A Side Note: Jim Loves Documentaries!

I spoke with Professor Porter about this after class, but I thought I would share this with everyone else too.

During class today, I was reminded of a film I watched at the Belcourt last month called Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow. It’s about this German artist named Anselm Kiefer, who spent much of his time from 1991 to 2008 transforming an old silk factory in the south of France into a giant complex containing pieces of art. The complex includes many new buildings which Kiefer built to house one piece each and a labyrinthine series of tunnels which make their way under the buildings. But that’s not what I’m really getting at.

Part of the film focuses on the construction of these huge concrete structures (featured on the film’s poster here). They’re supposed to suggest the ruins of a civilization “after people,” one might say. I can’t help but feel like this speaks to our discussion about (im)mortality and humanity as it relates to the natural world. As I said in class, the poet’s equivalent to birdsong is his poetry, and through poetry he hopes to find some kind of immortality. Over Your Cities makes me think that perhaps society’s equivalent would be buildings and ruins. Society’s buildings might be analogous to Keats’ search for the immortality which the nightingale achieves through the birdsong shared by all nightingales. While the individual nightingale or person might die, he still maintains a certain immortality which is achieved through the collective in which he took part during life. Is this too much of a stretch?

I think that Kiefer’s work also speaks to the questions suggested by Byron’s “Darkness,”: what shape will society’s end take? What happens after people are gone? In Kiefer’s answer, nature wins out and reclaims what society took from it. This is especially true because he practically abandoned the site when he was done with it in 2008, and grass is literally growing back over the complex which he built.

This was way too long. Watch the film if you’re interested (here's the trailer). It’s a little tedious and intentionally obtuse at times, but I personally can’t get enough of that shit.