Visual art, oddly, doesn’t always translate that naturally to cinema as a subject. Just as you don’t get the full impact of a painting from a coffee table book, the camera can impose a distance from the art at hand – a secondary perspective that isn’t really needed. Wim Wenders bucks that trend, however, in his marvellous Anselm Kiefer documentary Anselm (Curzon Home Cinema), which feels fully alive to the angular, nature-based textures of the German painter and sculptor’s work. It’s especially exciting as a study of process – of the grand-scale action that goes into the art’s own dynamic movement.
A large part of its reward came, on the big screen, from Wenders’ continuingly imaginative embrace of 3D technology. Now on VOD, the film loses that element but remains engaging for the connection it draws between Kiefer’s own thorny persona and the work itself, and its elegant bridging of the artist with his dramatised younger selves. As a documentary about an artist that makes clear how their vision emerges from their character, Anselm is not as scrappily candid as Jack Hazan’s 1973 landmark A Bigger Splash (Netflix), but belongs in that league just the same. Hazan’s film intimately traces the breakdown of David Hockney’s relationship with former lover Peter Schlesinger over a three-year period, and its effect on Hockney’s work and perspective. It alternates fly-on-the-wall observation with flights of overtly queer fantasy, serving its subject with a fascination that never feels fawning.
