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The Critics' Corner"A cinematic event...a massive, nearly 16-hour chronicle of life in Germany, from 1919 to 1982, as reflected in the fluctuating fortunes of the members of one family, initially peasant-farmers, in the fictitious village of Schabbach in the Rhineland....In spite of its intimidating length, Heimat is immensely, easily watchable, an extraordinary succession of mostly ordinary events and characters -- history seen from ground level -- vividly acted by a huge cast of both professional and nonprofessional actors." -VINCENT CANBY, The New York Times "Edgar Reitz' Heimat (Homeland) is not only the fulfillment of all the hopes of New German Cinema over the past two decades, but should also go down as a milestone in contemporary film history. Truly, as the vast majority of critics attending the Venice fest (in 1984) attest, there has never been anything like it before." -RONALD HOLLOWAY, Variety Heimat is overwhelmingly charged with emotion. Some, but not I, have felt...that the raw sentiment has been ladled on too freely. What is unquestionable, however, is that overall Reitz reveals the skills of a classic novelist. He has a just sense of proportion and a matching breadth of human vision." -JOHN PYM, London Financial Times Heimat has 28 leading performers, 140 speaking roles, 5,000 nonprofessional actors and is divided into 11 parts... Heimat begins and ends with basics-family, love, hate, rivalries, marriages, births and deaths. The title refers literally to a homeland. But, to film maker Edgar Reitz, it implies a state of mind, a yearning for the idealized home that is lost with innocence and time, the home where the heart is, to which you can never go back again. Heimat equates this homeland with roots, family and friends, with memory and sense of self." -JOSEPH GELMIS, Newsday "There's no use pretending that Edgar Reitz's Heimat is just another movie. For one thing, it's 16 hours long. For another, it was the sensation of the Munich, Venice, and London Film Festivals, has been rapturously received in France and England, proved a theatrical as well as a TV hit in West Germany, and Stranger Than Paradise notwithstanding, was the international success d'estime of 1984-85." -J. HOBERMAN, Village Voice "[Heimat]" proves beyond question that soap operas can be real works of art and that films for television and the cinema, as the great Rossellini used to say, can be made exactly the same way. This is of immense significance for the future of both... To explain why Reitz's film is so very different from most soaps is extremely difficult and would take, like the movie itself, a long time. But the German critic put it beautifully when he said that after seeing this family chronicle, which is also a whole slice of German history, you feel like driving off to Schabbach right away." -DEREK MALCOLM, The Guardian | |
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