Reflections of the ‘Heimat’ Genre

This article examines two intertexts of Edgar Reitz's Heimat La Habanera (Detlev Sierck 1937) and Heimat (Carl Froelich 1938). Both films set ‘Heimat’ against the Other: La Habanera is a study of a woman who is irresistibly attracted to the exotic, only to be disappointed by its dark side. Heimat is less obviously National Socialist propaganda, but concerns a woman who returns from an alluring foreign place to the ‘Heimat’ and is recuperated into an ordered existence. My interest in both films is on the treatment of the alien in the ‘Heimat’ and how this issue is linked to representations of gender. It is my view that both films are read by Reitz against the grain: the fascist film La Habanera is read by characters in Heimut as having subversive potential and the more differentiated film Heimat (1938) is read by the character‐spectators in a more conservative mode.While emphasising the role of spectatorship and alerting spectators to the possibilities of constructing their own meanings, Reitz still leaves open the fraught question of whether cinema spectators are basically autonomous or basically manipulated in their readings and responses

Aesthetics · Alien · Art · Art history · Character (mathematics · Literature · Mode (computer interface · Movie theater · Set (abstract data type · Sociology · Computer Science · European history and politics · German Literature and Culture Studies · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Mathematics