Interview: Wim Wenders on the Philosophies Guiding Anselm and Perfect Days

For over half a century, Wim Wenders has captivated audiences with both his fiction and documentary work. Twenty twenty-three marks a rare year in which he’s released films in both formats, and the ways in which they overlap highlight the director’s versatile skillset and unified humanistic spirit. The nonfictional Anselm and narrative Perfect Days make for a cinematic yin and yang, utilizing different techniques as part of a larger exploration into the elusive nature of finding expression and ecstasy through one’s work.

But the main topic of my conversation with Wenders was Anselm, his latest in a series of portraits of great artists. Subject Anselm Kiefer—not unlike Wenders himself—provides a captivating lens through which to view the changes undergone by their native Germany since World War II. The film’s survey of his life and art, from early controversial photography involving Nazi salutes to contemporary installations of sweeping scale, is more than just an intellectual overview of an important creative force. Wenders’s 3D photography ensures that viewers can feel Kiefer’s painting and sculpture as if they were standing before the pieces.

I spoke with Wenders before Anselm’s opening in New York. The filmmaker discussed how Kiefer’s work sparked his creativity in crafting the documentary, why he’s still fighting the “good fight” for 3D, and the unexpected inspirations that Perfect Days took from Kiefer’s aesthetic.

A key distinguishing feature of Anselm Kiefer’s work is his use of time, a feature often associated with the cinema. Did you relate to him as a director or filmmaker?

Time is present in Anselm’s work more than in any other living painter’s work because he managed to somehow incorporate it into the work and make it almost touchable and invisible. As a filmmaker, it’s my main material. Every time you run the camera, every shot is a little brick of time. A movie, in the end, is architecture in time. So one of the things that attracted me so much from the beginning to Anselm’s work—and I’ve known him personally for 30 years—is the way he makes you aware of time. He manages to show you time and make you aware that time is part of everything he paints. That’s part of the impact his art has made on me and on people.

I was able to go to the exhibit at the Doge’s Palace in Venice last year, and the film does such a great job of capturing the time contained in the piece—and just how much time is needed just to take it all in.

The last installment of the movie we filmed was at the Doge’s Palace, where we shot for a week. You’ve seen it, and you realize that what I tried to do is show him inside that enormous, mind-blowing piece of art but also introduce into it himself as a child because I felt only somebody who was in touch with his childhood could dare to do something like this at the Doge’s Palace.

Does time also inform your choice of 3D to explore his work? Unlike your subject in The Salt of the Earth, which captures specific moments in photography, that extra dimension allows us to experience the motion of Anselm’s work.

I don’t think the use of 3D was directed by that idea of time. I felt it was needed to have space and presence available because 3D just creates an increased presence of things. But it also makes you see more than ever. Art on a flat screen is always a little bit like looking at a catalog. Looking at Kiefer’s art in books—and he has made a number of great books—is such a different experience than being there, exposed to the layers of his work and the size of it. The fact that there are very often objects built in front that protrude, it’s such a different thing to be there with his work. Or be inside his work, because sometimes he also does buildings and works in landscape. It’s such a different experience if you have space available and if you have the heightened sense of awareness that 3D gives. You just simply see more in 3D than you’d ever see on a flat screen, and I needed people to be able to see more.

You often say you’re fond of 3D because it makes the entire brain work. Is that part of the statement, to say that artists like Pina Bausch and Anselm Kiefer demand our full attention—aesthetic and intellectual?

That’s part of it. A huge part of our brain is totally inactive if we see a flat movie. Your brain, when you see a 3D film, does see two streams of information. That’s why you have to wear the god damned glasses. These two streams of separate information enter your left and right eye, and they correspond to what the left and right cameras shoot. Then, it’s your own brain that turns it back into space. On the screen, there’s nothing. There are just two out-of-focus images. But in your brain, it deciphers it as space again, and that does occupy regions of your brain, [including] emotional areas of your brain that are usually not active in a movie. Your brain does work overtime, especially if you don’t cut away all the time. I don’t know why it is that most of these 3D films that are, of course, superhero movies and action movies don’t ever give you time to watch something and take it in. They always give the next piece of information, so 3D cannot develop its true possibility to let you enter space and be there. It’s almost like all the action movies disable you [from] being there because they just cut so fast that you can never really immerse in any of these places. Anyway, I’m on a mission when it comes to 3D, so forgive me.

Is there a philosophy to the way you approached shooting for 3D on Pina and Anselm? You invite us to lean in and explore rather than make things protrude.

I was very lucky that when I did Pina, which was my first 3D movie, it was at a time when 3D was strictly prototype equipment and nobody really knew how to do it…at least in Europe. Avatar hadn’t even come out. I’m eternally grateful to James Cameron that he made that movie because it created 100 theaters in Germany that then could also show Pina.

The philosophy I learned was that 3D was trying to simulate what eyes do. There was 3D that was physiologically correct and didn’t hurt your brain and your eyes by painfully, painstakingly imitating the actions of the eyes on converging or moving apart. When you see into the distance or when you see something close, [they] really go together. That’s a long process, and it’s the work of a stereographer. I did Pina with somebody who had studied 3D for 20 years. He had built the first prototype cameras in Europe, and unfortunately, Pina was the only film he was able to make in his life because he died a year later. I got to learn it the good way.

Then, I realized computer power had increased so much that you could actually shoot it with one camera. Not with two eyes, but with one eye, and let the computer do the work afterward and calculate the space. That, of course, wasn’t physiologically correct and did have a lot of mistakes. That’s one of the reasons why a lot of these movies cut so fast: so you don’t see the mistakes. James Cameron does lead the fight right now in Hollywood with, or against, the studios to fight for native 3D. This means shooting it with two cameras, and not shooting it with one camera and faking the space. We really fight the good fight, both of us.

When you’re making films about other artists, do you feel the need to mirror their craft in your own? The superimpositions and fades in 3D, for example, use montage to achieve the same textures you’d see in Anselm’s installations.

It’s part of my job to adjust the language I’m using. In this case, 3D is its own filmic language. I adjust it so it corresponds as well as possible to its subject. Pina really needed the space more than anything else, and therefore we used 3D in our learning process for spatial reasons to be on the same level as the dancers. Their work happens in space and only in space. With a painter, space wasn’t the key issue. The key issues were presence, impact, emotionality, and a really enhanced way of being there as an audience. Actually being there. That was something I didn’t really know when I was doing Pina. I was only looking for the spatial functions of the 3D camera because that was really the only thing that I needed. When I did the most boring and easy shots of Pina, which were the close-ups of the dancers, we did that as an afterthought on the last day of shooting. That’s the first time I realized 3D isn’t just about space. It’s also about an increased presence of things. That increased presence was our main reason to do Anselm in 3D.

How did Anselm’s work influence the form of the film? Did the year-and-a-half needed to find Pina in the edit help make that process easier?

Much more so. With Pina, at least I knew from the beginning what I was going to film. I was trying to film her choreography and capture the emotions that she was able to create in this new art form that she called “dance theater.” With Anselm, there was so much that I tried to do at once. His work goes into so many areas and in so many directions that I really had to approach it much slower. We shot in seven different installments of two weeks over two-and-a-half years. I always returned to the editing room to edit, and think, and edit again, and think…and then realize the next step would be to go into this or to make this understanding deeper. Slowly, like a big huge puzzle, I managed to put it together and find the language that made you able to enter into his universe. At the same time, it spoke with the same grammar. I also realized I had to disappear so much from it. I was never going to appear in it. You weren’t going to hear my voice. I couldn’t, like in many documentaries, bring myself in because that would have really destroyed the desire I had to confront people with the work—not with an opinion of the work.

You’ve described your fascination with these documentaries about artists as a journey into the relatively unexplored territory of the mind. Many people are reading the documentary as a reflection of your mind given some similarities between your backgrounds and thematic interests. Given the removal you just spoke about, is that something that you wouldn’t want?

In this case, it was almost unavoidable by the simple fact that we were born in the same year in Germany, even if our life took us into other directions. Anselm’s impulse was to dig deep into this country that he was born into, this nonexistent country that we were both born into. He was digging deep into the desire to annihilate this forgetting act that was happening everywhere. I just wanted out of this country ever since I could remember, so I had a very opposite reaction to it. But, in a strange way, I was so involved in the subjects that he was treating that even more so I had to objectify it and disappear from anything that you could actively detect. There’s still a lot of Wim Wenders in there, of course. The territory was just too close. It was much closer than Pina’s art, which was a very foreign territory to me. I had not had anything to do with dance or ballet. And as somebody who had wanted to become a painter himself, Anselm’s territory is so close to my heart that I had to be even more attentive to not impose myself.

Did any of his work bleed over into Perfect Days, which you shot during the post-production process for Anselm? Hirayama’s dreams in Perfect Days feel like they have a similar texture to those superimpositions.

Well, thank you for saying that. Maybe Hirayama’s dreams are the only link between the two movies because there’s also this idea of time in these dreams. It’s the remnants of time that you see there. The dreams are a strange part of Perfect Days because I didn’t really shoot them. Because we shot the film so fast in 16 days, there was no way we could shoot anything other than the action itself. But my wife [Donata Wenders], who accompanied me and had done still photography on most of my films before, could finally do something on her own. We were both so happy when I developed the idea of the dreams. She had her own little crew, two ladies, who worked parallel to us and recreated these reverberations of each day of the story in Hirayama’s dream life. It’s almost like elements of another artist’s work in my film.

In 2003, you sat for a lengthy television interview to discuss violence in cinema, and you argued that filmmakers need to provide the space for context that explains why it occurs. Do you see Anselm as a thesis statement on how art can depict violence without inadvertently glorifying it?

By showing German cultural heritage that was abused, misused, and appropriated by the Nazis and revealing it for what it was by putting himself into photography into photographs all over Europe with the Hitler salute, he was [saying to] everybody, “You were all doing this 25 years ago, don’t pretend you didn’t. I’m just doing it to remind you.” He got bashed a lot for that. He was, at the time, mistaken for a neo-Nazi because people just didn’t know how else to deal with the idea that somebody wanted to expose himself by showing something to them. Artists hadn’t done that yet at the time, to really put their lives on the line to show something to other people.

Anselm managed to face fascism—and the ugliest face of fascism ever was the German face of it, with the result being the Holocaust—without that dilemma that, as you brought up, any good intention about war and violence is that you just by exposing the audience to it, you do the same as war and violence does. It’s almost impossible to escape that trap, that a film is always what it shows and not what it intends. Anselm really managed to show that German 19th-century romanticism, for instance, was heavily abused. [He] showed it for what it was and freed it of the violence that was done to it. I don’t think any of his work was ever in danger of glorifying a Nazi past. I wouldn’t know in which way his works ever attracted me like that.

A lot of movies that dealt with Berlin in the ’30s and cabarets profit a lot from the look of fascism and then make it sort of sexy. I walk out each time because I cannot stand that movies are under the spell of it. Of course, the fascist in their German branding invented a lot about what later became our advertising industry. That still bothers the shit out of me that when you talk about them. Most propaganda is attractive! You’re always in that trap. I think Anselm really avoided it. He never painted the visual attraction of fascism or Nazi paraphernalia. He kept out of it. I don’t think he ever painted a swastika.

In that same interview, you talk about your aspirations for the creation of a “peace cinema” that could be attractive and something that people want to watch because it can be boring and genre-less. You’ve written a book on the subject since then, but is Perfect Days at all related to the fulfillment of this concept?

Perfect Days is as close as I ever got to making a statement on peace. For me, one of the big conditions of peace is being content with what you have. One of the big troubles with peace is that our countries and economies are addicted to growth. Growth creates wars. Growth creates inequality. Growth creates those who cannot grow, as opposed to those who always want to continue to grow. Growth is a huge obstacle to peace. Our economists do not like to hear that. They don’t want to hear that we shouldn’t be happy with what we have and try to share it instead of growing more. Growing more is only possible at the expense of others who will grow less, and that’s the reason for most wars. Hirayama is a real peacemaker. He’s my first real peace hero…well, except for the angels in Wings of Desire.