Home, History, and Memory: Spatial Explorations in Recha Jungmann’s Etwas tut weh (1979/1980) and Sandra Wollner’s Das unmögliche Bild (2016)

Abstract:This article compares spatial explorations of family history in two films and analyzes the impact of the filmmakers’ generational differences on their approaches to film as an aesthetic medium for pursuing memory work. In Etwas tut weh (1979/1980; Something hurts), Recha Jungmann, one of the few women graduates of the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, revisits her family’s decayed former estate, curiously reconnecting the ruin with the elusiveness of family history. Sandra Wollner’s Das unmögliche Bild (2016; The Impossible Picture, 2016) explores her family history by imitating Super 8 home movie making. In both cases the house becomes an archival place that is interwoven with German and Austrian national history. The camera practices a form of approach that deliberately creates (disorienting) spaces that refute the hierarchies of conventional narration. Forty years apart, the respective handling of space is different in each film, the intent of uncovering family secrets similar.