082 REVIEW
Directed by
THOMAS HEISE
Released
22 NOVEMBER
ANTICIPATION.
A four hour historical essay
film is a somewhat intimidating
prospect.
ENJOYMENT.
Immensely well constructed;
compelling despite its severity.
IN RETROSPECT.
A serous, summative work. An
ambitious formal achievement.
hy do we have to live through
these times?” This question found
in documents drawn from 1942 is
one that is just as pertinent today. Constructed from
correspondences plucked from the filmmaker’s
own family archives, Heimat is a Space in Time
works through a great number of questions over its
near 100-year-long time span (and near four-hour
runtime), many of which are unanswerable, too
great, or else rhetorical by design.
Heimat is the latest film by Thomas Heise, an
East Berlin born filmmaker who has been living
and making films long enough to have seen the
times change – his first films, made in the early
1980s, were banned under the GDR. The central
observation of Heimat is history’s propensity to
repeat itself. The various characters – all members
of Heise’s immediate family – all suffer persecution
or oppression under several different state powers,
and humankind’s unwavering capability for torment
and treachery ( both active and unconscious) is a
thread that runs throughout. Is it possible, Heise
asks, to retain your humanity within a dictatorship?
Spanning from the end of the 19th century
into the start of the 20th, the film reroutes the
stories that emerge from Heise’s own genealogy
into a broader national history, rendering the
personal political in a scale and seriousness rarely
seen on screen. Alongside scanned documents
and photographs, letters are read aloud by the
director for most of the film’s duration, paired with
extraordinarily well composed cinematography
by Stefan Neuberger accompanying scenes ofcontemporary Germany. It is stark, striking and
always in sobering black-and-white.
Through these letters, familiar stories emerge:
wars are waged; people are put into camps; couples
fall in love; families are formed and then torn apart.
Some of the scenes described are universal, others
are more idiosyncratic and specific. Despite all
that is endured, romance remains a regular motif.
An enormously dense and difficult film, no family tree
or timeline is provided to tie these stories together.
No map is provided around the web of networks, nor
a compass for navigating them. Certain assumptions
are made about the viewer’s ability to not just piece
these fragments together, but place them against a
national history which in turn imbues them with a
greater weight and potency.
Heise’s unerring monotone voiceover plows ever
forward through his mass of material. He retains an
emotional neutrality despite the intensely personal
nature, and maintains the film’s impressive, if
imposing, rigour throughout. Years pass, regimes
change, yet the letters continue, always precise in
their descriptions of the present and prescient in
their perception of imagined futures.
Wolfgang Heise, Thomas’ father and a famed
philosopher, once wrote that, “this state, like any state,
is an instrument of domination; and its ideology, like
any ideology, is a false consciousness.” It’s a pivotal
line, mirroring the film in its clinical, punch-packing
precision. “What can we do?” asks another character
in response. Thomas reads Wolfgang aloud, one Heise
echoing another. The answer? “Remain decent.”
MATT TURNERHeimat is a Space in Time
“W