Yael Friedman at the LARB:
EARLY ON IN Wim Wenders’s new documentary Anselm, we hear the whispers of Anselm Kiefer’s famous headless female sculptures. “We may be the nameless and forgotten ones,” they whisper, “but we don’t forget a thing.” These full-bodied specters haunt us in the way only Kiefer’s art can. His body of work interrogates myth and memory, wrestling with Germany’s past in ways that helped form the foundation of its postwar present.
Both Wenders and Kiefer, two of Germany’s most iconic artists, were born in 1945, into the still-smoldering ruins of the war. Their engagement with the heaviness of history, and the “great silence” of the adults after the war, took dramatically different forms. Kiefer confronted it relentlessly, even bombastically, while Wenders has been guided by it more obliquely. In my recent conversation with Wenders, the filmmaker acknowledged that the two of them “had a very different approach—I wanted to leave it behind, and Anselm wanted to dig into it and put his finger on it. And that is also why I felt we had something to do together.”
more here.