Michael Pilz's 285-minute Himmel and Erde is an essay film or an ethnographic documentary. It contemplates the finite lot of individuals as part of a continuum of human experience in the natural world. Himmel und Erde, translatable as Heaven and Earth, was recorded between 1979 and 1982. The documentary invites the viewer to contemplate the disruptive effects of technology on economic and social ties through circumscribed vignettes of village life which are oft repeated either as recycled footage or variations on a theme.
