Home From Home: A Chronicle of A Vision (15.)
Directed By Edgar Reitz.
Starring Jan Dieter Schneider, Antonia Bill, Maximilian Scheidt and Marita Breuer. Black and white. German with subtitles. 231 mins
Back in the old days, quality TV didn’t have dragons, battles and gratuitous nudity and you didn’t binge watch it over a weekend. In the old days, when everything was better, quality TV was long and arduous and serious; quality TV was Heimat. Screened in 1984, Edgar Reitz’s 11 part drama traced the life of a simple German village, Schabbach, from 1919 all the way to 1982 taking in the rise of Nazism and its aftermath. Heimat (roughly translated as Homeland) was the must see highbrow TV drama of that year.
After that Reitz could’ve done more or less anything he wanted. He chose to churn out Heimats, taking the story to the end of the century. To be honest he got to be a bit of a bore with the Heimats. Now, he has struck upon the notion of a prequel, released here as a very long standalone film with a title dull enough to dissuade all but the hardiest of fans. (The German title translates as Another Heimat, which is just as bad.) This one looks at Schabbach in the mid 1840s, a time when the cruelty of the Prussian rulers and years of bad harvest made life very difficult. It centres on The Simon family and the young son Jakob (Schneider) who dreams of escaping this humdrum existence for a brave new life in Brazil.
The original Heimats were filmed in a mixture of black and white and colour, a technique to suggest the disparity between memory (b'n'w) and reality (colour.) Here everything is shot in black and white, with just the odd glimpses of colour. So, for example, when Jakob's father shoes a horse the red of the fire bursts through into the monochrome or in a night-time scene the candle's yellow glow illuminates the wall. It is a beautiful technique, but also a slightly kitsch one and it illustrates the contradiction at the heart of Heimat. Reitz is a great film maker, with a great eye for composition and a serious intent but one bound to the soapy, melodramatic lure of his homeland.
Directed By Edgar Reitz.
Starring Jan Dieter Schneider, Antonia Bill, Maximilian Scheidt and Marita Breuer. Black and white. German with subtitles. 231 mins
Back in the old days, quality TV didn’t have dragons, battles and gratuitous nudity and you didn’t binge watch it over a weekend. In the old days, when everything was better, quality TV was long and arduous and serious; quality TV was Heimat. Screened in 1984, Edgar Reitz’s 11 part drama traced the life of a simple German village, Schabbach, from 1919 all the way to 1982 taking in the rise of Nazism and its aftermath. Heimat (roughly translated as Homeland) was the must see highbrow TV drama of that year.
After that Reitz could’ve done more or less anything he wanted. He chose to churn out Heimats, taking the story to the end of the century. To be honest he got to be a bit of a bore with the Heimats. Now, he has struck upon the notion of a prequel, released here as a very long standalone film with a title dull enough to dissuade all but the hardiest of fans. (The German title translates as Another Heimat, which is just as bad.) This one looks at Schabbach in the mid 1840s, a time when the cruelty of the Prussian rulers and years of bad harvest made life very difficult. It centres on The Simon family and the young son Jakob (Schneider) who dreams of escaping this humdrum existence for a brave new life in Brazil.
The original Heimats were filmed in a mixture of black and white and colour, a technique to suggest the disparity between memory (b'n'w) and reality (colour.) Here everything is shot in black and white, with just the odd glimpses of colour. So, for example, when Jakob's father shoes a horse the red of the fire bursts through into the monochrome or in a night-time scene the candle's yellow glow illuminates the wall. It is a beautiful technique, but also a slightly kitsch one and it illustrates the contradiction at the heart of Heimat. Reitz is a great film maker, with a great eye for composition and a serious intent but one bound to the soapy, melodramatic lure of his homeland.
