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
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