OVER YOUR CITIES GRASS WILL GROW, dir Sophie Fiennes

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (Artificial Eye, 2010, director – Sophie Fiennes)

 I braved the rain tonight and went to the screening of Over your Cities Grass will Grow by director Sophie Fiennes which turned out to be a documentary and bio-pic of the artist, Anselm Kiefer (1945 - ). 

In 1993 Kiefer left his home in Buchen, Germany for La Ribaute, a derelict silk factory near Barjac in France, which happens to be near Montelimar, Avignon and Nimes, the region also known as Provence. Director Sophie Fiennes has clearly enjoyed the films of Stanley Kubrick and employs the music of Gyorgi Ligeti featured in Kubrick's film, 2001; A Space Odyssey. She obviously wishes us to understand that Kiefer's artworks are as monumental as the visionary themes of Kubrick's films. 

Kiefer is busily transforming the derelict site of La Ribaute into a theme park or installation, using bull dozers, drilling machines of all kinds, cement mixers and just all kinds of mechanical aids and gizmos. Sometimes he is working in his studio with his assistants who just pose as minions, faithful Igors who adjust the screens or the cement but who play no meaningful part in the creative process. Kiefer is a hands-on practitioner of his art, not a dull theoretician compartmented in an office with a tedious script. 

He is interviewed in the library he built in la Ribaute, speaks in German to an interviewer about the meaning of meaning while small boys miculate or do hand wanking signs behind his head. Candidly Kiefer's art flows from him, but all around evidence of the monoliths he and he alone created flow in and out of the landscape, while the music of Gyorgy Ligeti drones on in the background and then in the foreground and then perhaps in the background again. We don't find out much about the practicalities of Kiefer's life, for example where does the money come from for all this? Instead we have a portrait of the artist as an old dodger. Kiefer constructs his installations encountering problems of interpretation, construction (or deconstruction) of meaning, but always ready to seize a spade or welding torch, to go in alone and sort whatever hitch or technical glitch might occur. His faithful minions always obey and never ever complain of lack of pay or long hours or anything (they're not allowed). But the film has real poetry and real poetry is concocted somewhere in between Kiefer's paintings, Ligeti's tone poems and Fiennes skillfully crafted images. Although the film could have flowed over with pretension, it all seems remarkably spare, pared to the bone, reduced and minimal. 

 Paul Murphy, the Soho Screening Rooms, London

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