I
If some of the most consequential filmmakers of contemporary German cinema, such as Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, and Thomas Arslan, to cite but a few names that are inevitably lumped together under the loosely defined term “Berlin School,” work primarily in fiction to probe in very different ways the realities of post-unification Germany, then undoubtedly one of the most significant voices working in documentary to do the same is Thomas Heise. However, unlike, for example, Petzold and Schanelec, both of whom recently enjoyed full retrospectives at Film at Lincoln Center in New York, Heise, who has been steadily making films for over three decades, has until now not enjoyed the kind of wider exposure to North American audiences that he rightly deserves. Therefore, the theatrical release of his latest film, Heimat is a Space in Time (2019), a brilliant, expansive essay that uncovers the ineradicable linkages between personal biography and national history is a vital corrective to the lack of distribution of his films this side of the Atlantic.
II
Born and raised in the German Democratic Republic, there is an element of covert archaeology in the way Heise makes his films. His earlier shorts from the 1980s, all banned at the time from public screening, feel like a collection of non-state sanctioned images secretly extracted from behind the public face of East German reality and its civic institutions. In Volkspolizei (1985), Heise anchors his camera inside a Berlin-Mitte police station situated near the Wall in the days leading up to the May Day holidays, creating a snapshot of the daily routine of the East Berlin police. A drunken boyfriend beats his girlfriend. A vagrant without his identity papers or money is questioned. A woman reports her husband missing. A punk of questionable appearance is hauled off the streets; conspicuous looking folk like him are not wanted on the streets during the holidays. During their downtime the officers sit around watching hockey, talk about their lives, and drive around in their patrol cars through the city’s strangely empty streets. Heise’s stance here is purely observational, much like Fredrick Wiseman in Law & Order (1969). The film ends with two young teenagers reading aloud their job applications for the people’s police. Each moment alone is banal, a document of an ordinary day. Yet the cumulative effect of each scene reveals a lingering dread behind the facade of everydayness, especially when seen in the light of future events that were to grip the country several years later.
III
In his essay “Archeology is about Digging” Heise writes: “In a dictatorship, the idea is to amass hidden stores of images and words, portraying the things that people living under the dictatorship might have actually experienced, but that would not necessarily be seen or heard. Then, when the dictatorship was no more, those images bore witness to it.” Following not so much a prescribed methodology as his blind intuition, Heise has been burrowing mole-like (to use his own metaphor) into the crumbled pile of 20th century German history, mining its ripples, traces and remnants that continue to persist in the present, discreetly stockpiling an archive of images for future use. History, as it appears in his films, is not a coherent flow of linear events, but an incomprehensible and impenetrable heap of detritus and leftovers; residual specks of evidence that when gathered and glued together amount to only a partial picture of the past. In his film Lucky (Niggers) (2005), in which Heise sporadically follows the lives of five teenagers from 1999 to 2005 in Berlin as they advance into adulthood, there is a long shot of street graffiti that reads: “What is time?” It is a question that echoes throughout Heise’s filmography, and certainly one with no single measurable answer. Time is both a vertiginous force continuously displacing our balance in the present, full of slippages, and sudden detours into temporal roundabouts and dead-ends, as well as a dull trudging mass pinning us inescapably down to the here and now.
IV
In Peter Nestler’s film Up the Danube (1968) there is an image of a boy digging up from the soil a mound of bones and showing them to the camera, prompting critic and filmmaker Hartmut Bitomsky to write of Nestler’s filmmaking approach, “Here is the child that plays, losing himself in his activity. This is a type of archeology that does not follow a system, but is also not random, for the child knows this place, and this place has a secret, a buried history, whose discovery has just begun. Here are the hands that find, show and hold.” Heise’s films too can be read as the result of unsystematic fieldwork, wherein he holds up his chance findings for us to see, contemplate, and study.
V
His terrain is the former GDR, the country he grew up in and that no longer exists, ideal ground for digging into the black hole of history. See, for example, the tangled strands of time in Vaterland (2002), a work that excavates the sedimentary deposits of Germany’s fraught past in the remote village of Straguth in Sachsen-Anhalt. A kind of anti-Heimat film, Heise slowly, mindfully unearths tiny shards of the town’s history of the last fifty years, creating an unfinished puzzle or filmic palimpsest wherein past and present quiver and rub against each another in disorientating ways. There are the nearby ruins of a Nazi forced labor camp, where Heise’s father and uncle were interned towards the end of the Second World War, though he does not make the familial relation explicit. His camera unhurriedly encircles the structural remains of the camp that are strewn tomb-like across the discolored landscape, spindly constructions spectrally receding into the autumn foliage, the fog-heavy air. We hear him reading the smuggled letters dated December 1944 exchanged between the imprisoned siblings and their father in Berlin, the ghost of their words wafting through the present like the wind blowing through the bare branches of the trees that surround the encampment. Half a century later: December 2001, Otto Natho, the ageing, wryly good-natured proprietor of the village pub, chops firewood under the watchful eyes of his German shepherd. Later he is stationed at his bar remembering the last days of the war, the arrival of the Russians, the liberation and all the time between then and now. His bar is the center around which the town orbits, the place where its working-class inhabitants gather together to drink, play cards, and shoot the shit about their lives. An aura of sad stoicism emanates from them, especially the men, some of whom could easily have wandered out of a John Ford picture. Heise alternates interviews with them in their homes and scenes of quotidian life in the town with lo-fi video material he shot in Straguth in the 1980s: the roar of Soviet fighter jets screaming across the sky; the rubble of a GDR military training ground enmeshed in barbed wire, a crumbled newspaper, announcing the success of Perestroika, blows across the frame; a farmer sleeps underneath a 1000-year-old oak tree, while the same people, 15 years younger, populate the tables of Otto’s rustic establishment. Back in the present, a teenager wearing his military service uniform watches with his girlfriend a television program about the accelerating expansion of the galaxies and the inevitable collapse of the universe. Compared to the macro progression of cosmic time, Straguth along with its humble populace seems a mere breath away from obsolescence, a forgotten speckle of dust adrift in the larger cosmos of a united Germany.
VI
Ten years before Vaterland, Heise began chronicling the younger generation’s struggle to gain a stable footing in a post-Wende Germany, as in his controversial first feature-length documentary, STAU – Jetzt Geht’s Los (1992), made in the time shortly following the dissolution of the GDR. It is a portrait of right-wing extremist teenagers—the left-behind children of socialism—and their dreary native city of Halle-Neustadt (also in Sachsen-Anhalt), a place typical in the former Eastern bloc country, blighted by indigence and a declining population. Heise dispenses with commentary in his representation of his young subjects; he lets them talk, he listens, occasionally he asks questions, but not very often. What they say is often abhorrent, misguided, dangerous, yet Heise forgoes the easy convenience of positioning himself above them or passing judgment. He refuses caricature, and one-dimensional demonization. Instead Heise shows us them in their homes with their families (mostly reduced to a single mother), such as Konrad, an aspiring baker, who demonstrates for the camera how to prepare a marble cake. We see them at work at their construction jobs or on their nights off partying at the Roxy Club. Heise attempts to tune into to their anger of living under a new system that they believe has neglected and inflicted an economic and social violence on them, towards which they respond with their own ideological wrongheadedness. And it is hard not to feel for, say, unemployed Stefan, who speaks openly about his depression, how he is losing a grip on his life, how his days slip into night and day again, something, he says, that he would not wish on anyone. The care and attention with which Heise approaches these kids is evident in the precise framing of every shot, and the length of time he chooses to hold them. See, for example, the shot of Ronny at work, held for over one minute: he is kneeling down in a residential road under construction sawing at a long pipe, behind him a brick wall, above him a slate of grey sky, the only sound that of the saw in his hands working away at the pipe; a shot that transmits in its duration the effort it takes to complete such a task, a pure image of labor reminiscent of Peter Nestler, a shot that, to invoke again the words of Bitomsky, finds, shows, and holds up something essential for us to behold. But we also see how one of them eagerly displays to the camera the swastika he has tattooed on his thigh, and how another arches his right arm upwards in a Hitler salute at the entrance to the Buchenwald concentration camp. The contradictions pile up, and it becomes impossible not see a continuity between such gestures and the terrorist attacks committed by the National Socialist Underground in the early 2000s across Germany or the more recent attack on a synagogue in Halle in October 2019. In other words: a story of our times.
VI
Casting a wide glance over Heise’s oeuvre, there is the sense of each film being like a fractured mosaic resisting coherence into a finished picture, where every film is necessarily left open, unfinished, because to achieve completion is impossible; that would mean all questions have been answered, that everything has been found and explained away. But pieces are always missing. As Heise says: “Something is always left over, remnants that don’t work out. So images lie around and wait for a story,” words spoken at the beginning of Material (2009), his monumental chronicle of the GDR from the late 1980s, particularly those crucial autumn/winter months of 1989 in Berlin, to present day Germany in 2008. Assembled entirely out of such images “wait[ing] for a story” sourced from unused footage from his older films and unfinished projects—Heise’s own living archive collected and safeguarded for future use—it is both a continuation and summation of his work up to that point, where many thematic nodes of his previous films intersect: the exhumation of the scattered wreckages and debris of history, the acute attention to places and spaces as being complex repositories of the past, the collapse of temporal linearity, the quiet sniffing out of disparate images, scenes, observations, and fragments previously unseen and collating them into a unified mass of raw materials that belies any single interpretation. These are the unofficial images of the so-called Peaceful Revolution in November 1989 and the immediate events following the fall of the Berlin Wall as experienced by those in the East. Images of civil discord, anxiety, uncertainty, of citizens witnessing the slow annexation of their country by the West, the marginalia occurring at the periphery of televised events, archaeological findings that refuse to be conscripted into a grand narrative scheme. Heise’s assemblage of these unassimilated scraps depicting these micro-histories occurring at the sidelines are like tiny ruptures or interventions in the narrative transmitted by the remembered images on public television of the Wende, and provide the privileged perspective of being untethered to the dictates of any officialdom, of remaining open to contradiction. It is a film resounding with visual dissonance, its different formats (8mm, 16mm, 35mm, VHS, Beta SP) and footages visibly stitched together revealing its seams, the camera often shaky, off-balance, hand-held, jerkily panning over, say, the demonstrating crowds on Alexanderplatz in Berlin, or recorded off of live television screens.
And what do we see? In the beginning: a slow pan over a desolate urban landscape of tall grass and muddy puddles of rain water littered with defunct cars and piles of rubble populated by children laughing and playing as if in a playground, the shot lingers on two of them, zooming in as they pick up a long pipe or log of some sort and carry it away. A sudden cut plunges us into the midst of a desperate scene of street warfare between riot police and squatters being evicted from their occupied home on Mainzerstrasse in Berlin, 1990. A man runs alongside the column of police tanks repeatedly screaming “Stop it now!” as he drops to his hands and knees pleading, begging for the police to cease its raid. Another cut: it is 1988 and we are watching the theater rehearsals of a Heine Müller play appropriately titled “Germanic Death in Berlin” with lengthy arguments and discussions between the director Fritz Marquardt, the actors, and crew. Another cut… November 4, 1989, crowds of demonstrators descend upon Alexanderplatz, the camera scans over the endless sea of faces until it rests in a close-up on a woman holding up a sign declaring her father’s name and his death in a Stalinist gulag. A silence falls over the surrounding crowd, falls over us… Another image from almost 20 years later on 35mm: the skeletal remains of the Palace of the Republic—the GDR parliament—in the middle of the Berlin, the ruins like a haunting from another time…To describe every moment like this would be to retell the entire film.
In between silences speeches are made, voices usually not heard are allowed to speak, a whole lexicon of various types of speech, language, and cadence creating their own internal rhythms within the film: the schooled politician employing the phraseology of the party, the lowly bureaucrat haltingly stumbling through a speech weighed down with cumbersome jargon at a rally, the simple no nonsense diction of an elderly housewife at a residency meeting. After the speeches: the fall back into silence. Possibly the longest section is from December 1989 a couple of weeks after the fall of the Wall within Brandenburg State Prison. Both guards and prisoners together articulate for Heise’s camera their feelings of helplessness at having to watch the images on the news of their country falling apart. They speak of the unfavorable conditions under which they have had to live and work, of the circumstance that landed them there, of their longing to start a new life outside the prison walls. The process of watching language coarse through them in uninterrupted takes, especially the prisoners, who have never been provided the opportunity before to have their voices heard, to see them seize their momentary agency to express their grievances and hopes are the most moving moments in the films. It is a bizarre sequence infused with utopian possibility borne out of the particular historical moment, a possibility that was lost and subsumed by the reality of events that were yet to occur.
The perspective of Heise’s passage through the “heap of history,” as he calls it, is marked by dim vistas, landscapes and cityscapes sunk in wintry half-light like the shots of Berlin’s snow-covered streets, boulevards, and railway lines captured from the window of a moving S-Bahn train. A journey where the beginning is the also the end: “It began with the laughter of children. And it will end with it… Today is a holiday. October 3, 1992. There’s a premiere at the cinema.” The screening is the premiere of Heise’s film, STAU – Jetzt Geht’s Los at a cinema club in Halle, where the film’s young protagonists and other skinheads are in attendance. Left-wing activists disrupt the screening and attack the venue. The skinheads fight back. A riot ensues. Glasses and windows are shattered, pieces of furniture are used as barriers, and people are injured. All the while a camera records the mayhem, for a brief moment you can see Heise himself among the crowd, watching the chaos and arguing with a group of fearful bystanders who strike out at the cameraman for filming. A fight between left and right, images waiting for a story, in other words: a story of our times.
VII
Heise’s latest film, Heimat is a Space in Time, is another story; the story of Heise’s family in Germany stretching from the Wilhemine period before WWI to the present; an archive of personal letters, photographs, official documents and recordings that reveal history not as an abstraction or as a set of events occurring elsewhere, but as a single catastrophe that pummels a life into shape, destroys and takes. A tale of two cities: Vienna and Berlin; topographies of memory and trauma; tramways and railway lines; a journey through space and time, through streets, corridors, ruins, landscapes, and train stations. The destination: an elusive Heimat that is not a physical place you can return to, but a filmic space built out of time’s leavings. No interviews, no talking heads, just one voice: Heise reading aloud words and experiences rescued from the dark back of time, findings from the disorder of the past assembled, organized, and held up for us to see and hold.
Heimat is a Space in Time runs March 13 - 19, 2020 at Anthology Film Archives in New York and Lumiere Cinema at the Music Hall in Los Angeles.