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Series: Heimat 2: Chronicle Of A Generation
Release date: 21st June 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 1513 mins
Director: Edgar Reitz
Starring: Henry Arnold, Salome Kammer, Frank Roth, Noemi Steuer, Franziska Traub
Genre: Drama/War
Studio: Second Sight
Format: DVD
Country: Germany
Over twenty-five hours of material brings to life a world often unconsidered by Western audiences fed on typically two dimensional depictions of Germans in film. This generation is ideally epitomised through the character of Hermann Simon, whom we return to as grounding for the series’ meandering plot that incorporates thirteen episodes featuring twelve different character perspectives.
In 1960, we first meet Hermann, a brilliantly gifted musician, who, after a youthful romance is brutally cut short by his family, vows never again to give himself up to love. He leaves his small rural village and makes for the Bohemian Mecca of Munich where he is accepted to study piano and composition at the city’s renowned Conservatory. There, he discovers an enclave of talented, experimental young musicians, poets, filmmakers and thinkers, who are collectively trying to come to terms with the long shadow of the country’s all too recent Nazi past. In the grounds of their artists retreat house, this group take a decisive hand in shaping its future.
Hermann’s vow is put to the test by a cohort of liberated and talented women, but it is the quiet, inhibited but brilliant cellist Clarissa whom Hermann cannot seem to put from his mind.
The series then follows Hermann and his friends as the decade unwinds, tracking them through to the end, where the toughest decisions lie in wait for all of them…
Unsurprisingly given its length, the series often has more in common with a novel than a piece of cinema. Reitz’s direction creates a visual canvas that does much to present the shattered, post war beauty of Munich, and even more to present in smoke-filled, lingering detail, a lifestyle that will awake longing in anyone who professes to have an artistic soul. Heimat 2 portrays a world of improvised jamming sessions, revolutionary ideas, talent feeding on genius, and all with explosive and unpredictable results.
For those used to modern cinema and television, the scenes seem to barely move, so content is the director to allow his audience to soak up the atmosphere. It is a series of powerful contrasts that leaves its audience in little doubt that this generation of young German artists had far more to rebel against than their counterparts in the West. The freedom of expression and sexual liberation are movingly contrasted with characters so emotionally fragile that they are often unable to make good on the bounties their lifestyle offers them.
Each of the thirteen episodes offers a new perspective, and, through use of voiceover, allows for a searching, introspective style that creates characters of depth. As the audience reaches the conclusion of the series, there is an intimate familiarity born of having spent at least an hour-and-a-half inside the head of each character. As their initial youthful euphoria gives way to the far more recognisably adult word of professional jealousy and inadequacy, the characters come of age.
Hermann’s inspiration in writing a composition for Clarissa becomes steeped in envy when his experimental work propels her to stardom but he is left in the shadows. His multi-talented South American friend Juan goes from being a musical figure of near reverence to a bitter love rival. As the episodes progress, the intoxicating wide-eyed optimism of the early stories is replaced by something distinctly more dramatic, verging on melodrama, as debauchery, drugs and death pay the characters a visit.
One of the series’ main achievements is in the fact that we never question for one moment that these are highly gifted musicians. This is in equal parts a testament to the skills of the ensemble cast as well as clever, intricate filmmaking. Unfortunately, visually the quality of the series appears to have been greatly diminished in its transfer to DVD. This is particularly sad as the films share an almost decadent, languid visual style that incorporates use of monochrome amid the colour photography during scenes of high emotional poignancy. The slow pacing allows us to take in detail that we would certainly miss in modern, intercut film and television. Whilst some might view this visual style as dated, others will be seduced by it.
There is nothing dated about the performances, however. Henry Arnold leads the ensemble cast with a nuanced and, at times, unsettling portrayal of Hermann Simon, the young genius struggling to come to terms with the ruthless, clinical suppression of his human desires. He is ably supported by Salome Kammer playing frightened love interest Clarissa. The scenes between the two conjure the awkward, stumbling attempts at romance that many will empathise with, and they are handled with a grace and humour that belays their charged emotional context.
In what some might describe as brazenly attempting to ‘chronicle’ a period of the last century, Reitz unsurprisingly faced accusations of a somewhat selective approach to German history. Whilst his representation of ‘60s Munich is often idyllic, Reitz preserves a subtle sense of foreboding at the Nazi skeletons lurking in closets and attic spaces. Even the Foxhole, the Bohemian mansion paradise of the creative set once played host to leading Nazi figures, and the students must face the knowledge that the philanthropy that allows their artistic collective to flourish was preserved by their benefactor’s dealings with the Reich.
Heimat 2 is unquestionably and unflinchingly epic in scope. Its unhurried style may not suit all tastes but for those willing to invest the time demanded by the story’s length the rewards are considerable. In many ways, the best judgement on the film is passed by the film itself. In the opening episodes, Hermann is introduced to a team of young, Avant Garde film-makers brimming with revolutionary zeal. “The films of our fathers are dead,” they tell him, without a hint of mourning at their passing. Now, approaching twenty years since the filming of Heimat 2, there is little doubt that epic filmmaking of this kind has long passed into history, but history has preserved, albeit imperfectly, a near unique cinematic experience of great depth that will fully repay the time invested in watching it. NB
Film: Heimat Fragments: The Women
Release date: 13th September 2010
Certificate: 12
Running time: 146 mins
Director: Edgar Reitz
Starring: Nicola Schössler, Henry Arnold, Salome Kammer, Caspar Arnhold, Gudrun Landgrebe
Genre: Drama/Fantasy/History
Studio: Second Sight
Format: DVD
Country: Germany
After over 53 hours of film, you’d be forgiven for thinking Edgar Reitz had said all he had to say regarding the numerous descendents and associates of the Simon family throughout his epic Heimat series. Heimat Fragments: TheWomen is the latest addition to the franchise, combining new footage with previously unseen outtakes from all three prior instalments. Focussing mainly on Reitz’s female characters, the film attempts to show how the various women from the Simon past have combined to shape the person of Lulu Simon today.
Heimat Fragments has no plot as such, structured as a dream-like narrative in which Lulu, the 35-year-old daughter of the musician Hermann Simon, searches for something which she calls “the old future of childhood.”
As part of this search, the film sketches in forty scenes, or fragments, that deal with the lives and dreams of the women of Heimat. Scanning almost the whole of the 20th century, the women featured include Maria, Lucie, Clarissa, Renate, Olga, Evelyne, Ms. Cerphal, Helga, Marianne and Dorli from Duelmen.
Also included are old and forgotten war scenes in which her father’s brothers were involved, the day when her grandmother Maria’s last cow is taken away from the Simon farm, and Hermann, once again a schoolboy in shorts, experiencing first love with Klara, or as a young ambitious artist at the music conservatory.
Lulu views these excursions into the past as representing not only the end of her youth, but also as a means by which she can discover a new freedom…
It makes sense that Reitz returns to the theme of womanhood. The women of Heimat were always the most compelling - caught between a sense of duty toward home and family and a desire for personal freedom, they embodied most the themes of the series. Unfortunately, Lulu is one of the least engaging female characters, often coming across as charmless and self-involved. Though her personality is partly explained by being the daughter of the similarly solipsistic Hermann Simon, Nicola Schössler’s mannered performance does not make it any easier for us to empathise with her.
The worst the original Heimat series could be accused of was of being sentimental or melodramatic - though even these elements were tempered by the wider historical-political contexts, be it the rise of Nazism or Cold War and pre-millennial tension; the darkness at the edge of Heimat’s town. Filtered through the perspective of the emotionally distant Lulu, Heimat Fragments certainly can’t be accused of sentimentality, but it can be accused of self-indulgence, and of being seriously confused and muddled.
Aiming for a Proustian remembrance of things past, it falls way short - alternating between banal truisms (endless variations on looking into the past signalling the end of youth) and quasi-philosophical pretentiousness (“I am the archaeologist of the future, who excavates the present”). As if this wasn’t silly enough, Reitz has Lulu constantly wandering around with a shovel and a bore in her hands, digging in the ground, boring holes into trees and into the pillars of the music conservatory through which we look into older scenes. Clearly these sequences contain an element of fantasy, with an all-too-obvious symbolic meaning (metaphors about digging up the past are often followed by scenes of actual digging), but then Reitz insists on shooting the scenes with Lulu through a digital camera – usually the lingua franca of the gritty realist. The end result is some very cheap looking cinematography, jarring considerably with the older, more accomplished shots taken from the earlier series.
There is one moment when Reitz’s approach almost works, during a scene when Lulu revisits the village of Schabbach. As she hammers on an anvil, recalling an iconic scene from Heimat’s opening episode, she speaks of reawakening memories of days gone by. It’s an evocative moment, but the effect is quickly ruined by a shot showing a startled old man overacting as though his life depends on it, as he reacts to the ringing of the anvil. Just like the various allusions, both verbal and physical, to digging, it makes for an odd match of pretentiousness alongside an unnecessary tendency to spell things out for the viewer.
As if the piece wasn’t confused enough, Reitz also includes misjudged attempts at a post-modern self-reflexivity. There is an outtake from Heimat 2 involving the editing of a film that seems to suggest what is left out is just as important as that which is included (a conceit which might have been viable if the outtakes included in this film were not as generally banal and clearly superfluous as they are). Another scene has Lulu in a cinema, insisting: “I do not dream about a movie… The movie dreams about me.”
The picture culminates with Lulu’s attempts to communicate through the film with her father (or, rather, the image of her father upon the screen). Such attempts at breaking the fourth wall could be lauded as daring if they even came close to working, but the execution is clumsy, and the ideas behind them are never really fleshed out enough to succeed.
Of most interest to Heimat fans will be the outtakes from previous series’. However, just as we learn virtually nothing about the character of Lulu, these outtakes are similarly unrevealing. The older scenes, although not entirely without interest, add little to the Heimat series as a whole. Though they do mainly deal with the lives of the women, sometimes at turning points, involving love or career decisions, they seem fairly arbitrary. Often it’s obvious why they were originally left on the cutting-room floor, and you could go through the entire series and pick out a great number of scenes that better illustrate the themes Reitz is getting at.
Watching the fourth instalment of Reitz’s Heimat series, it is the writer Sherwood Anderson that comes to mind - never quite able to recapture the success he enjoyed through his depiction of life in the eponymous town of Winesburg, Ohio. But while Anderson at least tried to move on, Reitz seems unwilling, or even unable to. As Heimat Fragments draws to a close, the overriding feeling is perhaps it’s finally time Reitz left his own fictional village behind.
Even the most ardent fan of the original Heimat series will find Heimat Fragments hard going. Clocking in at just under two-and-a-half hours, it’s an exhausting and ultimately unrewarding watch, confused both in its message and delivery. A huge disappointment from a director capable of so much more. GJK
Series: Heimat: A Chronicle Of Germany
Release date: 21st June 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 927 mins
Director: Edgar Reitz
Starring: Marita Breuer, Eva Maria Schneider, Kurt Wagner, Rüdiger Weigang, Johannes Lobewein
Genre: Drama/War
Studio: Second Sight
Format: DVD
Country: Germany
Over five years in the making, and with a running time of over fifteen hours, Edgar Reitz’s 1984 epic Heimat portrays the lives of the Simon family within their small rural village against the turbulent backdrop of 20th century Germany.
The majority of the action of Heimat (which roughly translates as ‘Homeland’) takes place in the fictional village of Schabbach, in the Hunsrück region of Germany. The story begins in 1919 with Paul Simon’s return from the Great War. His marriage to the mayor’s daughter, Maria Wiegand, and the birth of two sons does not seem enough to quell his innate sense of restlessness, and by the end of the first episode he disappears, emigrating to America (though as to why remains a mystery to his family and the inhabitants of the village for many years).
The remainder of the series focuses on the villagers of Schabbach, and particularly Maria’s journey from teenager to eventual matriarch of the Simon family.
Against the backdrop of the tumultuous events of 20th century German history, we are shown the impact on the lives of the ordinary German people, ending in 1982 with the death and funeral of Maria…
Despite being hailed by some as a sophisticated soap opera, Reitz has always insisted that his Heimat trilogy owed more to the novels of Dickens and Proust. The first Heimat seems equally indebted to that brand of naturalism that flourished in 19th century European theatre. There, as in Reitz’s film, strictly mimetic realism was often replaced by a kind of heightened realism intended to reveal deeper insights into human nature and our world, often depicting a specific society or social milieu as a microcosm in which universal truths are contained. While Heimat is most definitely concerned with historical accuracy, there are also present a number of features that give the film an added dimension, such as Paul’s hallucinatory visions of a dead war comrade, or the rain that stops, as if on cue, as the children’s choir complete their memorial service song.
Even the film’s elements of melodrama seem conscious on the part of the director, acknowledging the film’s debt to the heimatfilme genre, as well as providing a slightly jarring quality that works like the film’s various stylistic tropes to prevent the viewer from watching the film as historical escapism with no intellectual involvement. Of these stylistic tropes, the most salient is contained in the film’s cinematography. Predominantly shot in black-and-white, there are a number of individual shots in colour, sometimes whole scenes, and a few shots where an object is picked out in colour in an otherwise black-and-white frame. Reitz has stated he used colour to emphasise certain elements, most noticeably the landscapes of the heimat. But for the most part, it seems fairly arbitrary, drawing attention to the film’s artificiality (in the purest sense of the word), while reminding us that the historical background was very much real.
For this is a film that deals with zeitgeist in its most literal sense, haunted by the various ghosts of 20th century European history. As early as the first episode, a minister gives an impassioned speech in which he foresees the day when a ‘genius of (Germany’s) blood’ will rise to lead the country out of its misery. There is a terrible irony in the minister’s belief that this leader will take Germany into a period of peace. Later on, there are foreshadows of Kristallnacht in the smashing of the windows of a Jewish man’s home, and it is not long before the first of the communist sympathisers are rounded up for ‘re-education’ in the emerging concentration camps.
The subtly of its undertones, the simplicity of direction and the palpable warmth Reitz displays towards his characters perhaps account for some of the criticism of Heimat’s perceived romanticising of a traumatic era. While it is true that major events such as the post-First World War period of hyper-inflation are mentioned only fleetingly, this seems more in keeping with the film’s naturalistic approach, where such events have become so much a part of everyday life that it barely warrants mention by the villagers. There is also an argument to be made that relatively self-sufficient rural communities like Schabbach may have been somewhat insulated from the worst of the privations suffered by the country during this period. In fact, it is only when the inhabitants embrace modernisation, buying into the promise of prosperity via the latest motor car, the fancy villa, etc., that problems arise. Everything ‘is on tick’, as Katharina observes, and this knowledge of a debt arising that must be paid for later is equally resonant today. It also gives the portrayal of the village a haunting quality that is something more than nostalgia, almost like a paean to a world that never quite existed, or at least one destined to be left behind by the 20th century.
While some viewers may find aspects of the film troubling from a political perspective (the Holocaust and persecution of the Jews remains largely the elephant in the room of Heimat), it is refreshing to see a film that deals with such events seeking neither to demonise the ordinary German people nor acting as an apologist for the crimes committed within Nazi Germany. Much of this must go down to the strong attention to character paid by the screenplay and the overall excellence of the acting. While essentially an ensemble piece, a number of performances do stand out, particularly Gertrud Bredel as the kind-hearted and down-to-earth Simon matriarch Katharina, and Marita Breuer as Maria, perhaps the moral and emotional centre of the film (as suggested by the film’s ending with her death). Overall, though, this is a series that is very much the sum of all its parts, with a direction that rarely draws attention to itself, and a simple charm that is easy to surrender to.
Realising much of Reitz’s lofty ambition, Heimat is a considerable achievement that repays repeat viewing, containing beneath its relatively simple surface a complexity and richness that mirrors life itself. GJK
