Heimat - Chronicle of Germany
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Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: DVD
Brand: FACETS VIDEO
EAN: 9781565804692
Format: Black & White, Color, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Subtitled, NTSC
ISBN: 1565804694
Item Dimensions: 105
Label: Facets
Languages: EnglishOriginal LanguageUnknownFrenchOriginal LanguageUnknownGermanOriginal LanguageUnknownEnglishSubtitled
Manufacturer: Facets
MPN: DV86904
Number Of Items: 6
Publisher: Facets
Release Date: August 30, 2005
Running Time: 925 minutes
Studio: Facets
Theatrical Release Date: March 31, 1985
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Editorial Review:Product Description:While America watched Roots Germany watched Heimat with the same mixture of pride and shame that held a nation spellbound. The riveting 16-hour film was the sensation of the Munich London and Venice Film Festivals and a huge hit in France and Germany. It is the incredible interlocking saga of a German family from the end of World War I to 1982. Ambitious grand yet very intimate Heimat is an incredible motion picture chronicle--an immersion in the lives loves and tragedies of the extended Simon family. Shot over two years the film features 28 leading performers 140 speaking roles and a cast of 5000 non-professional actors. In German with English subtitles.System Requirements:Running Time 924 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: FOREIGN/LATIN UPC: 736899059125 Manufacturer No: DV86904
Amazon.com:Heimat isn't just (just!) a great motion picture--it's one of the richest, most deeply satisfying life-experiences the movies ever afforded. Conceived for West German television and divided into 11 feature-length chapters, Edgar Reitz's film begins in 1919 with the return of a soldier from the Great War to his hometown of Schabbach, in the northwestern corner of Germany, a rural region known as the Hunsrück. It will end some 16 hours (in screen time) and 63 years later, having refracted the history of modern Germany through the experiences of the people--especially, but by no means exclusively, one extended family, the Simons--living in and connected to that village. Not that the film unreels as a didactic history lesson. We come to know intimately dozens of sharply imagined characters whose lives, personalities, and allegiances shift and deepen across a broad expanse of time and event. Reitz and co-writer Peter Steinbach never force these characters into unnatural dramatic or symbolic poses. Some of the most telling truths emerge out of the corner of one's eye, as it were, from the patient accumulation of unobtrusive yet heartbreakingly beautiful detail. Few films have held the particular and the universal in such eloquent equipoise.
To cite just one example: On an evening in 1924, a German-American flyer sets his small plane down in a field near Schabbach. The following day, as he prepares to continue his journey, he invites Paul (the returning warrior) up for a brief spin, and there's an almost metaphysical thrill to the moment: thanks to the new technological wonder of the aeroplane, Paul is about to
see his village as no native ever has, and Schabbach is about to be
placed in relation to the rest of the universe as it has never been placed before. They take off, and almost immediately, just when we expect a transcendent Big Moment, Paul's attention is diverted from the panorama by the sight of a dark woman wheeling a baby carriage along a country road. He thinks he knows who it is--someone who has caught his imagination and led him to dream of an alternative destiny for himself. Down!, he urges the pilot. Yet returned to home ground, running after the woman as the plane takes off again in the background to disappear forever, he discovers it's not the woman he thought it was after all. And so two Big Moments have slipped away, and life goes ineluctably on.
So does history, though the citizens of Schabbach see very little of History directly. The Führer who seizes the imagination of some and implicates all in his vision remains a voice on the radio, a face in a frame on the wall. Even when one of the Simons visits Berlin as a low-level Nazi Party apparatchik, neither he nor the camera investigates the glow of a torchlight rally outside the window of the room where he makes love to his future wife. By the same token, the America toward which some members of the Simon family yearn is only a carefully memorized and recited postal address and, for one character who does get there, the Statue of Liberty glimpsed through the one pane in a window whose other panes have been blocked.
Heimat means
homeland, and the homeland or heartland film was a national genre encouraged by Propaganda Minister Goebbels during the Hitler years (at one point two of the characters in
Heimat go to see another movie called
Heimat!). Reitz's film, so free of anything resembling melodrama, adopts a plain, unhurried visual approach that could almost be mistaken for documentary; yet it's a subtly stylized experience from beginning to end, with its interlayering of glowing color and pearly monochrome (sometimes within a single scene), epic detachment and discreet intimacy. The storytelling, too, is subtle, true to the rhythms of real life: characters who seem key to the narrative drift out of it never to be seen again, or perhaps to return, all but unrecognizable, years later; other characters who seem minor and incidental may come to assume remarkable significance and poignancy. Throughout, Marita Breuer as Maria, a young, lovely bride who becomes a matriarch by default, limns a character of quiet dignity and authority who remains the heart of the film, and of Schabbach, even after she has passed away. This film constitutes a definition and celebration of the idea of community, of having and sharing a place in the world. And once you've experienced it, lived with it, you'll feel part of its community as well.
--Richard T. Jameson
Average Rating:
Rating:
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Facets have done it again. They have released this German Masterpiece with an appalling dvd transfer. The quality is so bad that it is unbelivable. I just don't know why Facets release dvd's , the majority of them are of such bad quality. If possible try to track down the region 2 version , the transfer is excellent.
As for the series itself , it's a brilliant piece of film making and a must see.
Rating:
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A little more than ten years ago, in my days of heroic cinephilia, I did saw Heimat, the German miniseries directed by Edgar Reitz, that deals in 11 episodes with the life of a German family from 1919 to 1982. Every day they showed one of the episodes in the Buenos Aires Cinematheque, and I remember going to see it every day (I was at the university at the time, studying a subject totally unrelated to filmmaking, so I was certainly sacrificing hours of study to see this). After Heimat, they did show ...
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Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany. (video recording reviews): An article from: Cineaste
This really gives a perfect impression of things, people, history and landscape of this country and area.
anton blok 1944
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covers the german history from before ww1 to the later decades of the last cent.
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This is a teriffic piece, tracing the lives of the people of Schabbach from post WW1 to the early 80's in Germany. The whole thing is in German with some English and French and all subtitled in English. I would recommend this to anyone looking for a good cultural view of Germany. The film focuses on the 30's and 40's in great detail, as it was a responce to an American Holocost Film, but the real emphasis is on the development of German society and the different facets of the population.
NOTE: ...
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