Edgar Reitz, currently honoured with the German Film Award for THE OTHER HOME, is one of the founders of the New German Cinema and was perhaps the most genuine filmmaker among the signatories of the Oberhausen Manifesto. He made numerous short films in the early 1960s, including a masterpiece such as GESCHWINDIGKEIT, as well as numerous industrial and advertising films, which enabled the self-taught filmmaker to experiment and learn the cinematic craft from scratch. In Alexander Kluge's ABSCHIED VON GESTERN he achieved iconic shots as a cameraman, and his first feature film MAHLZEITEN still captivates us today with a montage that furiously fragments the plot. In the 1970s Reitz moved away from a fragmentary aesthetic towards a narrative cinema of epic proportions: "I only really found myself in HEIMAT. That's when I discovered the secret of narrative within myself. Until then I had been an anti-narrator."The HEIMAT project, with which Reitz also achieved an international breakthrough, has since grown into four large cycles that present 150 years of German history from the micro-perspective of one's own life and family history and condense it into a narrative cosmos of its own that calls up collective experiences in the medium of cinematic memory and links them associatively with one another. For Edgar Reitz, the real significance of film art - and above all of his own "contemporary cinema" - lies in forming social synapses. This volume brings together texts - essays, interviews, fragments - from five decades, many published for the first time. Texts in which the director offers insights into his life, his understanding of auteur film, his working methods and the processes of making individual films, in which he questions analogue and digital production techniques, cinematographic space and image design processes for hitherto unused possibilities - always with a view to the fictional power of a medium whose real future is yet to come.