German filmmaker Thomas Heise delves into his family's (and country's) tortured past in this transfixing documentary.
certainly has the feel of a summative work, touching on such macro events as World War I, the rise and fall of Nazism and German discontent, economic and otherwise, before, during and after the Berlin Wall. In micro counterpoint, Heise tells the story of his own flesh and blood, beginning with a reading of an antiwar essay written by his grandfather, Wilhelm, for a school assignment in 1912. Wilhelm's naive pacifism makes for a sobering complement to all the unrest that follows.
In an extraordinary early sequence, which takes up about 25 minutes, Heise reads a number of letters between family members while pages and pages of typewritten Nazi documents scroll glacially across the screen. The papers contain names, addresses and dates, all relating to Jews sent to East European ghettos throughout the early 1940s. The missives Heise reads increase in desperation and eventually segue into resignation.
One of the few instances where color seeps back into the film is when Heise himself becomes a part of the story. A childhood photo of he and his brother Andreas has the tinted look of a silent-film frame, and it resonates provocatively with an anecdote Heise relates about a time when he and Andreas, as teenagers, went into a pitch-black movie theater to make out with some girls and unwittingly ended up kissing each other.
Not a single image or sound is absent this sense of deprivation. One repeated visual: a car shuttle train moving between unspecified stations, sometimes with, sometimes without cargo. And aurally, the film tends toward the subtly dissociative, as with the distant industrialized din that tends to play over numerous serene landscape shots. Heise is undoubtedly paralleling commercial chattle with the human freight that's been exploited, at different points in history, by those in authority.
How to resist? Perhaps merely through perseverance and communication. Heise's father Wolfgang, a well-known utopian philosopher often under siege by the powers-that-be, has a heady debate with a colleague that is preserved here via audio recording and an evocative series of still photos.
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