What Happens in Eight Hundred Times Lonely?
The complete story of Eight Hundred Times Lonely, from the first scene to the last, in 429 words (about 2 minutes). Spoilers throughout.
Spoilers ahead
The up-and-coming director Anna Hepp meets the old and renowned German director Edgar Reitz in Eight Hundred Times Lonely. Discussions between the two filmmakers take place at a historic cinema called Lichtburg, located in the Ruhr-city Essen, and at the nearby Lake Baldeney (Baldeneysee). Or Edgar Reitz talks about his life, his view of art and his sometimes philosophical viewpoint.
Edgar Reitz reflects soberly, precisely and also critically on his life, in which not himself but always his art is at the centre of attention, his path in life, the difficulty of breaking away from his conservative and catholic parents’ house and embarking on an artistic career, the creation of the Oberhausen Manifesto, the risk of using the memories of his family and himself as material for films, the criticism of German television and the problems with television editors, who, despite his many years of professional experience, impose 11 script versions on him for his six-part film Heimat 3: A Chronicle of Endings and Beginnings (Heimat 3). With the remark: “This program is too good for the people.” (translated from German)
Edgar Reitz also reports on his professional and private failure after the film The Tailor from Ulm (Der Schneider von Ulm), which did not run successfully in German theaters in 1978 after a negative review in the news magazine Der Spiegel. After this failure and the separation from his wife at the same time, the demoralized Reitz thought about making a new start in his career at the age of 46. In this difficult phase he remembered his home, the Hunsrück. And as a result, the first part of the international well known and multiple award-winning film series Heimat was created in 1984.
In addition to Edgar Reitz, filmmaker Anna Hepp herself stands in front of the camera and in the centre of the film, as a connoisseur and admirer of Reitz and his life’s work. At the beginning of the film she says, that she cannot separate the director and his films. Every feature film character that Reitz developed would be projected onto him by Hepp. In the course of the film plot the title of the film is also explained. The two filmmakers Reitz and Hepp look from the stage into the empty cinema hall of the Lichtburg in Essen and ponder together on the cinema culture and the situation of the audience during a film screening. Reitz feels that in a cinema—by this he means the Essen Lichtburg cinema—eight hundred lonely people would become a community through the discussed screening. So, “Eight hundred times lonely”.
