from the traditional beats of the modern documentary, it moves foreword and backward through time, through various media, and brings Keifer into focus for moments of breathtaking clarity before he recedes into the background again, leaving the viewer to contemplate his immense oeuvre in stunningly filmed images. This is not biography nor hagiography. It is rather a portrait of an artist, a history, an entire way of being-in-the-world that both Wenders and Keifer represent. The children of Germany Year Zero are a generation fraught with a search for meaning, unmoored from the timeline of world history while sitting at its modern fulcrum, who through their art grappled with the sins of their parents and their country. "Anselm" succeeds as a film precisely because it embraces this search, does not try to separate art from artist or from history, but instead is constantly making connections, echoing back to the horrors of war throughout the 20th century and the trail of destruction, death, and suffering left in its wake. Yet for all this suffering, there is incredible beauty and lightness to both Keifer's work and Wenders' film. Exquisite images abound. To say more would perhaps lessen the experience. Keifer's work needs no further comment, it need only be experienced.