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Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010)

Director: Sophie Fiennes

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From Time Out London

It’s rare to have the chance to watch an artist at work at length, and that’s what Sophie Fiennes offers with her immersive documentary about German artist Anselm Kiefer. As the titles tell us, 65-year-old Kiefer moved to an old silk factory near Barjac in France in 1993 and in 2000 started transforming the buildings and the surrounding 35 hectares into an evolving exhibit of industrially created artworks. He builds caves by pouring concrete into earth to form columns and erects wobbly-looking towers as a response to the Bible. He works with glass, dust, metals, paints, canvas and crockery, and, at first glance, you could mistake his workshop for a living, breathing factory.

After ‘The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema’, her films about Slavoj Zizek, this is another unusual, collaborative film from Fiennes about the creative mind. The difference is this is almost silent. We hear Kiefer talking to his assistants (‘Now, glass, please,’ he says as they smash huge sheets while building a sculpture. ‘Mmm, nice, nice’) and there’s a mid-film interview with a journalist which reminded me of the chatty scene in ‘Hunger’. But the rest is slow and observational as Fiennes lends her voice to Kiefer’s haunting works with stately camera movements and a minimal score by Jörg Widmann and György Ligeti. The boldness of Fiennes’s film lies in how, like Kiefer’s wonderland, it’s removed from the world and indulges only Kiefer and his work. It’s like watching beautiful rushes of a less imaginative doc. Not for everyone, but if you’re willing to give yourself over to its pace, there’s much to enjoy.

Author: Dave Calhoun

Time Out London Issue 2095: 14 – 20 October, 2010

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david glowacki said...

Posted on Oct 19 2010 21:10 l am a big fan of the one intelligent Fiennes (Sophie)This is a great challenge to the viewer to sit through one mans vision and take on life through his art.His canvases are awesome and moving.His constructional art at times looks and feels daft.l enjoyed this film,but the problem for me was that l disliked the artist.He owns cranes and diggers and hoists and dumpsters and employs several men to help him.The whole concept is crazily OTT.His wealth must be enormous as he still had to hire bigger cranes etc for some installation.His enormous property with vast rooms makes Tony Blair seem a pauper.The ego matches the wealth of this guy and l found him repellant.The whole thing amounts to a form of artistic Fascism.The self indulgence and nilhilism is just too much for me to accept this spoilt person.The lead books are interesting and use of colour is excellent,but anyone that needs caves and a large house and dozens of acres as well as many tunnels all so he can create his installation in the end,and inspite of some brilliance earns my derision.Worth seeing for the patient

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