Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010) – The Altar of a Mad God | Ruthless Culture

In 1992, Anselm Kiefer took over a disused silk factory in the departement of Barjac in Southern France.  Over a period of nearly ten years, Kiefer transformed the industrial ruins first into a gigantic studio space and then into a living and breathing work of art in its own right.  An immense installation known as a Gesamtkunstwerk.  This installation comprises an underground maze, an amphitheatre, vast paintings and a series of towers.  The Gesamtkunstwerk fuses the logos of industrialisation with the mythos of Biblical and Jewish imagery to create what can be interpreted as a commentary upon the Holocaust.  However, anything as crude as an interpretation sits uncomfortably on the images that Fiennes provides us with, particularly in the hauntingly scored and exquisitely shot wordless walking tour sequences that bookend the film.  These are not images that are supposed to make sense to us, they are simply there.  The act of interpretation is a vulgar after-thought.  An unwanted interloper.  A pathetic scrabbling for truth against the sheer scale and weirdness of Kiefer’s vision.  A scale so pulverisingly huge that it may as well take in the entire universe.

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