Film Screenings
EDGAR REITZ

Tue, 09/08/2015 -
Thu, 09/17/2015
Anthology Film Archives

Though not as well known in the US as some of his New German Cinema peers, Edgar Reitz is legendary for his mon­umental Heimat films. A precursor to the serial dramas popular today, Reitz’s ambitious project began in 1984 and comprises three multi-episode series and two feature films with over 50 hours total running time. Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision (2013), the most recent addition to this epic saga, turns back the clock to the struggles of the Simon family ancestors in the mid-19th century. It is now presented to a New York audience as part of a pre­cious program at Anthology Film Archives, including a small retrospective with some of Reitz’s lesser known short and feature films.

The Home from Home screenings will be followed by Q&A sessions with lead actor Jan Dieter Schneider. We regret to inform that the director had to cancel his trip to New York due to a Lufthansa strike.

On September 12, 4:00pm, Edgar Reitz will participate in a videoconference with film scholar Johannes von Moltke at the Goethe-Institut New York.

Film screenings at Anthology Film Archives:

TABLE OF LOVE / Mahlzeiten
In German with English subtitles, 1967, 94 minutes, 35mm, b&w
"Photography student Elisabeth meets idealistic medical student Rolf. She’s interested in everything he does; they go on outings together and feel like they’re at the beginning of a great, romantic love story. Children soon follow, one after the other; Rolf gives up his studies and tries his hand at various menial professions. It is a marriage that ‘consumes’ the husband, so to speak – ‘Rolf gives his whole life to Elizabeth and receives children and poetic thoughts of love in return,’ as the production notes put it. Table of Love presents in exemplary manner the extent to which the male directors of the New German Cinema were fascinated by strong, vital female characters full of life, while the male characters were usually held back by navel-gazing or lachrymosity.’ (Thomas Kramer)”–ARSENAL
September 8, 6:45pm & September 9, 9:15pm

ZERO HOUR / Stunde Null
In German with English subtitles, 1977, 108 minutes, 35mm, b&w
Zero Hour takes place in a village outside Leipzig in 1945, in a Germany decimated by the war and just beginning the long process of reconstruction. With the U.S. Army having left and the Red Army preparing to take over, the village’s inhabitants are forced to adapt to their new circumstances. Young Joschi, a former member of the Hitler Youth, decides to go over to the Americans, but first he’s determined to find the money and jewelry that he knows was hidden in the local graveyard by a Nazi officer. Together with the beautiful Isa, with whom he’s fallen in love, the two plot to escape, only to find themselves falling prey to the chaos of postwar Germany and the abuses of both the Soviet and American forces. Zero Hour is a powerful and penetrating portrait of a society convulsed by the consequences of war.
September 8, 9:15pm & September 10, 6:30pm

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Though Reitz is best known for creating Heimat, the longest film in the history of cinema, his short films rank among the greatest of his works. They range from deeply perceptive, finely crafted documentaries about the production of cotton (Cotton) and about the vanished culture of the Maya (Yucatan), to an impressionistic paean to the unprecedented speed of movement in the modern world (Speed – Cinema One), to the truly extraordinary achievement that is Communication: commissioned by the German post office, this masterpiece of avant-garde filmmaking is a rapidly edited, associative, purely visual essay on mechanical and electronic forms of communication that depicts the world of modern technology as a profoundly dystopic one.

Cotton / Baumwolle (1959-60, 40 minutes, 35mm)
Yucatan (1959-60, 11 minutes, 35mm, b&w)
Communication / Kommunikation – Technik der Verständigung (1961, 11 minutes, 35mm)
Speed – Cinema One / Geschwindigkeit – Kino Eins (1962-63, 13 minutes, 35mm, b&w)
The Children / Die Kinder (1966, 11 minutes, 35mm, b&w)
Susanne Dances / Susanne tanzt (1979, 17 minutes, 35mm, b&w)

In German with German subtitles. Total running time: ca. 105 minutes
September 9, 6:45pm & September 10, 9:15pm

HOME FROM HOME: CHRONICLE OF A VISION / Die andere Heimat: Chronik einer Sehnsucht
In German with English subtitles, 2013, 230 minutes, DCP, b&w/color
Edgar Reitz’s monumental Heimat films hold a privileged place in postwar German cinema. A precursor to some of the episodic yet cohesively crafted serial dramas that are all the rage in the U.S. and Europe today, Reitz’s enormously ambitious, ever-expanding project began in 1984 with the 15-hour Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany. Since then, Reitz has added to his career-defining edifice roughly every ten years, with 1993’s Heimat II (more than 25 hours long), 2004’s Heimat III (11 hours), and now, like clockwork, with Home from Home: Chronique of a Vision, which comes in at a breezy 230 minutes. (This account elides the smaller-scale, in-between work, Heimat Fragments: The Women, from 2006…)

A prequel to the previous Heimat films, Home from Home turns back the clock to the mid-19th century, to focus on the ancestors of the Simon family, as they struggle to subsist in the (fictional) village of Schabbach (familiar from the earlier films). Depicting both the struggles and the deeply ingrained rituals and sense of community that define their lives, Reitz shows his usual panoramic flair, bringing to life a host of characters and capturing the rhythms and textures of a whole village.

Nevertheless, the film’s attention settles on two figures in particular: the sensitive, imaginative, and restless Jakob, who immerses himself in literature and dreams of emigrating to Brazil, and Henriette, the beautiful daughter of a gem cutter fallen on hard times, who is at once drawn to Jakob and fated to take a different path. Reitz, as always, is attuned both to his characters’ daily lives and to the larger social and historical forces that shape their existence. Here he explores a world marked by famine and poverty, the stirrings of revolution, and above all the specter of emigration, a phenomenon that holds the promise of freedom even as it represents a threat to the stability of the communities that are left behind. Playing out against the backdrop of the mass exodus that saw hundreds of thousands of German farmers, laborers, and craftsman departing for the New World, Home from Home is both a heart-wrenching drama and a penetrating portrait of an historical era.
September 11 through 17, 7:00pm nightly, additional screenings on September 12 and 13, 9:00pm

Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision is presented in collaboration with Corinth Films.