物質

《物質》定位十分明確：如何記錄一個正處在轉型期的國家？如何組織這些鬆散的材料？1989年前的生活給我們留下了什麼？未來有什麼希望？應該怎樣處理這些“剩下的”圖片？

沒有平白的敍述，只有導演的隻言片語和Charles Ives哀傷的輓歌。導演通過對過去二十年來自己以及其他人拍攝的素材的整理和剪輯，讓這些影像自己説話。從最近柏林的騷亂到1989年底亞歷山大的大型集會，這是一個羣眾無視當局的罕見時刻，讓人感覺任何事都可能發生。從舞台導演Fritz Marquardt在使《海納穆勒的日耳曼-死在柏林》登上舞台的聯合項目中的初步談判到今天共和國宮的毀壞。在這部影片中，Heise用他自己的方式回顧了德國曆史。從二十世紀八十年起Thomas Heise就開始這項工作，將社會政治問題融合在探索歷史的過程之中。以新舊辯證的眼光，Thomas Heise密切的觀察，讓事件自己説話，為歷史創造了更多可能。

A slow pan shot sweeps over a piece of wasteland next to a ruin, with the laughter of children playing in the distance: providing the background of these three motifs – childhood, landscape and loss. Then an announcement follows: “Certain things remain as surplus, leftovers that are undeveloped, unfinished. It is the same with images waiting for a story”. These unedited images, the very substance of the film, were made in the margins of other films (his own or other people’s) or shot under the urgent pressure of events. They cover the last twenty years.

The space of his Material is precise and well-defined: how to document a country undergoing transformation, how to articulate this scattered material, what is left of Life before 1989 and of the hopes for the future? What should be done with these ‘left-over’ images?

Nothing is explained directly, apart from a few rare snatches of the director’s commentary and the elegiac, melancholic music of Charles Ives. Heise leaves these situations caught up in their own intensity: from a recent riot of hoodies in Berlin to the enormous rally in the Alexanderplatz at the end of 1989, showing the crowds defying the authorities in one of those rare moments when there is a feeling that anything could happen; from preliminary discussions with the stage director Fritz Marquardt on a joint project to stage Heiner Müller’s Germania – Death in Berlin, to what remains today of the gutted Palace of the Republic.

In Material , Heise has constructed a personal reflection on Germany’s history and on his own method. Thomas Heise has been ploughing this furrow ever since the 1980s in the GDR, weaving together socio-political issues in his exploration of History. In a dialectic of the Old and the New, closely observing faces and letting words deploy themselves, he pays the necessary attention to this gesture, which opens up the material of History itself and its possibilities.

Film material shot over a 20 year period, a visual diary, outtakes that just will not leave their creators alone. Put together in a poetic way, in which chronology takes a back seat to sense and atmosphere. History is not a linear sequence but a pile of events. ^[1]