Wim Wenders is sitting in the gardens of the Resideal in Cannes. It’s early morning. The 77-year-old German director is back at the event where he won the Palme D’Or half a lifetime ago, with Paris, Texas in 1984. His stamina is formidable. Wenders has a new film in competition, Perfect Days, a minutely observed drama about the daily life of a Tokyo toilet cleaner. Anselm, his new feature documentary about the visionary artist Anselm Kiefer, a fellow German and near contemporary, is a Special Screening at the festival.
There is a certain irony in the way the two films are made. The highly stylised doc Anselm, produced by Karsten Brünig and sold by Hanway, is in 3D and uses many of the tools of fiction. The more homespun Perfect Days includes sequences detailing its protagonist’s routine which have a documentary-like verisimilitude about them.
“You’re right. Working on my documentaries, I always find myself trying to introduce fictional elements or at least parts of the language of fictional storytelling that I want to apply to the documentary language. And vice versa, in fictional films, I try as hard as I can to bring in documentary methods. In a documentary, you can take it for granted that you’re allowed to somehow shoot in chronological order because often you’d shoot without a firm structure and you just need to find your way through…the shooting process in a documentary is quite creative and based on improvisation, so I try to save some of that for the fictional approach,” Wenders says of applying a freewheeling method to non-fiction.
Anselm was made over a period of two and a half years in six different shoots. Wenders kept “having these impulses of shooting scenes I would rather shoot in a fiction film.” He came up with the idea of depicting Kiefer’s youth and middle age. “I thought maybe I can do this with an actor but then I looked at his son Daniel. I realised I don’t need an actor, because his son looked very much like him when he was in his 40s. Plus, he was actually there as a little boy when Anselm painted in his attic as a totally unknown artist. In fact, the only eye-witness became my actor.”
“Then, eventually, as we have so much in common in our pasts, Anselm and I, in the post-war German era we both lived through, I thought I could do something on where his inspiration comes from,” Wenders continues. “Of course, his life [as] a boy would necessarily be semi-fictional …you can see the imagination of a boy and how much a boy is inspired by where he lives and what he sees and where he comes from. He’s inspired by seeing nature, and he’s inspired by seeing beauty and art. These first impressions change his life. They did change my life, I could finally compare the ugliness around me, the ruins around me to something that was better, and that world was art.”
As a boy, Kiefer used to do his homework on the steps of a nearby castle owned by the local prince. Wenders speculates that the building, which was untouched by the war and was full of art from all over the world, must have inspired him. The director felt this could be relevant for the film. Here was “a little boy who lived in poor conditions, who lived in ruins, in the aftermath of the war, and who was confronted by the beauty of art. And he realised he was good at drawing and at painting, at creating a parallel world.”
What happens, Wenders wondered, when a young, impressionable child is exposed to “a sudden blast of beauty”?
In the documentary, Kiefer makes one very telling remark about how he was taught at school about the Third Reich. The Nazi era was dealt with in just a few weeks. In other words, it was brushed under the carpet. As a kid, Wenders likewise was denied proper teaching about the Hitler period.
“I didn’t get any information about the past when I was a boy. I did realise that something was wrong. All the grown-ups in my family and everybody else, no-one wanted to look over their shoulders. Something was wrong behind their shoulders, in the past, deeply wrong. We didn’t find out anything in primary school, nothing at all. At high school, just like Anselm said, there were a couple of weeks that touched on the Nazi era, as if it had been a remote part of history. Then I knew about the real trouble and the extent of it. Those teachers were too deeply involved in it to even be able to present it as history. It was their own history they were not able to think about.”
Wenders realised that many of his teachers were from the Nazi era. They were still in their jobs and their beliefs hadn’t changed. “My maths teacher was such a Nazi. He still had the moustache, the haircut. The way he treated us was clearly authoritarian. That’s the way he has treated his other students in the Thirties… “
Wenders and Kiefer were among the artists who challenged the refusal of an older generation to confront the problems of the past. Wenders remembers finding in his father’s bookshelves some literature that had been brought into the country by the Allies in 1945 and that detailed the reality of the death camps. His father had collected this material and kept it secretly. (If he had been found with it during the Nazi period, he would have been killed).
“My father was a doctor. He was sent to the front as soon as he had his degree. He was never a Nazi and already as a Catholic boy scout had battles with the Nazi Jugend (Nazi Youth),” says Wenders. “He was a surgeon, he had to put all those young men back together, if he could. He had received information from the allied armies about the euthanasia program the Nazis had established, in the camps. I found that book and read it. I realised my father must have it read it. It was all torn. It was information on the abuse of children, gypsies, Jews and other minorities for medical research. Most of these people died in these horrifying experiments. Kids died from it.”
As he surveyed this material, dug out from the most secret shelf in his father’s library, Wenders began to understand why his parents’ generation were so afraid of confronting the past. His father was initially shocked that his son had discovered the book but realised it was now safe for him to consume. He encouraged Wim to read it well and to remember it.
“In school, the killing of six million Jews or seven [million], was not a subject. It was a fact that was on one line here and one line there, but teachers didn’t know how to deal with it. They didn’t have the language,” Wenders concludes.
In Cannes this week, Wenders also features in Room 999, the new documentary from Luna Playoust that is screening in Cannes Classics. It is inspired by Wenders’ 1982 film Room 666 in which he invited fellow filmmakers to speculate on the future of cinema.
