[my response to this is at the bottom, where it belongs]
Review:
Sophie Fiennes’s mother died in 1993. Seventeen years later, her daughter, now 43, is almost seven months pregnant with her first baby, and her new film, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, is about to be shown at Cannes. Sophie is the sister of the movie star Ralph Fiennes. Their mother’s death is crucial to her presence at Cannes. It was the reason she started making her own films.
“It was some kind of trigger. I thought, ‘I’m going to do work now.’ My mother was a very observant person; I felt a little invaded. If I had been doing my own work, I would have felt invaded by her. When she died, I felt I wasn’t being watched. She was a passionate, intelligent, emotional person, very complicated.”
And, to get the family out of the way, there is that brother thing. “Well, you get used to it. There’s a big difference between the celebrity and the practical reality of being able to talk to somebody like Ralph. I learn a lot from him about how actors feel about film. The celebrity idea of the Fiennes family is a big press construction, really.” She is sitting on the edge of her seat at the Groucho Club. Her condition makes this look uncomfortable, alarming. Her big eyes are fixed on me, as if demanding I understand.
Believe me, I want to. Her film is a wonder. It is a documentary about Anselm Kiefer. Before I saw the film, I knew Kiefer was a great artist. After I saw it, I knew why. In 1993, he moved from Germany to Barjac, in southern France. There, he constructed an astonishing work — a landscape of buildings, towers, tunnels and bridges — from torn chunks of concrete, broken glass and old lead from the roof of Cologne Cathedral. Inside each building is a painting or sculpture
Then, a few years ago, he decided to leave Barjac. A fleet of 110 lorries transported his work to a warehouse on the Périphérique, outside Paris. But he left behind the great work of Barjac — the art and buildings. A caretaker looks after it. Uninhabited, it quietly waits for nature to take over, because, as we know, over our cities grass will grow. Before he left, he wanted the work recorded in film. Somehow, Fiennes got involved. Making the film took her 2½ years.
She was, on the face of it, an odd choice. The Fiennes family came from first Ipswich, then Wangford, in Suffolk. There were seven children and, although they were linked to industrialists and aristocrats, there seemed to be no money. “They overbred for the money they had,” Sophie says laconically. Her father was a tenant farmer, then he tried to be a photographer. Sophie worked in his darkroom as a child. It was a strange upbringing — part bohemian, part bourgeois. “In my family, there was an emphasis on ideas, on visual language, on psychoanalytic thinking. But my parents also seemed to me to be middle-class, and every Sunday morning my father would kind of get everything shipshape. They weren’t bohemian in that they were having wife-swapping or free marriage. They were trying desperately to keep their heads above water, really.”
Sophie got her nine O-levels, but decided she wanted to go straight to art school, rather than university. Film had hooked her. At 14, she remembers seeing Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser on television — “It mesmerised me.” Art school was disappointing. She left and tried to make her way into the movies. “I started discovering the great European cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, then the great American cinema of the 1940s and 1950s — this huge journey of discovery into world cinema. I realised how many amazing films had been made.”
She ended up being a runner, then location manager, for Peter Greenaway on films such as A Zed & Two Noughts, The Belly of an Architect and Drowning by Numbers. Leaving Greenaway at 24, she had a perfect CV for a career in the movies. Except for one thing — she doesn’t compromise.
Next, she worked with Michael Clark, the radical punk dancer and choreographer. “Peter flirted with transgression and strangeness, then, suddenly, Michael was doing all this transgression and strangeness.” Clark gave her a credo. “He would always say, ‘Darling, we must start as we mean to continue.’ It meant he wasn’t going to compromise. You have to do what you feel is right. I always think of him saying that.” Thanks to this credo, there is no prospect of Sophie’s name appearing on the latest iteration of Batman or Pirates of the Caribbean — or, come to that, on the sort of film in which, for the most part, her brother appears.
“I go to see films that aren’t going to have a huge market, but I find them much more satisfying than big market-machine films. Yet that area of film-making has been completely sidelined. That’s why I want to fight to keep that space open.” Her finances are more church mouse than Goldman Sachs, a state of affairs for which her background prepared her. “I have low overheads. I don’t know how to make money, but I know how to live on little money.”
Her chosen way of keeping the non-market-machine space open is documentaries. Prior to the Kiefer film, she made a short about the maverick director Lars von Trier; Hoover Street Revival, about a pentecostal church in LA; and The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, a psychoanalytical critique of movies by the philosopher Slavoj Zizek.
Why documentaries? “Because I could be prolific. I could actually be a film-maker and not someone having endless development conversations. Also, there’s something about documentaries and that quality of time that I really like.”
Yet, once more evading the logic of the marketplace, she insists that she is not part of the fashionable wave of documentary movies. “I don’t feel myself to be part of the current documentary style. You know, how it’s all about how you are going to change the world with agitprop sensations that for a day will be on The Guardian’s website and make us all feel we should be doing something. And it all ends up being just part of the big traffic of noise.”
Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow has no messages and, in fact, few words. There is no voice-over, no ponderous commentary telling you what to think. The very idea is anathema to Fiennes. She believes in the autonomous power of the image, its ability to change meanings as you watch. There are long sequences in which the camera simply dwells on different aspects of Barjac, the only accompaniment being the music of Ligeti. The rest of the time, we just see Kiefer working with his assistants.
This is phenomenally dramatic. Lead is smelted, underground caverns are dug, sheets of glass are smashed, great chunks of concrete are craned into position, lead books are crushed by concrete sections and, at one lovely moment, a giant painting is dusted over,then raised by a crane so that most of the dust cascades off. The only relief from all this is a quiet interview with a writer in a library, which, perversely, I found incredibly funny. Kiefer defies questioning, not out of malice, but because he does not seem to be able to play the game. Yet the interview is, at critical moments, revealing. Kiefer takes a wondering interest in science, particularly physics. He regards it as evidence that he knows nothing.
“It’s a parallel construction for him,” Fiennes says, “like mysticism or the kabbalah. The only thing that is true for him — or not some kind of system he distrusts — is, in fact, the reflections of the poets he is influenced by, like Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. It is something much more fragile about moments lived by human beings.”
The whole thing is further dramatised by Kiefer’s manner. He is genial, amiable, but apparently oblivious to danger. He walks over mounds of broken glass in flip-flops and manoeuvres tons of crane-hung concrete by hand. He also uses a lot of lead. He has a blood test every year, but, he told Fiennes, has no lead in his veins.
It is an exhilarating, refreshing corrective to the fey conceptualism that dominates the London art world. We are used to artists who don’t get their hands dirty. But Kiefer is a healthy version of Jackson Pollock. He gets in among his work, risking lead poisoning or huge blood loss as he does so.
“He doesn’t fit in the art world,” Fiennes says. “Friends of mine are amazed at the extent to which he is in contact with the process of making his work. He is, in that sense, from another generation.”
She is quite protective of her subject. She recoils at most big, critical attempts to explain or locate his work. She is right. The whole point about Kiefer is that he requires no commentary of any kind. What you see is what you get. His life and his art are the thing itself. “He was born in southern Germany, in the midst of an air raid in 1945. There was no milk and he almost died. He was right in the moment of this cataclysm of European history. The house next door was shattered and, like many children of that time, he played in the ruins as he grew up — this sense of entering the world after some catastrophe marked him.”
Yet, oddly, there is something rather sunny and optimistic about Barjac. “When he wants the grass to cover the cities, it is a positive thing. I think that’s something to do with his generation. They wanted a new life.”
You have to see this film, but I don’t know how you will. No British distribution is yet fixed. It was financed by the French and the Dutch, although Fiennes was expecting British money for an extra print to take to Cannes. So, basically, what we have here is an outstanding British film with which neither the British film industry nor British television is equipped to deal. Compare that to what the French government did for Kiefer. It acted as an estate agent, actually finding the property at Barjac.
It is not how we do things here, but in rare cases such as Sophie Fiennes’s, it is perhaps how we should do things. Her purity about film, her refusal to compromise, are to be treasured and financed, not least because there’s a baby on the way.
My criticism:
Dear Sir,
I would like to make some comments about your review of Sophie Fiennes’ film – not the film itself, for as you have pointed out, it would be somewhat difficult to see in the UK at present, but I will seek it out as soon as possible. The comments I would like to make relate to your writing and problems it throws up. For example, you make the following unusual statement: “Before I saw the film, I knew Kiefer was a great artist. After I saw it, I knew why.” I don’t quite understand how, before you saw the film, you knew Kiefer was a great artist without knowing why. To define something as ‘great’ usually entails having some reason to do so, but you claim to have known he was great before having a reason. I’m sure you do have a reason, so it might be more to your credit to explain what it is rather than bandy the word ‘great’ as if telling us a self-apparent fact.
Another striking phrase warrants consideration: “Kiefer takes a wondering interest in science, particularly physics. He regards it as evidence that he knows nothing.” Tell me; how can a person hold evidence for knowing that he knows nothing? Surely to know the evidence is to know something? There are some good passages on this in Plato’s ‘Apology’ that you might want to read.
And finally (for the sake of brevity); “She recoils at most big, critical attempts to explain or locate his work. She is right. The whole point about Kiefer is that he requires no commentary of any kind.” You seem to say that we should abandon our intellectual and critical conscience in favour of looking up to people because they are simply there and do ‘big’ things – that they are beyond criticism. I fundamentally disagree; if people were not encouraged to relinquish their critical judgement and conscience so easily to men beyond criticism, Kiefer might not have grown up in the aftermath of the Nazis. Our ability to be critical is crucial.
In summa: your review of “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow has no messages…” and how I wish “…There [were] no voice-over, no ponderous commentary telling [me] what to think.”
Sincerely,
Daniel O’Reilly
