Maison/1984

"This film explores the State departments that chose to install themselves in the "Berolinhaus", the City Hall of Berlin-Mitte, on Alexanderplatz. Thomas Heise gives us a glimpse, day by day of a week the thinks is archetypical in the life of East Germany's public administration in 1984. From Sunday, the day of elections whose results surprise nobody, to Saturday, the day of weddings that serve as a pretext for lessons in socialist morality, these are procedures that the filmmaker captures in the self-evidence with which they function. Each office, each interview, the behaviour of the civil servants and the citizens, and they vocabulary are scrutinised by the filmmaker with great formal rigour. In this way he focuses on the deep-seated structures of society. After a public holiday on Whit-Monday, the days are punctuated by people – mainly women – seeking assistance, be it financial help or the allocation of a dwelling. They go up to the office floors in a lift which, in Heise's eye, becomes an oppressive leitmotiv : it never stops, inexorably pouring out a stream of applicants, whose expectations are mostly rejected. What is at stake is the rules, laws and plans that have to be respected !
Yet Thomas Heise does not confine himself to these observations. The intermediate subtitles that he inserts between the sequences – and sometimes within one and he same sequence – act like iconoclastic punctuation marks. This resolutely Brechtian technique provides a space for critical reflection and provokes some salutary smiles. "Das Haus / 1984", now revived from the oblivion of history, has not aged at all."
(Jean Perret - translation : Kevin Whitele)