This film of Thomas Heise, called Material, is a collection of film footage he collected over the years, not used in other projects. In the way it is structured together it gains more than the sum of its parts. The general topic seems to be the collapse of East Germany aka the DDR, though the spectre of the Third Reich is there too, for example a play being put together has to do with that and skinheads appear towards the end of the film. There is little music except "From Hanover Square North, At the End of a Tragic Day, The Voice of the People Again Arose" the last movement of Charles Ives' Orchestral Set No. 2, which originally refers to the moment when Ives learnt of the sinking of the Lusitania, but here I think refers to the process of Germany emerging from lost decades. There is a scene where some of the production team from the play access some dangerous ruins, no doubt from the war, and end up finding an apple tree in the overgrowth inside. In relation to the original project it is likely unimportant, but in the context of the film here it is very beautiful in its metaphor, a light at the end of the tunnel.
Other scenes appear to include footage of the Monday protests in Leipzig, seminal in the dissolution of the DDR, apparently because the secret police the Stasi did not have a major presence in the city; some pleas from prisoners in Brandenburg for further extension of an amnesty that was happening at the time; a residents meeting; a parliamentary session; children playing in ruins; footage of models of buildings by the Berlin Wall, footage of an art installation which contained miniature buildings too, but also model people in provocative situations; a cinema where a riot breaks out during the showing of what looks like a political documentary.
A fairly common feature was people being given the chance to speak their minds freely, which is so beautiful.
It was a slog as a viewer to watch this for nearly three hours, and I stopped at points to look into some of the relevant history as context, on the Internet. However, in its portrayal at the angst and confusion of a nation, it hit me as the credits rolled, with much more of a punch than Rossellini's Germany Year Zero, which I also watched recently.
