Heimat

How do I begin to extol this extraordinary film, of which it can truly be said 'all life is here'. I hadn't seen HEIMAT since I was seventeen, and was thrilled to discover that it was every bit as enthralling and rich as I'd remembered, a whole other world to lose myself in. First things first: YOU MUST WATCH THIS FILM. I know that sounds a little peremptory - hey, we haven't even met - but believe me, after nearly 16 - oh yes - hours, you'll be wanting me to bear your children for having offered you this advice. Or something. It may not change your life as it did mine - this was my first experience of what would become my cinematic obsession, the melodrama - but I wouldn't bet on it.

Don't be put off by its length - it was made for TV and so can be watched as such, an episode a week. After a couple of programmes, though, I guaranteee that will not be enough. And yet it's one of those films you never EVER want to end. If that's not enough, the sequel is even better.

So what is HEIMAT? Nothing less than the story of 20th century German history, told through the experiences of a small village, and one family in particular. But this is not a weighty history lesson. Every major event takes place off-screen - we experience their repercussions on a people remote from them in terms of time and space. The saga is a satisfying feast on the level of a novel-sequence by Powell or Proust - a varied dramatis personae, precise detail, anecdote, incident, communities, generation struggles, local and national crises, social comedy (I hadn't remembered how funny it was), domestic and national tragedy; each episode is packed with these, building up accumalitively a quiet, yet inexorable, power.

'Heimat' means both 'home' and 'homeland', and was also a type of film encouraged by the Nazis, espousing reactionary (no!) sentiments tinged with bucolic utopia. Therefore, although we will be introduced to hundreds of disparate characters, it is appropriate that the main character, and the first image of such a massive document, is the land. Outside of the Archers and King Vidor, you will not see a greater cinematic sympathy with nature, such a feeling for its texture and spirit, such a recognition of it as a marker of human history, as an inhuman constant in a world heading for nihilism, as a quiet, immemorial force thast looks on at, and yet is indifferenct to, a human comedy that becomes steadily unfunny.

The first episode is, in its quiet way, a manifesto of how the film intends to proceed. For all its smooth technical surface, this is a film seething with disjunction, comprised of layers and levels that refuse to cohere in the village's dream of community, continuity and order. As in all great melodramas, this confusion is an apt formal representation of its main character's state of mind.

This protagonist is Paul Simon, who begins the episode walking back from a French prisoner-of-war camp and ends it leaving his wife, child, family, community, past, tradition. He returns from the war into an unchanging quiet village world which could have existed at any time over the last few centuries. Indeed, it's almost as if he is some sort of Prince from fairy tale, returned to awake the enchanted sleeping inhabitants, because life suddenly flourishes in its own way.

The community's rhythm is one of slow circularity - his first sight of his father is of him forging a wheel; the circularity of his plot. And yet all has changed. Most of the men have died in the war - all that are left are invalids, idiots, strange young boys and crusty old codgers.

This is a film so rich, despite its narrative concerns, in detail, image and symbol, that I won't succumb to interpretive hubris. But that initial impression of disjunction lingers. Paul's first action is to urinate; we cut to a shot of a barren, pest-ridden fly-paper, a disgusting image of the entrapment and sterility on offer here. The fly plays a very important symbolic role in this episode, as do all kinds of images of flight - kites, planes.

Paul operates on a different level from his mundane family and neighbours - his world is that of dreams, hope, visions, ideas, fantasy. His pursuit of science and invention - progress - contrasts with the circular harvesting of the men. I used to wonder why the film would alternate between colour and monochrome. I don't think there's a systematic explanation for it - not only does the colour change, but the film stock itself does too - this surface instability in a seemingly gliding technique perfectly mirrors the torment in the mind of a superficially placid man, and makes his seemingly capricious departure more explicable.

The main disjunction in HEIMAT, of course, is that between the characters in the film and us, the viewers. We know what is going to hapen in the future, and this heavily colours a seemingly frivolous portrait of rural life. A huge pig chases away geese, a naked woman - 'probably a Jewess' mutters a witness - is found dead in the forest; a marten breaks into the shed and kills the hens: none of these incidents are remarkable on a narrative level, but create a terrifying sense of foreboding of the horrors we know are to come. There is a little Hitler lord mayor; a hugely comic unveiling ceremony in which the risible words of a puffed-up local dignitary are eerily similar to those that will be used with deadly seriousness by the Nazis; the almost pranklike attack on Jewish political dissidents; the harrassment and ostricising of an amazingly hardworking woman, ostensibly because she slept with an enemy officer, but really because she looks like a gypsy - all these serve to darken a seeming idyll, show that the seeds of Nazism were already truly in place; and you have to try very hard not to slip into disgust, and play 'spot who'll become a Nazi'.

The biggest disturbance of all comes in the plot of the lead character. The first two hours of this film are told largely through the point of view of Paul - both narratively and formally. And yet he ups and leaves, and there are still 14 hours to go. Itr gradually becomes apparent that it is his wife, Maria, who will become the saga's pivotal figure. Now the film becomes a different kind of melodrama, but this was announced from the beginning. While all the men were out japing like kids, the women were trapped behind windows, doing all the hard work, denied the privilege of escape offered Paul.

Absolutely, I agree with my previous commentator in describing this as a riveting,fascinating and certainly beautiful film. It's not necessary to see all the episodes,since the first ones are the best,while the last ones are a-bit tiresome,but for any person who likes German's and their good-natured ways,all episodes are worth seeing.In typical german fashion, values are constantly questioned,even it's murderous Nazi past is confronted in the last episodes, the rich dialogues are particularly interesting. These episodes are recommended for anyone who is about to live or travel in Germany,preferably in original language!!

I spent a year as an exchange student in the Hunrueck area of Germany (where the series opens). I both laughed and cried as I heard the accents and idioms that were used. They have not changed since the early 1900's until my residency there. The outside scenery shots took me back as well. The outside scenes to be back to the Germany that I remember with "Fernweh/Heimweh. I would like to point out one error in the englich subtitles. They make reference to a bucket of "berries" while the spoken word in the audio uses to local idiom "Krombeeren", a.k.a. potatoes. A great series. I am glad that winter is coming so that there will be plenty of nighttime hours to see Heimet 2. Gruess Gott!

Recounting the lives of the inhabitants of a German village from 1919 to 1982, Edgar Reitz's epic miniseries Heimat- A Chronicle of Germany is a stunning showcase of film-making at its finest, a fifteen-hour masterpiece, unequaled in European cinema.

The story begins with Paul Simon's return to Schabbach, the village where he was born, at the end of World War I. The conflict has left its marks on him, but no one notices this until it's too late: the first episode ends with Paul leaving Schabbach in 1928, without telling anyone.

We will subsequently learn he has become a successful businessman in America, although this aspect of the plot is covered sparingly, the director being more interested in the Scabbach community, where life revolves around Paul's wife, Maria (Marita Breuer). She is the heart and soul of these eleven episodes, watching her sons grow up, her in-laws get old and the world change radically: over the course of fifty-four years, she will witness war, poverty, family crises and much more, always trying to remain calm and controlled.

Reitz's brilliance lies partly in the story he tells (the history of an entire nation seen through the eyes of common people), but most of all in the means he employs to tell it: on the surface, Heimat looks like an ordinary TV miniseries, but in fact the director delivers a fifteen-hour art-house film, as testified by the techniques used to bring the story to life: what mainstream television product would feature so many black and white/color transitions (dictated by emotional reasons, rather than narrative), ambiguous characters (especially Maria, whose increasingly cold behavior has a devastating effect on her son Hermann, as we will see in Heimat 2), unconventional themes (adultery and sexual initiation were still taboos on the small screen in 1984) and bizarre fantasy sequences (one might even be entitled to think Reitz began the TV revolution given US form by David Lynch's work on Twin Peaks)? And let's not forget the unreliable narrator (every episode is introduced by Glasisch, the village fool), who makes the viewer unable to interpret the Heimat cycle in only one way. I also have to point out that the title is ironic: the people portrayed in these episodes struggle to find a home-country (that's what "heimat" means, although the translation doesn't fully live up to the significance that word has in German), but are destined to fail on one level or another: they can only find a temporary home, which will eventually vanish along with them.

For all the reasons listed above, Heimat deserves to be seen: those wondering if there still is a difference (in terms of quality, if not even success) between big and small screen really ought to give this intense opus a look.

Heimat is one of the best works of art of the twentieth century. Period. That is really all there is to be said. But the format of these comments forces me to write a minimum of ten lines. Well, lets just say that never before in film there has been as successful an amalgam of epic and lyric qualities. The TV-series depict the troubled history of Germany by focusing on a small community and a handful of families. As the show unfolds they become our family. Also: In art the profound and the entertaining seldom go together. In Heimat they do. Be amazed and cry. Still not enough lines. I have nothing more to say. Heimat is the ultimate television masterpiece.