Ursula, in 1953 is 13 years old, the Federal Republic of Germany just four. It is the era of Adenauer with the return to traditional values. How is one to grow up, how is one to understand matters of life? Hence Ursula takes refuge in a dream world, but without being able to reconcile her own needs with the reality of daily life.

1953. Ursula Scheuner is 13 years old, the Federal Republic of Germany only four. HUNGERJAHRE is a film about youth in the 50s, about a daughter and a mother and painful relationships of dependence, love and hate.

Ursula is the only child of a lower middle-class family that wants to somehow give their daughter a better life through education and social advancement. Ursula loves her parents; she would like to be daddy's cleverest daughter and mummy's prettiest boy. What does it mean, though, to grow up in a world where sexuality is only discussed in pub jokes.

The world of the adults is that of the 50s, the wave of plentiful food, housing, clothes, the restoration of the old traditional values. Ursula is confronted with the political indecision and private lies of her father, the iron will to consume, the huge backlog and anxious sexual antagonism of her mother. Her emotions, longings and curiosity meet with closed doors and paralysing prohibitions. Whatever Ursula does, her mother's anxiety follows her everywhere.

Her only option is to retreat into an inner world torn by conflicts. Her curiosity at first directed outwards is repulsed and she enters the dangerous path of separation between inner and outer life. When after her first experience with love in ignorance and anxious inhibition, nothing in her life changes, she knows that she can not go on living this way. The final shot is of a burning photo of Ursula, a symbolic image of the conclusion of a phase of life. The implicit statement of the film is the sad and harrowing realization: "If you want to create something, you must first destroy something - yourself."

"In sombre monochrome images of cramped flats and intimate relationships, Jutta Brückner recreates the fustiness of this period, breaking naturalist convention with spoken interventions where feelings are assimilated and distanced, where past reality, the ghost of her own 'I' is described in poetic language. Political reality as a sequence of historical events is occasionally blended in as documentary material in collage form, integrated into the scenes of the 'individual case' in realistic style as radio broadcasts or orchestrated as elliptic fragments of fictitious detail, when a protest against the ban on the KPD, the German Communist Party, is painted on a wall. These excursions are always extended into the individual reflexes of the characters: the window shutter is hastily closed; when the discussion of and reaction to a radio broadcast becomes too hefty, colleagues in the canteen stand up embarassed; when the child says something 'political', the teacher can only respond with evasive answers, that is, not at all...

With precision HUNGERJAHRE gives an authentic picture of the painful points of intersection between the external history of an epoch and the internal biography of an individual in a way seldom found in other films about this period. Just as the individual history cannot be simply subsumed by social history, like salt in soup, the directress demarcates the boundary in perception that isolates Ursula Scheuner from her own happiness in the prison of repression and inhibition in which the economic miracle' took place." (Gertrud Koch, Frankfurter Rundschau, 23 Oct. 1980)

Jutta Brückner's film contains autobiographic elements throughout; it is conceived as the subjective mourning for a daughter, as a kind of self-therapy, which continually relates back to collective experience and prompts individual as well as collective identification. In its statement and style, the film is also exemplary for the criteria and demands of the feminist film.

"Women's films are searches for clues, confirmations of identity as the topic of films and the process of filming, stories of hope for a life of self-awareness, in which we can think with feeling. Feminist aesthetic is an expression of the difficulty of seeing in a period in history where the eye, the most abstract of the senses, has pushed objectivity to the extreme, but it is also the expression of a process whose culmination is that which lends it impetus: feminist aesthetics. This much examined thing is not simply there because women are now standing behind the camera. Dysfunctional sensuality also reacts to a destructive reality in a distorted way. The films bear witness to what can only be borne in sickness and protest, not as the illustration of feminist insights, however iportant though these may be, not as the copy of a syntax, but as the synthesis of self-awareness in perceiving with the head, the guts, the knee. Perhaps in this process there are moments where visions surface of 'what might be possible if.' (Jutta Brückner, Frankfurter Rundschau, 26 August 1980)

Production Country

Germany (DE)

Production Period

1979/1980

Production Year

1980

color

b/w

Aspect Ratio

1:1,37

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Feature Film

Genre

Drama

Topic

Relationship / Family, Coming of Age, Sexuality, Psychology

Scope of Rights

Nichtexklusive nichtkommerzielle öffentliche Aufführung (nonexclusive, noncommercial public screening),Keine TV-Rechte (no TV rights)

Notes to the Licence

16mm Kopien in folgenden Filmarchiven:

Buenos Aires, Caracas, Hongkong, Istanbul, Lissabon, Madrid, Montréal, Moskau, New York, Rom, Santiago de Chile, Sao Paulo, Toronto

mit entsprechenden UT:
Deutsch, mit englischen Untertiteln, mit spanischen Untertiteln, mit französischen Untertiteln, mit italienischen Untertiteln, mit portugiesischen Untertiteln, mit hebräischen Untertiteln

Licence Period

30.06.2024

Available Media

DVD

Original Version

German (de)

DVD

Subtitles

English (en), French (fr)

• Hungerjahre
• Jutta Brückner
• Hungerjahre
• Jutta Brückner