Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow
Over Your Cities
Grass Will Grow
Director: Sophie Fiennes
British filmmaker Sophie Fiennes' documentaries have been defined by her reluctance to employ traditional talking heads and biographical exposition, but her latest offering takes this approach to an extreme.
Never mind a voiceover: Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow is nearly devoid of the human voice, as Fiennes allows the mammoth presence of her subject - German artist Anselm Kiefer's labyrinth of installations at a derelict silk factory in Barjac, France - to speak for itself. Viewers are led on a roam through tunnels, past pillar-like structures and along glaringly white spaces with nothing but Gyorgi Ligeti's sparse music for company.
So the film begins, and it takes nearly a quarter of an hour before a human presence emerges, in the form of an assistant undertaking drastically physical work to shape another of Kiefer's vast paintings. Kiefer does speak in the film, but it's hardly an aesthetic concession on Fiennes' part: he is seen giving an interview to a journalist.
Similar to Fiennes' Because I Sing, the 2001 piece about the preparations and execution of Alain Platel's massive 'choral portrait' of London with the contribution of 16 racially and culturally diverse choirs from the city, Over Your Cities is designed to reveal the artisanship which leads to the production of great art.
We see Kiefer and his team melting liquid metal to create an abstract image of a waterway in a piece resembling a small sandy mountain. Then the film sets off again on its wordless, meditative exploration of the space and substance of Kiefer's vast studio.
This juxtaposition of the raw and the reflective is mesmerising - and this idiosyncratic mix is highly artistic in itself. Over Your Cities transcends its status as a documentary to become art in itself - a docu-essay of Fiennes' own artistic instincts.
This is to plastic arts what Fiennes' previous outing, The Perverts' Guide to Cinema, is to film. Just as that relentless psychoanalysis of classic movies (with the help of Slavoj Zizek), Over Your Cities is an overwhelming embrace of an art form and its discontents.
The confines of the small screen might have stripped the film of the power it possesses in a theatre, but even a television viewing brings rewards.
Extras: feature-length commentary with Fiennes and writer Ian Haydn Smith; trailer.
