The new Wim Wenders documentary “Anselm,” opening at the Music Box Theatre this weekend, makes sublime and supple use of the finest 3D film experience I can remember. If your idea of contemporary 3D movies goes straight to watching the “Clash of the Titans” remake wearing cheap eyewear and squinting at a Kraken and a lot of gray schmutz on the screen, well, this is not that.
This is something else.
You can go into “Anselm” knowing roughly as much as I did (very little, or less), and Wenders’ latest nonfiction portrait of an artist and their environment will work, effortlessly, because it’s just plain beautiful.
Born in Germany in 1945, a singularly ashen time and place to come into the world, Anselm Kiefer emerged as a monumental painter, sculptor, mixed-media explorer and persistently provocative celebrity. His fame and his enormously scaled, physically imposing visions angered all sorts of people and tastes. Many since the late 1960s, when Kiefer began focusing on recent German history, have questioned or attacked his obsession with myths, legends and gods — the same symbols that fed a rabid nationalist fervor under Hitler and the Third Reich.
In “Anselm” Keifer, now 78, works and reflects in almost comically spacious studios. One is a converted brick factory in Höpfingen, Germany. Another covers 200 acres; for more than 30 years, Kiefer has been transforming land outside the French village of Barjac into exhibition space and sculpture grounds and what is both a utopian moment to himself, and a pretty amazing piece of open-air art. (Chicago note: The artist’s first American retrospective came in 1987, organized by the Art Institute and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.)
Wenders’ film wanders through Kiefer’s life, travels, influences and artworks. The opening of “Anselm” reveals sculptures of headless women in the wild, inspired by (or borrowed from?) the 17 figures found in his installation “The Women of Antiquity.”
The poet Paul Celan has long been a central figure in the artist’s work; Wenders’ film incorporates much of Celan’s story, and Holocaust-shadowed poetry, into its larger, impressionistic collage portrait of Kiefer and what makes him tick.
Do we get hard and clear answers to that question? No, and that’s fine with me (though we learn next to nothing about Kiefer’s life, relationships and interests outside his art. Wenders’ “Anselm” is an observer, not an explainer. The director’s gliding, paradoxically unobtrusive yet imposing 3D imagery captures his fellow 1945-born German at work (sometimes with a flamethrower), or as he hosts a tour of his onetime brick factory.
The screen image is often layered by several pictorial elements, including newsreel footage from the end of World War II, or Kiefer’s interviews as a much younger man, on the rise. Additionally two actors play the artist’s younger selves in “Anselm”: Wenders’ grandnephew, Anton Wenders, and Kiefer’s son, Daniel.
As presented in Chicago at the Music Box, this elegant accomplishment reveals the sneaky secret about this particular cinematic format. It’s this: 3D may be best known for flash and dazzle and cheap thrills (fire, spears, Jane Russell) thrown at the audience’s collective face. But it’s equally good for quiet contemplation and rumination. As was Wenders’ superb 2011 documentary “Pina,” about the dance-theater choreographer Pina Bausch, “Anselm” is 3D in the most confidential key imaginable. We see art being made slowly, oddly, in real time. And we marvel at the finished version from unexpected, ever-shifting and intimate vantage points, whisper-close.
And now, a few technicalities for Chicago audiences. “Anselm” will be shown at the Music Box in a brand new 3D system to be used in April for the theater’s 3D film festival.
The glasses you wear for “Anselm” are nothing like the cheapo multiplex throwaway eyewear. The theater, says technical director Julian Antos, recently bought 500 pairs of high-grade 3D glasses made by Xpandvision. Cost: roughly $50 a pair, $80 or so retail.
The 3D tech is embedded in the glasses themselves, not in the film projector or the screen. “We do replace a 3,000-watt projector bulb with a 4,000-watt bulb,” says Antos. “And we add a transmitter that’s connected to the projector that talks to the glasses.”
My editor couldn’t quite believe that a theater would invest $35,000-$40,000 on 3D, mostly in those high-end glasses. Surely they’ll lose some of the inventory to thieves? Or to distracted cinephiles lost in a trance on the way out?
Antos acknowledges that the 3D glasses are “delicate pieces of equipment. And they’ll be interacting with butter, grease and alcohol. And yes, we’re putting a lot of trust in our audience.” But, he adds, “I’m sure they’ll be up to the task.” I’m extremely grateful to have seen “Anselm” in optimal circumstances.
“Anselm” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)
No MPA rating (fine for all ages)
Running time: 1:33
How to watch: Premieres Feb. 2 at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.; musicboxtheatre.com
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
