Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow

Some might be reminded of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker as the camera lens here prowls endlessly through concrete-slab environments and rooms full of rubble while discordant and atonal music plays in the background. However, this is not a science-fiction movie set but rather a long-term art installation by Anselm Kiefer on the grounds of a disused factory in France, where the renowned German artist has added more mazes of tunnels, monumental constructions, and piles of debris and material. One heap consists of oversized molds of human teeth, others of broken glass. The first 22 minutes of Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow from established documentarian Sophie Fiennes (of the Fiennes thespian family) pass wordlessly, while most of the rest merely eavesdrops on Kiefer and his collaborators as they continue to shape the landscape, sometimes reconfiguring entire vast chambers to direct attention to a single bas-relief-style painting. And all for…what, exactly? One mainly unhelpful sit-down with the artist (no biographical material on the painter-sculptor is presented) touches on themes of entropy and the Big Bang theory—or, more precisely, multiples of the Big Bang, in which the universe repeatedly collapses in on itself, continually moving from order to chaos. The apocalyptic title refers to an Old Testament passage, but with no clearer clues to aid viewers in navigating the puzzling slag-heaps of post-modernism on display here, this is an optional purchase, at best. Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)