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<h1 class="css-19v093x">Interview: Thomas Heise</h1>
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<div class="css-7kp13n">By</div>
<div class="css-7ol5x1"><span class="css-1q5ec3n">Jordan
Cronk</span></div>
<div class="css-8rl9b7">filmcomment.com</div>
<div class="css-zskk6u">21 min</div>
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<p><i>Heimat Is a Space in Time</i> (Thomas
Heise, 2019)<i> <br>
</i></p>
<p>In Thomas Heise’s <i>Heimat Is a Space in
Time</i>, 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, <i>Heimat Is a
Space in Time</i> 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. “<i>Heimat</i> 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 <i>Film Comment</i>’s
March/April issue.</p>
<p>Following a screening of <i>Heimat</i> 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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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…”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<br>
</div>
<div lang="en">[. KNIP..]</div>
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<div lang="en">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?
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Pier Paolo Pasolini’s <i>Accatone</i>
(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</p>
<p>Luis Bunuel’s <i>Los Olvidados</i> (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. <i>Why Make a Film
about These People?</i> (1980) was later
the title of my first documentary in film
school.</p>
<p>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: <i>Alice
Doesn’t Live Here Anymore</i> (1974), by
Scorsese, <i>Lacombe, Lucien</i> (1974), by
Louis Malle, who is still important to me
today, and a few more. Also <i>I Was
Nineteen</i> (1968) by Konrad Wolf, which
I have seen at least 10 times in my life.
All works about outsiders.</p>
<p>At what point did you decide to pursue
filmmaking in earnest?</p>
<p>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 <i>Until Death
Do Us Part</i> (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.</p>
<p>The experience inspired me to make my own
documentary. <i>Why Make a Film About These
People?</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Today, <i>Why Make a Film About These
People?</i> 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 <i>Documentary
Without Pictures</i>.</p>
<p><b>You’ve said that</b> <b><i>Heimat</i></b><b>’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?</b></p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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…</p>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 06-08-2020 05:48, R.O. wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:14ee00ba-2bdd-7427-c4c5-188f21e7c949@ziggo.nl">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<address><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.nieuwescene.nl/movies/1745/17/heimat_ist_ein_raum_aus_zeit"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.nieuwescene.nl/movies/1745/17/heimat_ist_ein_raum_aus_zeit</a><br>
</address>
<h1>HEIMAT IST EIN RAUM AUS ZEIT</h1>
<div class="col-sm-6 col-md-7 col-sm-push-3 col-md-push-2
detaildesc"> 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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Let op!! Deze Duitse documentaire wordt vertoond met Engelse
ondertiteling.<br>
<br>
<br>
</div>
<div class="col-xs-4 col-sm-3 col-md-2 col-sm-pull-6 col-md-pull-7
detailposter"><a
href="https://www.nieuwescene.nl/uploads/Products/product_1745/PosterHeimat_132394791396362460_big.jpg"
data-fancybox="groupposter" class="fancybox
film_detail_poster" moz-do-not-send="true"><img
data-src="https://www.nieuwescene.nl/uploads/_CGSmartImage/img-3f639edeff616d97044c1c852384c39c.jpg"
src="https://www.nieuwescene.nl/uploads/_CGSmartImage/img-3f639edeff616d97044c1c852384c39c-cine_deskt.webp"
alt="PosterHeimat_132394791396362460_big.jpg" class="loaded"
moz-do-not-send="true" width="400" height="580"></a></div>
<p><strong>Regie</strong><br>
Thomas Heise</p>
<p><strong>Land van herkomst</strong><br>
Duitsland, Oostenrijk</p>
<p><strong>Gesproken taal</strong><br>
Duits</p>
<p><strong>Ondertitelde taal</strong><br>
Engels</p>
<p><strong>Genre</strong><br>
Documentaire </p>
<p><strong>Productiejaar</strong><br>
2019</p>
<p><strong>Lengte</strong><br>
3:53 (incl. 15 min. pauze) </p>
<strong></strong> <br>
<fieldset class="mimeAttachmentHeader"></fieldset>
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