Original subtitles

MATCH FLARES

Merci.

HE HUMS A TUNE

I've painted a long time on this painting,

and added layers and layers and layers,

and now I go back to the beginning.

HE WHISTLES A TUNE

You know, it's like in the cosmos -

it's always construction, demolition, reconstruction.

All the stars who die, and some others are born.

It's always like this.

Who is responsible for that?

Who started this in the beginning? We don't know.

We don't know why we are here. We don't know where we go.

It's quite desperate, no? Mm-hm.

Because we have an intellect to try to find out, but we cannot.

When a star explodes, all the material goes in the cosmos.

It's there. It's not...

God doesn't forget it, you know.

And then one day it will be recomposed. It will be...

The gravity will recompose another star, and so... So I keep it all.

I put it in one of the boxes there, you know.

If you come, you can see here different...

This is movable? Yes.

Here, different paintings, you see?

Different states.

HE HUMS A TUNE

It's much better now, I think.

Kiefer is emphatically one of the most significant artists

currently working in the world.

Within the art world, Kiefer's a giant, really.

There are some people whose creativity verges on the demonic,

and he is one of those.

When I was a child, I did tunnels in the garden of my parents,

and then I wrote something or made a drawing on a piece of paper,

put it in the tunnel, and then closed it.

I thought, you know, "Why you do this?"

It must be a deep need to do things like that.

ARTILLERY FIRE

I'm thinking of when you were born, 1945,

and, obviously, that moment in the history of Germany.

When I was a child, the neighbour house was a ruin.

There was ruins around.

And this was your playground?

Yes, I had nothing else.

I played with these bricks in the ruins of Donaueschingen, you know.

There was a mass of them, I could play with them.

Kiefer's was a generation that had been born at the very end

of the war, had grown up in the ruins of the war,

had seen, to a certain extent, the recovery of Germany, but, also,

dealing with the guilt, the historical scar of Nazism.

A lot of it had been buried, and I think Kiefer was

part of a generation that started to question that.

It's extraordinary now

because Germany has been about the best place in the world

to teach its children about the war and the holocaust and the Nazis.

But even as late as the '60s, it wasn't the case.

Something profound and horrible has gone wrong,

Germany is shrouded in silence and denial - a kind of willed amnesia.

The Nazis took over art - they decided what was good and what

was bad. Kiefer wanted to sort of purify, cleanse that role again.

From the very beginning, you were very bold.

Reckless, almost, because, as you say, Germany wasn't ready for it.

But...l wasn't ready too.

The starting point was an innocent part.

A stupid part, if you want to say.

The Sieg Heil salute had been banned in Germany since 1945.

Dressing up in his father's Wehrmacht uniform

and performing it for a camera was Kiefer's protest against forgetting.

When he took it to his tutors, most of them were horrified,

and the only one who understood what this precocious 24-year-old

artist was trying to do

was one of the tutors, called Kuchenmeister,

who had actually been in a concentration camp, I believe.

And he supported Kiefer in moving forward in this way.

MUSIC: Die Lorelei by Heinrich Heine

# lch weiss nicht Was soll es bedeuten

# Dass ich so traurig bin

# Ein Marchen aus uralten Zeiten

# Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn... #

As a young artist,

Anselm Kiefer prodded incessantly at the open wound of German history.

His paintings from that time

are covered with references

to mythical German heroes -

Siegfried, Hermann, Parsifal -

blood-soaked legends of the deep past.

These are the same heroes around whom the Nazis built a cult.

This made critics uneasy,

and led to outrage when he represented Germany

at the Venice Biennale, with some accusing him of fascism.

Was he trying to redeem these German heroes and wash away their sins?

If people say, "Oh, who has made that? ls this a neo—Nazi?"

then, um...

then I say nothing, because I go back to an earlier time,

in which time, I don't know what I was.

You understand?

It's not clear what I was in '30, or in '39.

It's not clear what happens with me in this time,

and most of the intellectuals, they don't ask this question -

what they would have done, or what they feel, really.

Kiefer's first flush of success came in the 1980s, and he used

the money to buy and renovate an old brick factory in Buchen, Germany.

Here he expanded

into sculpture and installation.

He began to create

a world for himself.

I've come to Buchen to see this first studio for myself,

and to watch Kiefer install some new work.

I think we have to go over... over there. Yes, we go up here.

Careful to your head. Yes.

This was one aeroplane but I didn't continue it.

It looks awkward.

'It's a bewildering and slightly disorienting experience,

'and Kiefer himself is difficult to keep up with -

'and not just physically.'

Sometimes I put diamonds in. Then it's Valentinus.

You know, the...

Dress designer?

NO! No, no, no, no. Who are you talking about?

Valentino from the antiquity.

Oh... No, from the... He wasn't a second...second...

second century after Christ.

I'm looking down here, and I'm seeing these boxes.

Obviously, you've collected these things. Yes. Where do you find them?

In this building was a lot of material of ancient craft things.

Yes. Yes. There was once a school burning. I found a lot of things.

I always see things that could fit once in my work.

But you don't necessarily know where they're going to fit?

No, mostly not. Let's go down here.

When I did the straw paintings in the '80s, then I had sometimes

an axe, and I took the straw away when it was too much,

or when I wanted just the remnants of straw on the painting,

and then...l didn't throw it away, and I brought it here.

That's probably been here for how many years?

When did you do the straw paintings? Oh, that's here for...since '84.

So it's been here for about...

30 years, now. 30 years, yeah. Well, it's... And it doesn't transform.

It's survived very, very well!

THEY LAUGH

Do you throw anything away? No, never. Never anything.

I think it all can be...

..reused or transformed.

It was here in Buchen that Kiefer's work began to develop

in new directions.

As he plunged deeper into the guilt and horror of German history,

it was as though somehow conventional paint

was no longer enough.

He began to mix it with ash, earth

and straw - the debris of the world.

These two paintings are Kiefer's

response to Death Fugue,

a poem about the Holocaust

by the Jewish poet Paul Celan.

IN GERMAN:

If the horror of the world

can be expressed by artists,

then that is an achievement, isn't it?

The word "achievement" is very difficult.

It's... As horrible as a subject is, art becomes beauty.

That's... That's a malediction, even. A curse?

It's a curse. That art that becomes beauty, you know. But...

um...it doesn't mean that you have found the sense of the world.

You have constructed a sense.

You could be seduced to think that art could redeem the world.

It cannot.

You see there? Yeah. They are the oven...

The brick ovens. The brick ovens.

This is really, for me, very shocking, this,

and I never changed anything. I just put a bulb in,

because this is already... I cannot do it better, you know. Mm.

It's like it is, you know.

Well, of course, without saying it, this is... Sure.

..very troubling when you look at it.

It's... For this reason, I never did something in here.

It's already enough. Yeah.

Dein goldenes Haar Margarete

Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith...

Julien, ca va?

The reason Kiefer has returned to Buchen with his assistants

is to install these new works.

Here are those Occupations photographs again,

now reused and transformed, just like the straw.

They'd been blown up, on giant sheets of lead.

In the '60s, I couldn't do them,

because I'd not the money to do big exposures,

so there was a lot of potentiality left.

ALAN LAUGHS

Lead is such a charged material.

I mean, it's poisonous, it's base material, it's alchemical

and Kiefer loves all of that.

I think he likes the fact that it's contaminated.

I think, you know, the contamination of history by various regimes

is something he's explored.

I think the fact that a lot of the books are made of lead,

you know - the literal interpretation -

the weight of history, that still reverberates.

'History is a material.'

It's like clay, you know.

You can form it as you want it.

You can abuse it, you know, this form, what they all do.

Since the 1990s, Kiefer's artistic vision has,

like the cosmos, expanded.

He began to attach objects to his canvasses - plants,

lead books, the weapons of war.

Each object has a deeper meaning,

an allusion to one of Kiefer's

wildly diverse interests.

There are references

to ancient civilisations...

..to occult 17th-century philosophers...

..or to NASA's attempts

to organise the stars.

If they could be said

to share a common theme,

it is man's quest

to make sense of the world.

The great thing for me about Anselm is that he's really only interested

in the big questions in life - "How did I get to be here?

"What am I here to do?"

And that's what he's trying to work out and work through

in his painting and in his sculptures and all of his work.

Are you a believer?

I believe not in a personal god,

who will help me or condemn me, or...

HE LAUGHS ..put me into hell.

I... But it's evident that there is something above us,

far above us, who...

what we cannot understand.

More and more, you ask yourself why we are here,

and for what reason. Nobody knows it.

So for this reason, you are always...

You are always... Looking? Searching?

Looking...searching for something.

He has this kind of Stanley—Kubrick—like view

which takes in simultaneously the birth of the planet

and the death of the planet, and the birth of civilisation

and the death of civilisation,

and the small stuff in between can piss off.

In 1992, Kiefer moved his studio

to Barjac in the South of France.

Without the help of architects or engineers,

Kiefer and his assistants have turned this 200—acre site

into one of the most dazzling,

jaw-dropping works of art in the world.

There are tunnels,

towers

and pavilions to house his installations.

It is Kiefer's imagination, writ large on the landscape.

CLATTERING

They are courageous, huh?

HE CHUCKLES

Now you can look through, Elektra! Look!

Virgil, you have so long feet from here.

There is a feeling at Barjac of a giant intellectual as well as

physical playground.

It does feel like someone has been

allowed to let themselves loose

and do what they want to do,

and explore and play.

He's one of those artists

who absolutely uses

the selling of art to fund

these extraordinary projects.

There's no commercial benefit in Barjac.

It's done because there is this extraordinary compulsion.

HORN BLARES

MELODIC BEEPING

STEADY BEEPING

HORN BLARES

So how would you describe Barjac?

ls it a working studio, or an exhibition space, or what?

It almost feels like a laboratory.

I would say "laboratory" is a good word, yes.

Exhibition space, laboratory, and...

..it's a work of art who has different issues,

or different material.

You know, it's landscape,

it's minimal art, it's conception art, it's land art,

it's all these together.

It is an overwhelming place to walk around,

and normally it's off-limits to the public,

but one month from now,

Kiefer is inviting a select group

of curators and collectors here

for the very first time.

HORN BLARES

And there's work to be done.

KIEFER GROANS

KIEFER GROANS

Tony! L'ouest!

L'ouest. La? Oui. OK.

Tony!

'So I started with three containers.'

I put them, and I put around other containers,

and then, in the space between, I put concrete.

And here you can see the container is still visible,

it was the inner container, the container was outside,

I took it away and I had a wall.

So I started here,

I wanted just to have three places underneath the earth...

..like bunkers.

And then I thought, it's so nice, and I continued with the next

and the next and the next, and it was a building,

all of a sudden.

So it was just growing, growing like a painting, you know.

I like things in movement. I don't like them static.

I like that they move and that they surprise me.

If this would collapse, it would be a wonderful surprise, you know.

I wanted that it slides a little bit, you know.

Because you can imagine if it would slide,

it would have been wonderful, no?

But it didn't. Didn't. Didn't want.

I get a cigar now.

I was a long time, I had a problem,

I didn't know if I would be a writer or a painter.

Now I cannot change any more, it's done now.

His bookshelves are full of physics and cosmology,

he's really, genuinely, conceptionally so omnivorous,

he's still Anselm the kind of teenager in a way,

who is very annoyed at life at not giving him another 100 years

in which he can read absolutely everything.

And that hasn't changed at all.

This is a printing machine,

they are filled up for centuries with meanings, you know, it's enormous,

and, erm, yeah...

..and I transformed them now in a new meaning.

In the Hebrew tradition, the letters are sacrosanct,

however you combine them, even in a completely irrational way,

it makes a sense, you know, because the letters themselves are holy.

'These pillars are made with a drill.'

So there was nothing, we drill - bzzz.

And then in this hole, we put the concrete.

These are the pillars then.

Here I left a hole, because I like to come the earth in a room,

you know, it's wonderful, no?

Tony, this has to be done quickly because I wanted it to stay like this.

OK, should we go up there?

We go up. How we can go up?

The best will be by here.

We can do something like this, Anselm.

No touch... Below, Tony, it stays like this.

Maybe we'll get a little bit more stones when we are going to

work on it, but that's it, eh?

Oh-h, Tony...

You like scale, don't you?

Scale? I know you're in denial about it, but is it important to you?

You know, I don't look at it like you look.

It's my... It's my gesture.

It's my body who is implicated.

You know the quotation of Nietzsche - "the philosopher has to dance".

You have to dance.

So it's...the physical part is very obvious,

and the scale is a product of the dance, if you want, you know.

What I see in your work, it makes me look at the world differently.

Your use of material, whether it's lead or it's straw,

material which ages, and changes, and transforms.

I think the transformation is in them.

Because since a few years, some years,

I do electrolysis, I put the painting in electrolysis bath.

You know, I want to put some time on this painting.

I want to accelerate the time?

And this is what the alchemists do.

What happens in nature, they accelerate.

My paintings goes very often to change, they get green or red,

with time.

I think you can see beauty in anything.

I remember I was walking once on the beach in India.

And the people came in the morning to the sea to shit, you know.

A lot. Thousands. It was covered with shit.

And it was fantastic, you know, you could see all colours.

It was a palette of colours. No, there are no ugly things.

When you look at films, Germany after May '45, you know...

It looks so fantastic, these damaged towns, you know.

I mean, each artist or each writer,

he...his capital is his childhood,

you know, all what you learn there, what you saw there.

Because you saw there without any connotations, you saw it like...

innocently. innocently, and that's important. Yeah.

All the source of inspiration, the source of doing something is there.

You know, when you are a child, you have little equipment

and now I have real ones.

But it's the same, you know. It's not so much difference.

Achtung!

HE SHOUTS

This was less good.

HE SHOUTS

Yeah! Bravo, Tony!

You are a genius. You are quite a genius.

No, no, no!

Andreas!

I would like to put this now there.

Jag

'I have to guard against order sometimes,'

because there is always a middle way or a compromise

between chaos and order.

If it's too chaotic, nothing comes out, you know,

if it's too order, it's sterilised.

You have to always find the way between these two things.

Let's go.

Stop! Stop!

Now that's better.

Ja. ja, ja. Gut.

Sunflowers are everywhere in Kiefer's universe.

He seems to prefer them dead and dried up,

when their heads are packed with seeds -

a potent symbol of death and rebirth.

Six years ago, Kiefer moved his studio for a third time.

He now works here,

on an industrial estate half an hour east of Paris,

in a warehouse that used to belong to a department store.

Unlike Barjac, everything here is on one level.

Paintings and sculptures can be moved quickly on wheels.

In fact, everyone who works here uses bicycles to get around.

You know, this, what you see here is like my brain.

It's... All the synapses and things.

And I go around and sometimes I find, late, a new connection

between some objects, between a painting and an object,

or between two paintings, and so on.

Obviously you've collected these things?

Oh, there are a lot of things, skins of snakes,

there are rails out of clay, or locomotives,

flowers, all kinds of plants,

debris, all kinds of things.

So you have your memories, and your materials,

but also you might want to come back to these works at any time.

So they're all here for you to...

They're waiting.

I think to wait is something important.

It's philosophical to wait, no?

You know, today people don't wait any more.

You are always contact with your friend, your wife,

you have always your Handy with you...

Oh, now I'm there... It's no more waiting for someone.

Some of these works have been waiting for a very, very long time.

I think there are works from '71.

In the containers outside, I have works from the earlier '70s,

but I know where they are in which container,

and then I go with my bicycle through all the rooms,

all the spaces, and then I have an idea.

Stop!

Do you enjoy the process of making?

Erm...it's difficult. And sometimes it's a failure.

Because in any stage of a painting, you have 100 possibilities,

and you have to choose one.

It's a war in your head, you know.

'And when I look two, three days later, I think it's shit.'

It happens, you know.

Because you are in a certain situation, and you think,

"Ah, now I've got something." And then you have to wait.

To calm down, you know, and then you see.

And sometimes, the contrary happens too.

You think, "Oh, I work so much, and it's damaged. It's not good."

And then, later, you see, oh, you found a new thing.

How do you know when a work is ready to leave the studio?

It's a very difficult moment.

Because it's artificial interruption.

It's a crucial moment when I have to give a painting to a show

and they sell it, and then I cannot touch it any more because then

the curators or restorators take over and it's taboo for me.

We should divide one in two and then...

It's too much, Bill. We cannot use these walls.

This gets out for the moment, OK?

We will take it out.

You know how he used to show me the paintings?

There were the paintings, there was a frame with wheels,

and the paintings were outside.

So, one day it was raining and he wanted to show me

paintings on wheels.

I said, "Anselm, maybe we should wait until it doesn't rain?"

He said, "Rain won't hurt it, it might even help it."

And so he would bring the paintings out, and leave them out

in the rain while we were looking at them, and then put them all back.

So that's what's so great about working with him.

Ja.

Oh, it looks already better, Bill.

'I did some flower paintings, I like so much flowers, you know.

'And then I thought, “That's difficult, to do flowers."

'It's too...comforting.

'People would like it too much.

'I thought I have to give the flowers'

and the wonderful fields of flowers

another meaning. And I called it Morgenthau Plan.

Henry Morgenthau Jr was an American politician,

who in 1944, with victory imminent,

devised a plan for Germany after the war.

He wanted to destroy its factories

and turn the entire country into farmland.

The Nazis discovered this and Goebbels seized the opportunity

to inspire the German people to fight on.

So the Morgenthau Plan didn't happen,

but I like this idea of these non-executed plans.

I think an artist has a good opportunity to do something

with this, because it didn't happen, you know.

I had in my head the idea Germany would bloom everywhere,

there would be a lot of flowers, wheat everywhere

and it would be a wonderful green country.

Now we go here.

Because in the middle, it could be more, how do you say, disparate?

Open fire!

You know, you do exhibitions, you sell paintings,

and once you have to say, "That's now finished."

But you're very reluctant to say anything is finished.

Yes, I think it's never finished.

Even when it left my studio, it continues.

Because, erm, the feeling of the spectators play a big role.

Because they create then

thousands and millions of their own picture of the picture.

You get a feeling now that here's a man at the height

of his creative powers.

I mean, he always had energy but I've just seen a level of intensity

in the last ten years escalate.

And I think it's going to be a phenomenal late period.

Maturity, I think we call it.

"Die Erzeitalt."

You know what it is in English? No.

Strats... The strats of the time.

For example, you can see a portrait here, look.

You see these flowers?

Yes!

THEY CHUCKLE

The Queen of France, you see?

She doesn't look too pleased, Anselm!

ANSELM LAUGHS

I don't think there's ever been anything like this quite

in the Royal Academy.

THEY CHUCKLE

Did you spend much time establishing this in this room?

No. Four and a half hours. Wow.

It goes quick, I have five people, and they throw it.

I made it from this side, you know.

But it's always better from the other side.

You was aware of this?

It's controlled from this side, from the other side not.

And that's mostly better.

And in this room... You want some in your camera?

That's me. Me projected to another time, to the geological time.

Our life is so short, you know.

So it's a sort of self—portrait, is it?

It's a self-exploration,

to be connected to the geological time,

then I have more time, you know.

Perhaps it has something to do with turning 70 next year, but

Kiefer's fascination with time seems to be getting deeper and wider.

Geological time is the oldest time on Earth,

stretching back millions of years.

A timescale in which the human race,

and everything, everything it has achieved,

is little more than a blip.

330 million years ago a big meteorite hit the Earth,

and then all...l think 97% of all livings was destroyed.

And if this meteorite wouldn't have hit the Earth,

you wouldn't be there, because evolution would have gone

in another direction.

FLUTE PLAYS

Now tell me, do you dream, Anselm?

You know, the most wonderful dreams are always connected with water.

Water can be also very, erm...

Dangerous?

ja. It comes down and dissolves all like this.

When I was growing up, I had always nightmares

but now I don't have any more nightmares.

I was always fascinated by the expression -

“I hold all Indias in my hand."

It's from a poet, Quevedo, from the 17th century.

We know the continents was once all together, then they were separated

and I liked the idea to reorganise the continents

by swimming.

Why are you an artist?

You know, I... I have to connect things in the world

in a different way.

You see a lot of things. They are disparate.

And, um, you want to have a connection, to feel more secure,

or to feel better.

And this is what artists do,

they create a new connection between things.

We don't know why we are here. We don't know where we go.

We have an intellect to try to find out.

But we cannot.

It's quite desperate, no?