One might be forgiven for mistaking the first ruminative minutes of Anselm, shot in 3D with 6K resolution, for an unusually somber outtake from The Polar Express. But in Wim Wenders’s imaginative, image-driven documentary about his friend, German artist Anselm Kiefer, the three-dimensionality serves less to entertain than to sensorily envelope and engross. From the plaster comprising “Femmes Martyres” (2018–19), the sculptural installation described above, to the ship-container towers over La Ribaute, Kiefer’s 100-acre estate in southern France, all surfaces are exceedingly tactile. Kiefer’s artworks punctuate a cinematic field of sweeping, multiplanar proportions — to which Wenders invites us to revel and recoil. 

Wenders’s shot composition mirrors the dense layering of materials that comprise the eponymous artist’s massive collaged works: scorched sunflowers, shattered glass, the rusted handlebars of a vintage bike. The camera moves between the planes of each shot as a dancer moves onstage. It’s no surprise that the director’s first 3D venture, in 2011, was a documentary about dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch.