The news that Thomas Heise – one of Germany’s greatest documentary film directors – suddenly passed away at the end of May after a short illness was devastating to large swathes of the documentary and experimental film community. Especially because nothing seemed to point to this tragic outcome: not long before, he had been a member of the Berlinale documentary film jury, which had awarded two of the most political films of the year (No Other Land and Direct Action), where he poignantly spoke in support of the Palestinian cause.

It was an exceptional display of courage and integrity within a German cultural environment that, over the past eight months, has been consumed by a form of paranoia – overcompensating for its historical guilt – and by Islamophobic excesses, where (self-)censorship has become a daily reality. And Heise, both as a descendant of a family deeply affected by the Holocaust and as an artist who had personally experienced censorship and prohibition, was the ideal person to address these issues. Although the recording of the Berlinale’s award ceremony is still not available online, we can refer to his last interview, conducted by the Berliner Zeitung, in which he vehemently criticized the controversy that followed the Berlinale: „Does this mean we have to scrutinize who is permitted to award films? And who exactly is supposed to do the scrutinizing? Excuse me, but that’s GDR [German Democratic Republic]. This is not possible! Does that include us? We awarded the film. This is a threat; this is police.”

Among the German documentary filmmakers born in the former communist half of the country who began their work around the DEFA state studios and continued in reunified Germany – such as Volker Koepp and Helke Misselwitz – Thomas Heise devoted much of his career to a topic that, in time, will become one of the most pressing concerns of the present: the resurgence of the far right and the erosion of the memory of Nazism. Nowhere is this phenomenon more paradoxical and troubling than in Germany: Heise’s cinema directly connects the memory of the two German dictatorships of the 20th century with the present. This is nowhere clearer than in his monumental last film, Heimat ist ein Raum aus Zeit (2019, which I reviewed at the time of its release), which was acclaimed as one of the great documentaries of our time by critics worldwide. Now, more than ever, it is essential to revisit his entire body of work, to explore it beyond this final film that established him as a vital voice in contemporary nonfiction cinema.

Labyrinth-heads: Early, Censored Works

Beginning with the handful of films Heise shot in the final years of the East German regime, which could only be released after the fall of the Berlin Wall. His 1980 debut, So Why a Movie About These People? (Wozu denn über diese Leute einen Film?, which was banned after its release), is a medium-length film where Heise explores the daily life of a family living in extreme poverty, where he also explored his affinity for Pasolini’s Accattone.

From the outset, Heise is drawn not so much to people on the margins of society as to how they live their daily lives outside of any ‘official’ ideology. At the same time, he examined the mechanisms through which this ideology is enforced, a subject more closely explored in The People’s Police (Volkspolizei, 1985), itself a banned film. The premise is Frederick Wiseman-esque – a slowly-paced study of an institution (a police station in Berlin-Mitte), its procedures, employees, and the people that end up being arrested there, through a lens that is mostly observational, underpinned by occasional interviews. All these arrests, reports, and indictments – mostly of young people, notably including a mod punk at one point – center around participants in a documentary that reveals something much larger and more violent than themselves, while also implicitly taking a look at a life beyond the reach of the law. Consider the sequences where police officers, taking a break around a cup of cheap coffee, are watching television, becoming engrossed in a hockey game or a cheesy romantic movie: the contrast between the images that we glimpse at alongside them and the officers’ menial, fundamentally violent and monotonous work could not be greater. It’s no coincidence that the movie ends with a shot seemingly so disconnected from the rest of the film, so transparently subversive that it’s almost comical: the image of a cement mixer spinning around in endless, dreary circles.

The highlight of these early films is Imbiss Spezial (1989), yet another portrait of an establishment – this time, of a snack bar located within an S-Bahn station in East Berlin. Beyond the repetitive tasks of the employees and the constant hum of propaganda on the radio, one witnesses more than just a social microcosm but, indeed, a snapshot of a society on the brink of radical change, tensions simmering akin to the hot dogs that the employees set to boil in large pans. “My head’s a maze, my life’s a minefield,” sighs one of the employees at one point – the small gestures and ideas of the day enter a direct conflict with the official narrative, sketching a general mood of resignation and a lack of perspective, which Heise transforms into a deeply critical commentary. Here, we can also see the seeds of the formal rigor that would define his later directorial style: the camera movements are meticulously calculated and masterfully executed. At the same time, their extended durations create space for time-images, placing liminality at the forefront of his visual discourse.

The Halle-Neustadt Trilogy: Shooting (at) Time

That rejection and irreverence towards the official political narrative against a backdrop of material deprivation turned after 1989 into the resurgence of the neo-Nazi movement – which Heise documented in the heat of the moment, long before it became apparent to wider society, in Jammed – Let’s get going! (Stau – Jetzt geht’s los!, 1992). The opening film of the “Halle-Neustadt trilogy” is named after the small town in Saxony, south of Berlin, where it was shot. The film broadly addresses the rise of the far-right ideology among young people in the East, who are wrought with disillusionment regarding the reunification, marred by traumatic childhoods and generally dissatisfied with the “new” state into which they have been “absorbed”. Consider the young man who enumerates and then rejects all the reasons why “evil Germans” are made to feel guilty; or the pacifist punk who complains about being regarded as “dumb Easterners” – economic outcasts celebrating their marginality in the face of a national identity that they fail to embrace. All of which makes the film’s first gesture even more powerful – a fairy-tale-like rendering of German history, over the shot of a burning car.

Heise avoids the main trappings of films that approach the subject of juvenile extremism – and that is, to caricature and flatten the young people who fall prey to it. With absolute clarity, he sees the tragedy of a generation that is losing itself precisely against the backdrop of a hope that once seemed inexhaustible, of the generalized confusion that only a handful of completely overwhelmed parents could see at the time. All the while, he never places himself in the ultimately condescending position of “trying to understand”: because all understandings are already there, and other positions would imply either indulging their extremist ideology or falling into a cheap, counterfeit form of “empathy”, trappings that are all the more dangerous when your characters are some blokes that are chanting “Sieg Heil!” to the beat of AC/DC’s Thunderstruck, who chuckle and sneer as they showing each other their hidden swastika tattoos.

What matters is to observe, to take note, and to counteract when the opportunity arises. Consider this mid-movie discussion with a young man who initially seems benign but takes an extremely dark turn when Heise asks him why he owns firearms. And the more nonchalantly the boy answers, the more he seems to think that responses sound logical, the more Heise tries to show him that things are exactly the opposite:

– Against whom are you defending yourself?
– Against foreigners and leftists, against strangers.
– Have you tried to get to know these people?
– No. But the Romanians and Roma are notorious.
– How can you say such things if you don’t know them?
– I don’t want to know them. Why would I want to know them?
– But you don’t!

With sequences like this, in the hands of another director, the movie could easily have veered into sensationalism – but later on, another young man says that unemployment has made him lose all sense of time and that he often feels utterly miserable, the abyss in which these young men are living their lives engulfs the entire screen. The film’s final, most irreverent gesture perfectly captures the essence of this abyss: during target practice, a young man aims an old alarm clock, and each bullet that hits becomes a shot fired both into a contradictory past and a disappointing present.

It’s hard to find a more touching moment than the opening of the last movie in the trilogy, Children. How Quickly Time Flies (Kinder. Wie die Zeit vergeht), that was released 15 years after its first installment. This film creates a superb contrast and continuity with the previous ending. One of the protagonists, smiling bitterly, gives a heartbreaking answer to a question akin in spirit (“What did you enjoy most about life?”): “Childhood”. It’s the age-old story—people look back at the toughest of times with joy, should they coincide with a happy childhood. Placing this fragment at the beginning emphasizes that these characters who live on the margins of society are plagued by a constant, acute sense of nostalgia, haunted by the ghosts of a selectively remembered past and those of an unfulfilled future.

The liminal – not just in its social understanding –  is a theme Heise turned to often, steadfast and rigorous in his approach and style. In his cinema, one often sees abandoned or destroyed corners of the world, desolate post-industrial landscapes, and decrepit remnants of a past that keeps on haunting the present. Another often-seen element is train tracks, one of the darkest symbols of the Holocaust, which simultaneously signify an irreversible passage (of time, history, etc.) and a transitory space, marking the transition from one state to another (thus also a cipher of montage). Over time, this preoccupation became a distinct directorial signature, a powerful presence that included an increasingly frequent use of an essayistic voice-over (see Heimat): his films often begin in such settings, the camera moving from right to left, sometimes from a fixed point, sometimes as a tracking shot – both a discreet political symbol and a destabilizing mechanism that works against the usual direction in which we read images.

Intersecting Images: Material

“Looking at Heise’s oeuvre, each film feels like a fractured mosaic, resisting coherence into a finished picture; every film is necessarily left open, unfinished, because achieving completion is impossible,” wrote David Perrin a few years ago for MUBI Notebook, introducing Material (2009), the film which won Heise the FIDMarseille Grand Prix.

Indeed, this sentiment is particularly poignant in Material, released years before filmmaker Kirsten Johnson popularized the idea of “recycling raw footage” in Cameraperson (2016). This is not just due to the form of the film – a collage of images that had once been “cut” at the editing table, now “pasted” into a phenomenal documentary that straddles the fine line between observational film and meta-cinema – but particularly due to its central idea. And that is, fractured images are but a shattered mirror that reflects a society that is, itself, deeply broken: between the furor of November 1989 and the contemplative calmness that permeates the process of creating a performance for the theater; between the images of those that were imprisoned during the change of regime and intellectuals having heated discussions in a café; between the discourse of an official who still craves power in the waning days of the old regime, and one desperately dissociating himself from the former power in the dawning days of the new regime. However, the bookends of this peaceful revolution are still deeply steeped in violence – see the images of a riot in Kreuzberg that open the film: wherein a protester is kneeling in front of an armored tank, begging for an end to hostilities; and especially in its incredible second-to-last scene.

Something extraordinary happens towards the end of this sequence – both within and outside of these images: Heise’s films begin to communicate with each other directly. The scene: a movie theater showing Stau, full of young people with mod haircuts, dressed in tracksuits and sweaters, smoking one cigarette after another, clinking beers. As the screening begins, the film’s first interview, featuring the mother of a neo-Nazi (“His path is not clear”, she says, her desperation lurking underneath her words), is met with laughter rather than with seriousness. A cathartic laughter, which might seem incomprehensible to a contemporary viewer, that stems from their identification with reminiscences about getting contraband bars of Milka chocolate from the West – a fact of life rendered absurd by the reunification – and their identification with the mother’s worries, which they likely perceive as exaggerated.

But soon, chaos erupts: neo-Nazis invade the screening, smashing and barricading windows, sending chairs flying through the room, and causing bloodshed, leaving the audience frozen and hostage. If, up to this point, Heise’s images stretched toward each other in a dialogue of sorts, from this point onwards, they become fully symbiotic: Stau continues playing while young men ransack the auditorium, creating a strange mirror of the scene that playing on the screen, where leftist skinheads argue about whether or not violent political action is justifiable. A nightmarish yet fascinating mise-en-abyme: reality forcefully juxtaposes these two slices of time in an almost prophetic way, as they begin to comment upon each other mutually. “You are a voyeurist!” shouts an academic couple at the cameraman, channeling their rage at the collision of these worlds toward the one capturing their images; both an unconscious act of revenge towards the most innocent of the evening’s participants and an intuition of this fateful reciprocity of images. A sentiment echoed in „Direct Action”, one of the two films that Heise awarded in Berlin, in its cry of „This is not what you should be filming!” – and is amongst the most unsettling moments in contemporary documentary cinema. And Thomas Heise’s passing only makes these moments even more urgent, vital to conserve within our cinephile consciousness.

A selection of Thomas Heise’s films – the Halle-Neustadt trilogy, Imbiss Spezial, “Eisenzeit,” and “Heimat” – are available for free on the German State Agency for Civic Education (BPB) website, should you have a German IP address. An evening dedicated to his memory will take place on July 26, at the Kino Arsenal in Berlin.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.