At Anthology Film Archives
HOME FROM HOME: CHRONICLE OF A VISION
Die andere Heimat: Chronik einer Sehnsucht
In German with English subtitles, 2013, 230 min, 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.Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision is presented in collaboration with Corinth Films.
September 11 through 17, 7:00pm nightly, additional screenings on September 12 and 13, 9:00pm
