Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (Wednesday, August 10, 2011) (67)

Sophie Fiennes's documentary about German mixed-media artist Anselm Kiefer, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, is an interesting and beautiful meditation on the creative process and a fascinating examination of how one artist sees the world and the future. The title is taken, apparently, from the biblical story where after humans leave the earth, there will be a new world of life, that there's a cylce to things and that we build things and they fall apart and then they're re-built later.

Kiefer's art is very much related to this. He's a post-structuralist painter and sculptor whose work generally is abstract but deals with the general driection of things moving toward their endings and toward chaos. Generally his work is about post-war, post-industrial, apocalyptic and post-apocalypic themes where stuff falls apart and breaks and the colors and textures are earthy, dirty and somber.

Fiennes filmed Kiefer during a time he was working at a former silk factory in the South of France. Apparently he took over a complex of buildings for several years, excavating certain areas, using the industrial spaces and materials as his inspiration. The work there is an expansion on the motifs and materials of lead, cement, dust, glass, water, books, boats (and all that those things symbolize). We see him working with his assistants on certain paintings (which are really assemblages of paint, found materials, glass and lead arranged in generally significant ways - though their significance is a bit hidden from us).

Fiennes alternates between expositive sequences of the work in the spaces of the building, undercscored by minimalist music by Ligeti and others, silent shots of the assistants and Kiefer working on the art in silence and more interactive parts where the artist explains to his assistants what he needs done by them. There are no talking heads or voiceovers explaining what we're seeing. There is, however, an interesting sequence in the middle where Kiefer is interviewed by a German journalist. He's very funny, in a very German way, in this element, possibly because the journalist is so literal and rigid — even more German than the artist.

This film is a very interesting examination of how art is about exploring human existance and how art refers to other, older art. There's an interesting dialectic between heavy, solid things and new, fluid things and how monumental elements fall apart over time. This is an investigation about how concrete can be soft and malleable and how dust and dirt can be pretty, about how all that remains after a silk factory leaves is concrete and metal. Soft and hard. Kiefer's work is not particularly aesthetically beatutiful, but it is powerful and full of complex emotions. This is an interesting look at a chapter of his career, moving from order to chaos.

Stars: 3 of 4