Heimat - Chronicle of Germany (1985)

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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