Film Spaces, Memory Traces: The Family House in Recha Jungman’s Etwas tut weh (1979)

Abstract

In 2016 Recha Jungmann’s film Etwas tut weh (Something Hurts, 1976) was rediscovered and restored. Jungmann, alongside with Ula Stöckl, was one of the few women graduates of the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, where Edgar Reitz and Alexander Kluge taught. In Etwas tut weh she revisits her family’s former estate which is now a ruin, abandoned and vandalized. This article explores how memory work and camera work unite to create spaces in which her family finds a (new) aesthetic home, and in which the film as a form of remembrance creates solidarity with the audience in the cinema -- a space that can give a home to films and spectators alike.