Heimat : A Chronicle of Germany (1985)

Heimat isn't just (just!) a great motion picture--it's one of the richest, most deeply satisfying life-experiences the movies ever afforded. Conceived for West German television and divided into 11 feature-length chapters, Edgar Reitz's film begins in 1919 with the return of a soldier from the Great War to his hometown of Schabbach, in the northwestern corner of Germany, a rural region known as the Hunsrück. It will end some 16 hours (in screen time) and 63 years later, having refracted the history of modern Germany through the experiences of the people--especially, but by no means exclusively, one extended family, the Simons--living in and connected to that village. Not that the film unreels as a didactic history lesson. We come to know intimately dozens of sharply imagined characters whose lives, personalities, and allegiances shift and deepen across a broad expanse of time and event. Reitz and co-writer Peter Steinbach never force these characters into unnatural dramatic or symbolic poses. Some of the most telling truths emerge out of the corner of one's eye, as it were, from the patient accumulation of unobtrusive yet heartbreakingly beautiful detail. Few films have held the particular and the universal in such eloquent equipoise.

To cite just one example: On an evening in 1924, a German-American flyer sets his small plane down in a field near Schabbach. The following day, as he prepares to continue his journey, he invites Paul (the returning warrior) up for a brief spin, and there's an almost metaphysical thrill to the moment: thanks to the new technological wonder of the aeroplane, Paul is about to see his village as no native ever has, and Schabbach is about to be placed in relation to the rest of the universe as it has never been placed before. They take off, and almost immediately, just when we expect a transcendent Big Moment, Paul's attention is diverted from the panorama by the sight of a dark woman wheeling a baby carriage along a country road. He thinks he knows who it is--someone who has caught his imagination and led him to dream of an alternative destiny for himself. Down!, he urges the pilot. Yet returned to home ground, running after the woman as the plane takes off again in the background to disappear forever, he discovers it's not the woman he thought it was after all. And so two Big Moments have slipped away, and life goes ineluctably on.

So does history, though the citizens of Schabbach see very little of History directly. The Führer who seizes the imagination of some and implicates all in his vision remains a voice on the radio, a face in a frame on the wall. Even when one of the Simons visits Berlin as a low-level Nazi Party apparatchik, neither he nor the camera investigates the glow of a torchlight rally outside the window of the room where he makes love to his future wife. By the same token, the America toward which some members of the Simon family yearn is only a carefully memorized and recited postal address and, for one character who does get there, the Statue of Liberty glimpsed through the one pane in a window whose other panes have been blocked.

Heimat means homeland, and the homeland or heartland film was a national genre encouraged by Propaganda Minister Goebbels during the Hitler years (at one point two of the characters in Heimat go to see another movie called Heimat!). Reitz's film, so free of anything resembling melodrama, adopts a plain, unhurried visual approach that could almost be mistaken for documentary; yet it's a subtly stylized experience from beginning to end, with its interlayering of glowing color and pearly monochrome (sometimes within a single scene), epic detachment and discreet intimacy. The storytelling, too, is subtle, true to the rhythms of real life: characters who seem key to the narrative drift out of it never to be seen again, or perhaps to return, all but unrecognizable, years later; other characters who seem minor and incidental may come to assume remarkable significance and poignancy. Throughout, Marita Breuer as Maria, a young, lovely bride who becomes a matriarch by default, limns a character of quiet dignity and authority who remains the heart of the film, and of Schabbach, even after she has passed away. This film constitutes a definition and celebration of the idea of community, of having and sharing a place in the world. And once you've experienced it, lived with it, you'll feel part of its community as well. --Richard T. Jameson Amazon.com

Wow.

Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany (Edgar Reitz, 1984)

For the first few hours of the massive undertaking that is Heimat, I wasn't sure I was going to stick through the whole thing. But as the sheer magnitude of what it was that Reitz was attempting really sank in, I found myself getting more and more absorbed. Then came the final few scenes of the last episode, and while I don't quite agree, I can see why a number of critics call this one of the thousand best movies ever made.

Heimat gives us eighty-odd years of German history as reflected in the life of Maria Simon (The Princess and the Warrior's Marita Breuer), born in 1900, over the course of fifteen and a half hours. (Yes, this is not a movie you will be watching in a single sitting.) We see her, her parents and grandparents, ultimately her descendants, mostly in and around the small village of Schabbach. This is a slice-of-life film whose aim, as the subtitle tells us, is to encapsulate the twentieth-century German experience in one village. There are a huge number of stories to be told, and all of them are given screen time, thought, and sensitivity by Reitz and scriptwriter Peter Steinbach (whose only work outside TV was 2001's Goebbels und Geduldig). As one might expect from any film that runs more than fifteen hours, the pace tends to flag at times, and there will be stretches where the viewer feels the need to not hit the pause button when getting up and making a sandwich. Resist the urge, however, as those times are relatively short, and the film picks back up again quickly in every case. These characters are fascinating, especially when one gets past World War II and into the funky fifties. (This is not much of a surprise; Reitz was born in 1932, and so was 18 in 1950, giving him far more firsthand experience of the times of the last few episodes.) And given this much time to really get to know the village of Schabbach, we find that it has become a character itself, inasmuch as it changes right along with its inhabitants over the years. (Contrast to, say, the little village in Last of the Summer Wine, where the producers have taken pains to show as little change as possible over the thirty-five years the series has been running.)

This is fantastic stuff, and well worth watching. I strongly recommend it. ****

November 20, 2008

Surprise Suprise !! Facets do it again

Facets have done it again. They have released this German Masterpiece with an appalling dvd transfer. The quality is so bad that it is unbelivable. I just don't know why Facets release dvd's , the majority of them are of such bad quality. If possible try to track down the region 2 version , the transfer is excellent.

As for the series itself , it's a brilliant piece of film making and a must see. September 23, 2008

German miniseries deals with life of a German family

A little more than ten years ago, in my days of heroic cinephilia, I did saw Heimat, the German miniseries directed by Edgar Reitz, that deals in 11 episodes with the life of a German family from 1919 to 1982. Every day they showed one of the episodes in the Buenos Aires Cinematheque, and I remember going to see it every day (I was at the university at the time, studying a subject totally unrelated to filmmaking, so I was certainly sacrificing hours of study to see this). After Heimat, they did show Heimat II, which is even longer, but I only saw a couple of episodes of that. Heimat is good and compelling, though I will stop short in calling it a masterpiece. And at the end, it is a miniseries about a family living in a small German town, during a century which was quite eventful for Germany. Besides, I don't remember a lot about the film itself, so is not very memorable (great movies should stay in one's mind long after you saw them). So I can't say whether I can reccomend this, unless you are a voracious cinephile (just as I was, some years ago) that wants to see everything, the odder the better. January 20, 2008

HEIMAT = GREAT

Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany. (video recording reviews): An article from: Cineaste

This really gives a perfect impression of things, people, history and landscape of this country and area.

anton blok 1944 January 19, 2008

great series

covers the german history from before ww1 to the later decades of the last cent. October 20, 2007

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