Edgar Reitz in conversation with Johannes von Moltke
At the occasion of the showcase of his work at Anthology Film Archives (September 8-17), iconic German filmmaker
Edgar Reitz joins film scholar
Johannes von Moltke to talk about Reitz's oeuvre with a particular focus on his monumental
Heimat films, the Heimatfilm genre, and the very idea of "Heimat" (engl. home, homeland) in pop cultural imagination.
Please note that due to a Lufthansa strike Edgar Reitz is not able to travel to New York and will talk with Johannes von Moltke over Skype videoconference instead. Our apologies for any inconvenience.
Edgar Reitz (born in Hunsrück, 1932) studied Literature, Journalism, and Drama in Munich. He started working as production assistant, dramaturge, cameraman, and film editor in 1957. He is a co-signer of the 1962 "Oberhausen Manifesto" which called for a "new German feature film" and is at the origins of the later New German Cinema. Together with co-signers Alexander Kluge and Detten Schleiermacher, Reitz founded the Institute for Film Design at the College of Design in Ulm, where he lectured on Camera, Dramaturgy, and Montage. His first feature film
Mahlzeiten came out 1967 and received the award for Best First Work at the 28th Venice International Film Festival. Since 1995, Reitz has been a Professor of Film at the State College of Design in Karlsruhe. His internationally best known work is the epic 53-hour long
Heimat film cycle.
Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision, the prequel to
Heimat, premiered 2013 in Venice and is now shown for the first time in the US at Anthology Film Archives.
Johannes von Moltke is a scholar of cinema and film theory and Professor and Chair of German, Professor of Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his PhD from Duke University and previously taught at the University of Hildesheim in Germany. His research and teaching centers on film and German cultural history of the 20th and 21st centuries. He is the author of
No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), winner of the MLA Scaglione Prize for Best Book in German Studies. He has published widely on German cinema, critical theory, and contemporary German culture. His articles on Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor Adorno, the work of Alexander Kluge, the role of melodrama and affect in recent historical "event television," on New German Cinema, the phenomenon of stardom in Germany and Hollywood, representations of Jewishness, the culture of Americanization, and popular culture in postwar Germany have appeared in numerous journals and edited volumes in the US and Germany.
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