MOVIE REVIEW : ‘HEIMAT’: OTHER SIDE OF HOLOCAUST

Edgar Reitz’s “Heimat” (in two parts Saturday and Sunday, beginning at 1 p.m., at the Nuart) is probably the first great original film-novel, a work of extraordinary range and ambition. If most films today are so morally and artistically shabby that they depress you, this one is elating: It stretches your ideas of what movies can achieve and can be.

“Heimat”--which runs 15 1/2 hours and covers 64 years (1918-82) in a fictional German village called Shabbach--has a novel’s plenitude of character and event, heightened by a great film’s visual and dramatic resources. It is Reitz’s attempt to reclaim his country’s history, prompted by his anger at the television miniseries “Holocaust” (whose characters he found “Americanized” and distorted). Perhaps that reaction flaws it slightly; there’s an irony and discretion used in portraying the Nazis that will alienate some viewers.

But Reitz assumes we all grasp the evil of Hitler’s regime. He’s after the story we usually don’t get: not of tyrants or victims, but of ordinary people, bystanders who allowed themselves to be blinded--and then, mostly, tried to blot out the memories after the war. It’s the flip side of the devastating reality Claude Lanzmann reveals in “Shoah”: the monstrous truths all these people sealed off.

“Heimat” is in 11 sections, and though it’s the linkage and progression that dazzle you, any one of the 11 taken alone is better than most films you’ll see this year. There’s something heroically profuse about “Heimat”--prodigal, Bruegelian, a vast, Balzacian beehive of a story. More than two dozen major characters appear, with many minor ones drifting in and out, and they’re all drawn by Reitz and his phenomenally gifted cast--professionals and amateurs--with superb intimacy and thoroughness.

The story centers on two village families, the Simons and the Weigands, joined together after World War I with the marriage of Paul and Maria (a towering performance, running through the entire film, by Marita Breuer). The crux of “Heimat”--taken, like much else, from Reitz’s own family history--occurs at the climax of the first part: Paul succumbs to wanderlust, abandons his family and walks off down the road. Most films would follow the wanderer, the Odysseus. This one even begins with the classic image, his return home after the war. But “Heimat” instead is Penelope’s saga: It’s about all those who stayed. The title translates roughly as “homeland,” suggesting both a matrix of nostalgic feelings and a heavily sentimental German film genre (one such, also called “Heimat,” is seen by Maria at the beginning of Part 5). The town itself becomes a protagonist, inexorably changing.

There’s an excitement about watching this movie--particularly in the eight-hour theatrical chunks the director finds preferable--that far outweighs its daunting length (very few deserted the marathon screenings at Filmex a year ago).

We meet most of the characters in their youth, sometimes even in infancy, and follow them to old age and death; every action, every lovingly observed village ritual, echoes and reverberates. Two lovers tumble in a sylvan embrace in the ‘20s, and we can project forward to the lives of their children, and grandchildren, half a century later. Actions and events, bits of the landscape, begin to take on almost mystical significance; we can never tell how they’ll return or recur, as the years roll on.

Reitz and cinematographer Gernot Roll make a rainbow of innovation, dryly rapturous, or shot with a near-Fordian mixture of spontaneity and reverie. They do something that seems odd at first, alternating between color and monochrome, sometimes within sequences or single shots. But besides any conscious pattern, there’s a sense that they’re using whichever stock most fits a given moment, an idea revolutionary in its simplicity. Reitz’s writing sometimes suggests Boll, and there’s even a trace of Joyce (those peculiar little epiphanies of the everyday in “Dubliners”); Reitz’s cinematic style is so eclectic that it variously recalls the Tavianis, Herzog, Tarkovsky, Welles, Lang and Fellini. But the influences are totally subsumed: He’s a true original.

“Heimat” accomplishes that magical task all art aspires to: It alters your perceptions, steeps you in its own created reality. It’s a really stunning achievement of the imagination. Days after seeing it, you may find images of Shabbach and its villagers in your mind’s eyes--the lush fields, distant mountains, Maria’s knowing smile, the rheumy eyes of her brother Eduard (an amiable dolt who marries a whore and becomes the Nazi mayor) and the ferret-like features of the perpetual gadfly, Glasisch (Kurt Wagner), who loved Maria in youth and survives almost to the end. It’s a lyrical film, but a knowing one; celebrating families and probing the forces that rend them, painting a ravishing countryside while showing, beneath, the demons that ravaged it. Watching “Heimat,” we get a pleasure like that of a great 19th-Century novel: Reitz hews up a piece of the earth and gives it to us, rich and teeming with life. Life buoyant and tragic; life in its nakedness, dreams and disguises, life caught with a fullness and sympathy that few film makers can give us: a song of blood and earth--of home, and all that’s hidden there.

‘HEIMAT’

An Edgar Reitz Film production. Producer Reitz. Director Reitz. Script Reitz, Peter Steinbach. Camera Gernot Roll. Music Nikos Mamangakis. Editor Heidi Handorf. Art director Franz Bauer. With Marita Breuer, Kurt Wagner, Ruediger Weigang, Karin Rasenack, Mathias Kniesbeck, Johannes Lobewein, Gudrun Landgrebe, Hans Juergen Schatz, Joerg Hube. Running time: 15 hours, 24 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature (nudity, language).