Holozän is the only film made by Manfred Eicher, founder and producer of ECM, who directed it in 1992 with Heinz Bütler. It adapts Max Frisch's 1979 story Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (Man in the Holocene), which The New York Times called a "luminous parable of indeterminable purport". An old man alone in a village in Ticino fights against forgetting, and the film carries his struggle through images, fragments of text and music rather than plot.
Erland Josephson plays Herr Geiser, with Sophie Duez as his daughter Corinne and Elvezia Barzan as an old woman of the village. Bütler and Eicher wrote the screenplay together, and Eicher chose the music. The director of photography was Giorgos Arvanitis, the editor Isabelle Dedieu, and the ECM designer Barbara Wojirsch shared the scenography. Filming took place in the Valle Onsernone and in Iceland in March and April 1991. Al Castello produced, with ECM Films, George Reinhart Produktion and the Swiss broadcaster TSI as co-producers.
Geiser's house becomes an archive. He cuts up encyclopedias and history books, keeps some pages and burns others, and pins notes on geology and the history of the earth to the walls. He studies a salamander that has come in from the rain under a magnifying glass, and shouts his own name from the balcony into the mist so as not to lose it. The soundtrack draws on the ECM catalogue and the classical repertoire. Bach accompanies the opening shot of water, a solo viola sonata by Hindemith sounds in an abandoned stone church, and music by Jan Garbarek follows Geiser through the wilderness. Keith Jarrett is heard as Corinne drives up the mountain, and Bartók and Shostakovich complete the score.
The film premiered in competition at the Locarno festival on 10 August 1992 and received a prize from the jury there. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote that in Josephson's "weather-beaten face" one may "behold a reflection of the haunting and ancient landscape". Josephson had worked with Bergman and with Tarkovsky on The Sacrifice. Reviewing the DVD for ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo found Tarkovsky's influence in almost every frame, and described the film as Eicher's single venture outside record production.
This DVD was published on 30 October 2009 as number 14 of the filmedition suhrkamp, in collaboration with ECM. The film runs about 91 minutes, in German.
