[D66] Heimat is a Space in Time

[R.O.]

  Interview: Thomas Heise

By
Jordan Cronk
filmcomment.com
21 min
View Original 
<https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.filmcomment.com%2Fblog%2Finterview-thomas-heise%2F>

/Heimat Is a Space in Time/ (Thomas Heise, 2019)/
/

In Thomas Heise’s /Heimat Is a Space in Time/, nearly 100 years of 
German history is traced through the words and testimony of the 
director’s family. Stretching from just before WWI to the present day, 
the film combines a wealth of archival materials—letters, photographs, 
drawings, official state documents, and other ephemera—with original 
black-and-white landscape footage shot at a variety of historically 
blighted locations across East and West Germany. With clear-eyed 
resolve, Heise, reading from the diaries and the intimate 
correspondences of three generations of his elders—including, most 
memorably, his great grandparents, a German and a Viennese Jew whose 
relationship straddled the two World Wars and eventually succumbed to 
the terror wrought by the Third Reich—gives voice to a series of 
personal indignities that in turn chart the greater arc of 20th-century 
European violence. Running 218 minutes long, /Heimat Is a Space in Time/ 
is the rare breakthrough work from a veteran filmmaker that acts at once 
as a perfect introduction to an artist’s oeuvre and as a grand summation 
of his style and interests. “/Heimat/ is elliptical yet detailed, 
generous even while withholding, distanced but compelling, heady to the 
max and just as emotionally absorbing,” J. Hoberman writes in his 
feature in /Film Comment/’s March/April issue.

Following a screening of /Heimat/ at the 2019 RIDM documentary festival 
in Montreal, where the film won the Jury Prize, Heise and I struck up an 
email correspondence about the film. His detailed memories and deeply 
felt observations regarding both the project and his upbringing confirm 
an artist of uncommon dignity and poeticism.

Can you tell me a bit about your childhood? We learn so much about your 
family in the film, but I’m curious how you grew up and how you first 
learned about some of the events described in the film?

I was born in Berlin in the mid-’50s, 10 years after the war. We lived 
20 km away from Friedrichshain, on the southeastern edge of Berlin, in 
an idyllic villa suburb called Hessenwinkel. The villas, built from the 
end of the 19th century to the first third of the 20th century, were 
often abandoned by their owners at the end of the war. The houses were 
first taken over by the Soviet military administration, and later by the 
municipal housing administration. Now refugees, displaced persons from 
the East, and other needy people were quartered here as tenants.

The villas and houses were divided into flats and the originally 
well-off, villa-owning population quickly became a mix of tenants from 
all social strata We lived in a house divided in such a way, which had 
been solidly built in the middle of the ’30s. There was now a lower and 
upper apartment, each with two-and-a-half rooms. We lived in the lower 
apartment and above us was Mr. Kramer, the caretaker of a local 
recreation home.

On the almost half-hour walk that my brother and I took every morning to 
our kindergarten, we had to pass a large barracks. This belonged to the 
border soldiers of the National People’s Army, which in 1956 had been 
proclaimed almost parallel to the newly founded Bundeswehr. Around the 
barracks stood a high and opaque black wooden fence soaked with coal 
tar. Along the fence stood masts with old station loudspeakers, from 
which radio hits were blasted. We sang along: “Marina Marina Marina / 
You are the most beautiful in the world / Wonderful girl…”

Our teachers warned us against the Americans, who regularly circled the 
barracks in a dark, matte green road cruiser, often throwing us what was 
certainly poisoned chewing gum, which we were otherwise keen on. We 
didn’t notice anything about the wall back then. It wasn’t talked about 
at home. We had no relatives or acquaintances in the western part of the 
city. A coincidence, without any political reason. That only began to 
play a role later, as we grew older.


[. KNIP..]

Your work seems to indebted to various forms of cinema: on the one hand 
landscape filmmaking and observational nonfiction, and on the other, 
essay and archival filmmaking. How did you first come to these 
storytelling modes, and are there any particular filmmakers you’ve 
looked to for inspiration when embarking on these personal journeys 
through the past?

What all my works—the films as well as the plays I have directed, and 
the works for radio—have in common is their biographical foundation, 
even if it is certainly not apparent at first glance. It probably has to 
do with my broken biography, the multiple, mostly forced, rapid changes. 
In addition, I was never really part of a milieu. Once upon a time there 
was a really large circle of my parents’ acquaintances: writers, 
painters, sculptors, composers, scientists, literary scientists, actors, 
singers, and lyricists, among whom my brother and I grew up very 
naturally. As we grew older, the relationships to unite with others 
changed and from that grew a closeness of our own.

At the same time, completely different childhood and youth friendships 
developed from school and the teachings we learned on the streets. Each 
came from completely different, rather proletarian social contexts. 
These friendships, which had a great influence on us, did not develop 
solely in the form of discussions. What does this have to do with form? 
I learned to be a printer because I also wanted to become a proletarian. 
At the same time I started experimenting with Super 8. After my 
apprenticeship I was determined to become a film director, to make 
feature films. But maybe not really, because I had no idea how to 
achieve it. I had only unattainable role models.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s /Accatone/ (1961) was one of the most impressive 
films I saw at that time. The images of the desolate suburb, the laymen 
who were “great” as laymen, the compelling and casual narration, Bach’s 
music… it’s like a passion story. That impressed me very much and did 
not let go—it always comes back to me. The interest in connecting things 
that apparently don’t belong together is something that has interested 
me again and again. In the ’90s, while NATO bombed Yugoslavia, I 
directed a stage version of Heiner Müller’s adaptation of “Titus 
Andronicus,” a two-hour choreographed slaughter in verse

Luis Bunuel’s /Los Olvidados/ (1950) was also a film that reached me in 
a different way, with its mixture of mercilessness and pathetic 
redemption with multiple endings, the social and psychological interest. 
/Why Make a Film about These People?/ (1980) was later the title of my 
first documentary in film school.

The experiences of military service should not be underestimated either, 
a time in which I, like everyone there, was forced to live in a barrack 
for 18 months with complete strangers whom I had not chosen to live 
with. I was 18 years old, and books became a way to escape: Bertolt 
Brecht, Thomas Mann, Volker Braun, Shakespeare, Arno Schmidt, who was 
special—everything I could get. Later, Alexander Kluge played an 
important role for me through his texts. But during this time my mother 
collected the film reviews from all the major German newspapers and 
magazines in the East and West and sent them to me. That could have cost 
her her job if it had come out. And in the dull boredom that usually 
surrounds you in the army, I memorized these articles, which had to be 
hidden for safety’s sake, and which were about things I couldn’t see and 
had to imagine. The films that were mentioned in these articles I saw 
only 10 years or more after that. By chance on TV: /Alice Doesn’t Live 
Here Anymore/ (1974), by Scorsese, /Lacombe, Lucien/ (1974), by Louis 
Malle, who is still important to me today, and a few more. Also /I Was 
Nineteen/ (1968) by Konrad Wolf, which I have seen at least 10 times in 
my life. All works about outsiders.

At what point did you decide to pursue filmmaking in earnest?

I actually gave up the idea of making feature films when I joined DEFA 
[Film Studios] after the army and became Heiner Carow’s assistant. But 
Carow ended up sending me on a research mission to interview “young 
married couples” and get him documentary material for his new film, a 
film that the ministry didn’t give him permission to shoot, called 
/Until Death Do Us Part/ (1979). Because of the prospects in the 
mid-to-late ’70s in the GDR no one expected anything from the film. The 
GDR produced 12-14 pieces a year, while GDR television was unacceptable 
to me. With documentary film it was a little different: there were 
sometimes unexplained alliances between authors and protagonists and 
there was the learned slave language of a dictatorship—even in the 
images and montage. It was told very indirectly, but then understood 
directly. It was not so much about messages as it was about the 
generation of thoughts.

The experience inspired me to make my own documentary. /Why Make a Film 
About These People?/ was my first real film, a 16mm interview film about 
outsiders. The title was something my professor had asked me about the 
project. It was the first and also the last film I was able to finish in 
four years at the film school in Potsdam Babelsberg.

When I showed Heiner Carow the first version of the film he told me that 
I’d never get it past the authorities. So I stupidly changed the film, 
took out about a third of it, and abandoned the analytical intertitles. 
And then Carow was right when he told me after the second screening, 
“Thomas, you’ve become tame now.” That hit me hard. The tamed film was 
immediately banned from all public and university screenings and 
remained so until the end of the GDR. I started over and over again and 
my last attempt to finish my studies with a film—a documentary film 
about workers in a transformer factory—was finally destroyed, officially 
and with a protocol note.

Today, /Why Make a Film About These People?/ is part of the “canon” of 
forbidden films in the GDR and is repeatedly brought out on appropriate 
occasions, leaving me with a stale taste. After my interrupted studies I 
sold ice cream, tore off cinema tickets, washed dishes, all sorts of 
things to make a living from anything. I didn’t get any parental 
support, which would have been easy. I then went to the radio as a 
“freelancer,” and in 1983 I made /Documentary Without Pictures/.

*You’ve said that* */Heimat/**’s length “isn’t a statement, it’s just 
how the film ended up.” Can you talk a bit about editing the film and 
how you arrived at the structure (and length) we see now?*

I need to add something first. It occupies me how seamlessly and 
surprisingly easy it was for me to use very private things as material 
for this film, which has been running through my head unclearly for over 
20 years. The film is also a reflection on myself, or rather a public 
reflection on how I see things, trying to bring history and related 
stories to term—not dissolved into verbal reflections, but in the 
montage of the film’s elements in its present form, which is a 
provisional form. Nothing is final or finished. I can hardly articulate 
the mixture of instinctive decisions and the contradictory thoughts 
during the film’s preparation, shooting, and editing. Perhaps it is in 
reality simply, as Heiner Müller once said about his texts, “The text is 
wiser than the author.”

As with every film, it’s always the beginning that I’m looking for. It 
can take quite a while. I’ve known Chris Wright, the editor, for several 
years. I once supervised one of his films when he was a student at the 
film school in Babelsberg. It was interesting to notice our different 
cultural influences—he’s English—which are often difficult to reconcile 
during the editing process. But I think this encounter was productive 
for us. It occupied me with how one could tell a simultaneity of all 
times, all things, all events in general, in cinema.

One good thing we did was not start editing at the beginning of the 
film, but somewhere after the first third, with the story of Rosie: her 
first dalliance in the winter of 1944/’45 on a skiing holiday, and 
finally her complicated relationship with Udo across the borders of 
occupied Germany, from them getting to know each other in 1948 to their 
separation in 1952. A first great love, told in a self-contained way, 
with lots of other love stories in between. It was an advantage that the 
dialogue between the two was indirect and consisted of different things: 
Rosie’s diary and Udo’s letters. Udo talks to Rosie and Rosie talks to 
herself.

It was important to remain in the now, not to anticipate any result. We 
did not think of what would follow or precede [each section]  in the 
overall narrative. I recorded all the texts as a dummy in the editing 
suite, whenever we needed something to get ahead. It remained like this 
throughout the entire editing process: no separate voice recording 
sessions. We just did it, without rehearsals: the endless love letters 
of Udo, the contrite monologues of my mother Rosie in her diary.

When we finished the chapter with Udo and Rosie and looked at it, it was 
a good one-and-a-half hours in length. By then it was clear to us that 
the film would be much longer than planned. But then we decided not to 
worry about it and to just continue working, piece by piece. There was 
something archaeological about it, the juxtaposition of fragments. The 
very different presences of the people in the overall material is a 
problem insofar as it is set and cannot be changed. But it is also a 
quality that one has to deal with. For example, there is practically no 
personal testimony by Wolfgang, my father, after the camp—that is, from 
1945 until his death in 1987. Nothing about him. In the camp he speaks 
of himself for the last time. It’s only 20 years later, in a letter to 
the Rector of the University where he resigned as the Dean of the 
Faculty of Philosophy after a series of unspeakable proceedings in which 
he was reported and found guilty, that one might get an idea of his 
constitution. In the letter he does not use a title by name but rather a 
formulaic socialist greeting. The letter in its brief impersonality 
shows Wolfgang’s mental state precisely by hiding it in the coldest 
possible bureaucratic German, which expresses the greatest possible 
distance to its addressee.

This was good for the film in the end, coming right after the letters 
from the Nazi era, the lists, the disappearance of the family, the 
piles, the camp, the Holocaust. Life went on in a completely different 
way somewhere else, and so did the film. We eventually came back to the 
first chapter, at which time we decided things should begin with the 
14-year-old Wilhelm’s essay. His reflections on the war would hardly 
have found the consistent form it now has if we had begun the editing 
process with this chapter. And it has been reworked again since then, 
with any protection for the audience now canceled out with the inclusion 
of the 20-minute rolling list of the names and addresses of the deported 
Viennese Jews. After the last list, which runs into black, we have 
Marika Rökk sing, ”Don’t look, don’t look / Just look straight ahead / 
And whatever comes / Don’t worry about it.” That’s how it should stay. 
Only after that did it become clear that the Little Red Riding Hood 
scene should come right at the beginning. Once upon a time…


On 06-08-2020 05:48, R.O. wrote:
> https://www.nieuwescene.nl/movies/1745/17/heimat_ist_ein_raum_aus_zeit
>
>
>   HEIMAT IST EIN RAUM AUS ZEIT
>
> In dit meeslepende filmessay duikt meester-documentairemaker Thomas 
> Heise (Vaterland) in zijn familiearchieven die vier generaties 
> omspannen. Deze weerspiegelen de diepgaande culturele en politieke 
> omwentelingen in het Duitsland van de vorige eeuw, die Heise op even 
> subtiele als indrukwekkende wijze laat zien. Heise's briljante 
> essayfilm bevat brieven en dagboeken die hij in voice-over voorleest, 
> aangevuld met zwart-witbeelden van Duitse landschappen, alledaagse 
> plekken en beladen locaties.
>
> Heise's nieuwste, Heimat ist ein Raum aus Zeit, is een monumentaal 
> werk over de 20e eeuw tot nu - de intieme verhalen van zijn familie 
> onthullen de grotere culturele en politieke gebeurtenissen die 
> Duitsland de afgelopen honderd jaar hebben gevormd.
>
> Let op!! Deze Duitse documentaire wordt vertoond met Engelse 
> ondertiteling.
>
>
> PosterHeimat_132394791396362460_big.jpg 
> <https://www.nieuwescene.nl/uploads/Products/product_1745/PosterHeimat_132394791396362460_big.jpg>
>
> *Regie*
> Thomas Heise
>
> *Land van herkomst*
> Duitsland, Oostenrijk
>
> *Gesproken taal*
> Duits
>
> *Ondertitelde taal*
> Engels
>
> *Genre*
> Documentaire
>
> *Productiejaar*
> 2019
>
> *Lengte*
> 3:53 (incl. 15 min. pauze)
>
> **
>
> _______________________________________________
> D66 mailing list
> D66 at tuxtown.net
> http://www.tuxtown.net/mailman/listinfo/d66
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