For most of us, family history is something inexact, a patchwork timeline cobbled together from old photos and half-remembered anecdotes. For Thomas Heise, however, things are a little more coherent, a chronology he elucidates in the impressively constructed Heimat is a Space in Time, which catalogs a century’s worth of ancestral narrative drawn from personal archival material. Making the most of a voluminous trove of primary source documents, Heise dispassionately renders the loose story of his family’s journey through the 20th century, reading out from a choppy flow of letters and diary entries, time skipping its way forward. The film encapsulates the struggles of the German people to retain some sense of normalcy under extreme societal duress, ignoring larger context in favor of a tightly focused perspective attuned to individual experiences and emotions.
That desire for normalcy ends up as one of the film’s primary focal points, as Heise’s ancestors strive to keep their heads above water, searching for some semblance of peace amid a string of epochal upheavals. Another is how the physical imprints we leave behind on the world, such pale reflections of a person’s entire being, end up serving as our firmest legacy, ghostly after-images marked onto yellowing paper. Whether it’s an old photo providing some small hint of deeper meaning, or an unsent draft letter marred by scribbled revisions, the angst behind its writing made manifest, Heise employs these scraps as punctuating snapshots, underscoring the sentiment obscured by his expressionless narration.
Such instances contrast with the filmed visuals, which encompass a series of street scenes and other bits of everyday interaction shot from a purposeful remove, often in ironic counterpoint to the content of the letters. Picking out incomplete, unorthodox perspectives on these tableaux, or panning the camera across them at a glacial pace, Heise chooses to emphasize the limitations of perspective. It’s an effect that matches the tenor of the letters, written by people with an image of their present that’s both more detailed and more incomplete than we in the future possess. Free from explanatory information outside the texts themselves, Heimat doubles this limited perspective back onto its viewers, creating a captivating dialogue between the present and the past.
Things start off in the lead-up to the first World War, with Heise’s teenaged grandfather Wilhelm using a school essay to excoriate the stodgy mindset of his conservative nation, still clinging to the threadbare grandeur of its imperial past. The interwar years find Wilhelm involved in an on-and-off relationship with his Edith (whom he would go on to marry), the pair’s artistic temperaments leading to both conflict and the sort of frank, unvarnished candor left out of most depictions of this period. Later, as WWII begins, the couple is separated between Berlin and Vienna, as the Jewish Edith cares for her aging parents, becoming increasingly unsettled as her friends and neighbors are shipped off to camps. Heise accentuates this anxiety with an excruciating scroll down a list of deported individuals, a half-hour-long register of doom that communicates the Holocaust’s sickening toll better than most straightforward depictions.
Each successive generation is marked by the conflict, both its direct effects and the aftermath of life in the Soviet-dominated GDR. Heise’s father Wolfgang spends time in an army labor camp for so-called Mischling (or “mongrel”) citizens, deemed to have an amount of Jewish blood acceptable to remain in society, while still forced to its fringes. Later, as an academic and philosopher, he comes into conflict with his country’s repressive new government, refusing to collaborate as an informant and suffering professional consequences as a result. Sixty years after his father’s youthful dream of a cleansing communist wave, he’s trapped in the dystopian alternative, the promise of an uplifting revolution flattened by the grey pallor of life in a Soviet satellite state. Fifty years further on, Heise himself occupies a world that’s no more idyllic or secure, defined by the same hopes and confusions, a state masterfully summoned up by this fascinating filmic experiment.
The post Heimat Is a Space in Time appeared first on Spectrum Culture.