DOK Leipzig makes documentarist Thomas Heise’s voice heard. It survives its owner: in “Iron Age” and “Barluschke”, both of which won awards in Leipzig, and in the monumental “Heimat” film with which his filmography ends. His voice still resonates: permeable to old and new German presents, between whose fragments it searches for a foothold and a stance.
Identity is a myth. Berthold Barluschke, an ambitious cog in the GDR foreign trade system, has changed names and roles multiple times. Thomas Heise follows him as he moves house. He once went from Mittenwalde to New York, now he is leaving his family in Paris. A polyglot secret agent with a petty bourgeois background. Barluschke worked for the GDR secret service and the West German Federal Intelligence Service, always anxious to get the most out of it for himself. “What should really be talked about?” the filmmaker asks. The impossible endeavour of getting to the professional impostor using the means of documentary film results in one of the freest, most fragmented works in Heise’s oeuvre. Awarded the Silver Dove at DOK Leipzig but rarely screened since.
This film about children in Eisenhüttenstadt, that showcase project of socialist urban development, was planned in 1981 and terminated “for reasons of state discipline” before it began. Ten years later, its protagonists are already in the West or no longer alive, Thomas Heise sweeps up the remains. Very little material, but memories. Neil Young’s ballads accompany car and train rides through the new non-places of the German East: “Gone, gone, the damage done.” From there, “Iron Age” delves into old and new conflicts – baffled parents, escapes from reality, the wish to think for oneself and not be thought. Odds and ends. A DEFA production, placed with Norddeutscher Rundfunk by Klaus Wildenhahn and awarded the Sponsoring Prize at DOK Leipzig.
Thomas Heise’s last film deals with his family archive, initiated by the deaths of his mother and brother. With suggestive comments and inserted into contemporary images, he appropriates the term “Heimat” by bringing the contradictions of more than a hundred years of German history to the fore. The counter-programme is formulated in a hit song by Marika Rökk: “Don’t look hither, don’t look thither, just look forward.” Heise’s monumental arrangement of fragments is at the same time open and insistent, devastated and hungry for life, never straightforward. Historiography and self-observation, never completely belonging: a touch in the dark cinema, a crack in the autobahn, lists, biographies, après-ski. Watching what happens (to them).
