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Helen M Jerome reviews
Tartan Video
- Cert:
- Cat.no: TVD 3567
- Running time: 1530 minutes
- Year: 1992
- Pressing: 2005
- Region(s): 2, PAL
- Discs: 7
- Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Dolby Surround)
- Languages: German
- Subtitles: English
- Fullscreen: 1.33:1
- 16:9-Enhanced: No
- Macrovision: Yes
- Disc Format: 7*DVD 9
- Price: £99.99
- Extras: background booklet by David Parkinson.
Director:
- Edgar Reitz
(Germany in Autumn, Susanne tanzt, The Tailor from Ulm, Zero Hour, TV: Heimat, Heimat 2, Heimat 3)
Cast:
- Hermann Simon: Henry Arnold
Clarissa: Salome Kammer
Juan: Daniel Smith
Evelyne: Gisela Muller
Ansgar: Michael Seyfried
Helga: Noemi Steuer
Stefan: Frank Roth
The most detailed of Edgar Reitz’s deeply personal trilogy of films about his homeland, Heimat 2 feels just as fresh as when it was originally completed and screened a dozen years back.
Neatly released on DVD just as Reitz gets a cinematic release for the third of his Heimat cycle of epic films, we can luxuriate in this epic homage to the sixties and to student life and self-expression.
Indeed, the word ‘epic’ hardly does justice to such an unflinching and detailed document of one decade, unfolding as it does across a daunting seven subtitled discs and over 25 hours. But if you get hooked and stick with it, the rewards are enormous.
Rarely has such depth of characterisation been achieved in a television series, but this is key to Reitz. He won’t be hurried or nudged off course as he explores the flowering, cynicism and empowerment of a generation through a handful of key individuals, from poetess Helga to Chilean Juan, who speaks 10 languages ‘including Esperanto’.
Each member of this loosely-connected group is seen through their relationship with central character, Hermann Simon, the heartbroken, multi-talented musician and budding composer who has fled his rural home and family in a determined move to excise his past. He’s also vowed that he’ll never love again, which is a bit of a drawback when he immediately falls for fellow music student and overachiever Clarissa.
And while other contemporaneous events like the Berlin Wall’s erection, Kennedy’s assassination and the rise of Willi Brandt and the infamous Baader-Meinhof gang take place, Hermann and Clarissa’s aching, overpowering and unrequited love stretches across the entire decade and their own unsuccessful marriages to other people.
Lovingly filmed in black and white, with judicious use of colour perhaps when glancing something important through a doorway and for extended sequences at night, Heimat 2 looks utterly sumptuous as it draws us into the everyday life of these post-war German youths, some of whom are neatly experimenting with capturing themselves on film – in new wave style, naturally.
Even as it reveals the hopes of this generation and their new freedoms, Heimat 2 also suggests these young people have a predetermined and inescapable fate set before them.
Those who marvelled at the first Heimat will be able to catch up with what happened to the young idealist Hermann, but you actually need no previous knowledge of the series that bookend the self-contained Heimat 2 to identify with the people and the plot.
You can see why this body of work was voted one of the best pieces of television – indeed European film – ever made by everyone from the New York Times to Corriere della Sera to the Radio Times.
In short, this is probably as close as television gets to pure poetry.
Note, also, that Heimat 3 is released in the UK on DVD in August 2005.
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Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.