I'm currently midway through watching the 10th episode of the Second Heimat (they're each two hours long so sometimes I need a break).
Once again I'm struck by how such a rambling story can feel so focussed. How such beautiful direction can feel so natural. How life seems to unfurl as art.
Back in 1993, the critic Barry Frogan pinpointed "Reitz's ability to create characters who, like those of Dickens, invaded one's consciousness and resided there from week to week," and it's true that watching is somehow like being in a dream. There's rarely much obvious drama but you are always completely involved.
Strange to read how the first series (which is equally good) came about:
Appropriately, the catalyst for Heimat was a cliche-ridden American TV miniseries called Holocaust that Reitz saw on television in the late-1970s, which he felt traduced German history in the Nazi era. At the time, Reitz had retreated to the North Sea island of Sylt in order to write poetry. He had ostensibly given up his career in cinema - one that started with a bang when his debut Mahlzeiten (Mealtimes), a love story about a couple that ends with the man's suicide, won the best first film award at Venice in 1967. Like Fassbinder and Herzog, he seemed to be a titan of the new German cinema. By the late-1970s, though, he appeared to be washed up: critically mauled for his 1978 film, The Tailor of Ulm, deep in debt and out of ideas. He vowed never to make another film. Snowed-in at his island retreat, however, he watched TV and saw something that revolted him back into film-making.
The sentimentalism of the Holocaust series made him reflect on German history, but also on his own biography. Reitz had been born in 1932 in a Rhineish village called Morbach, leaving home at 19 in order to pursue an artistic career. He had thus rejected his Heimat, a German word that means homeland, connoting one's spiritual roots, but that also signifies a place of innocence and childhood security. As with many of the characters in Heimat, he often felt an unfulfillable desire to return.
He started to make notes. Soon Reitz had a 250-page draft story set in a fictionalised version of his own village. He collaborated with writer Peter Steinbach, and that story became a 2,000-page screenplay.
Watching this evening I was reminded of comments made by Jane Tranter, Controller of BBC Fiction (which means she's in charge of TV drama) in a speech last month:
"In the modern world of endless media possibilities we can help a drama to succeed by encouraging it to be succinct, to declare its intent, to make its premise clear.
"This is absolutely not, repeat not, about making dramas that are high concept (hard to think of an aim more liable in TV terms to feel hollow and manufactured and fail). It's about ensuring that the heart of the drama is not only true, but is not opaquely or perversely hidden.
"Dennis Potter once said if you can "grab an audience by the hand, you can take them wherever you want". Absolutely. But if you can't grab hold of their hand in the first place because they haven't got a clue whose hand they're holding and why, then the drama will be making its interesting journey of revelation and insight all on its own. In which case it might have been easier, let alone cheaper, to write a novel."
I wonder how she'd respond to receiving a 2,000 page screenplay about life in a provincial village...
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