Aus aktuellem Anlaß und Metainteresse (schließlich ist der "Katz" laut Eigenwerbung "The Book Hollywood Can't Live Without"):

"Reitz, Edgar. Director. Born on Nov. 1, 1932, in Moorbach, Germany. A watchmaker's son, he grew up with a divided interest in science and the arts. Midway through engineering college, he switched over to the University of Munich, where he studied literature, drama, and art history. Staying in Munich after graduation, he assisted local filmmakersin various capacities before turning out his first film in 1958. In the following decade he directed numerous short documentaries, industrials and inventive experimental films, several of which won top prizes at international festivals. With Alexander KLUGE and 24 other young filmmakers he signed in 1962 the famous Oberhausen Manifesto, which called for the abolition of Germany's stagnant "papa's cinema" and the infusion of young blood and new ideas into the national motion picture industry. During the same year, Reitz, Kluge, and several of the others established a film school, the Institut für Filmgestaltung, at the Academy for Advanced Design in Ulm, where Reitz taught film technique and served as the director until 1968. All the while he contined directing shorts and in 1966 served a co-cinematographer on Kluge's breakthrough film Abschied von Gestern/Yesterday Girl. The following year Reitz directed his own first feature, Mahlzeiten/Mealtimes, a film rich in ironic double entendre that won the prize for the best first feature at the 1967 Venice Festival. Several features later, Reitz directed what could be the most ambitious film of all time, and is certainly the longest. He devoted more than five years to write, shoot and edit Heimat/Homeland/Made in Germany (1984), a 15-hour and 24-minute memory-based saga of a German family and its joys and tribulations from the end of WW I to the dawn of the 80s. Some critics faulted the film's undisciplined structure and questioned the moral fortitude of its view of German society during the Nazi era. But many hailed Heimat as masterpiece, one of the most significant achievements of contemporary cinema."

(Ephraim Katz: The Film Encyclopedia (3rd edition, 1998) pp. 1145-1146)