Black milk of dawn we drink it in the evening,

we drink it at noon and in the morning

we drink it at night,

we drink it and drink it,

we dig a grave in the air there we do not lie tight.

(Paul Celan, Escape of Death)

The sculptures dedicated to the Bride, poetically open the immersive images, in a rarefied and static woodland setting with Leonard Kübner's Sonnenuhren: a spell in which the dress becomes root, satellite, tower.

The list of women of antiquity, like Flavia and Poppea: women books, cage, wood: "we want to be the nameless, forgotten ones."

Boundless.

Storage, warehouse, construction site.

Art and mythology are fortunes of knowledge.

Myth is an alternative way to understand history.

Philosophy, literature, physics, astronomy, ruins.

Kiefer was born on March 8, 1945, spent his childhood in the ruins of war, and this will remain the unquenchable point of convergence in his work.

The need to obsessively retrace that past that is always present through the manipulation of matter, of the myths of monuments, of bodies.

The documentary is a comings and goings of Kiefer's life interspersed with current events that take place in his two distinct majestic ateliers: Barjac, 30 hectares in the south of France, and Croissy, near Paris.

He cycles through them, frantically climbing up and down mobile scaffolding to get closer to the heights and majesty of his works.

Through 3D, Wenders wants to take us directly into those spaces, drawing on Celan's poetry and Heidegger's philosophy.

The meeting between the two remained a nonmeeting: the director recounts the need of the poet, a Romanian Jew to whom his parents died in labor and concentration camps, with the philosopher who was rector of the University of Freiburg during the rise of Adolf Hitler.

In 1967 Celan awaits an explanation, an action, a thought, a gesture that remains mute, unfinished, unthought. After a few years he will commit suicide.

The need to narrate this impossibility highlights the director's urgency to grasp the absence of an answer that stalks Kiefer's artistic journey, tracing the labyrinth of reading, of the endless library, of the obsessive/compulsive accumulation of matter to be used without a fulfilled planning.

His work needs the landscape, the epic, the cathedral.

He flips through albums unlike his non-books, huge, heavy unsearchable, unreadable books.

He also flips through a volume of his own work titled "Heidegger's Brain," which becomes somber neoplasia, metastasis.

He builds bicycles with wings in honor of the unbearable lightness of being as he walks through a ghost town of ruins and abandonment.

Wenders' Kiefer feels he is on a journey, never arrived, always banished: depicted as a tightrope walker on the ruins of the world with a sunflower/poppy as his pole.

The scene is as empty as the beginning of the world and as the misunderstanding of his work that has been branded national socialist.

Then again, Wenders knows very well what it means to be German, heirs, albeit innocent of an ontological guilt.

A docufilm in which reality is intertwined with fiction, with passages ranging from childhood to early recognition of the artist's talent, to portraits of the great German thinkers, to biblical quotations, between metaphysical abstraction and apocalypse.

Wenders makes the infinite complexity of an irredeemable art usable to the general public, and he does not do so in a didactic or descriptive way: he nonetheless recounts, without resorting to his own words, the incessant search for fragments of life, of memory, of absence, of matter, of emptiness.

He ushers us into the restlessness that has become an expanding, chaotic, and grave repository where the subtraction of meaning reigns and where the need to build in order to destroy and rebuild again, seamlessly, prevails.

An archaeologist, an alchemist, pre-Socratic philosopher who rapes matter mixing the elements earth, water, fire and air with Heraclitean whimsy and lucidity where the Spinozian substance of Deus sive natura is represented.

Everything seems to be in becoming, despite gravity: everything is in constant transformation: for everything is in everything and perhaps the finite is resolved in the Hegelian infinite.

The work is such only in its making, while it becomes a product in the moment of its completion.

Wenders' Kiefer mixes everything, burning and extinguishing the fire it generates, emulsifying the elements like an immanent, anthropomorphic deity that ploughs the track of the unattainability of meaning allowing evil to become raw beauty.

22-Apr-2024 by Beatrice