Born 1941, Jutta Brückner studied political science, philosophy and history (Ph.D.). She has had no formal training in film, and also scripts for Völker Schlöndorff and Ula Stöckl.

As to a particular relation between feminism and film form: woman's historical and cultural oppression does not just reveal itself not only in our familiar exclusion from the forms of exchange in a public sphere erected by men. Also it especially reveals itself in the deformation, renunciation and incapacitation of our physical integrity and perception. This has most clearly affected sexuality, but also looking. Through the look, a person establishes space relations, and without space there is no time. Space-time-looking mean something else to women than to men. In film especially, these three elements of perception come together. Moreover, film allows us women to represent our disrupted physical integrity, whereas literature restricts physical presence to the imagination. In filmic representation, a vision of what undisrupted physical integrity might be emerges. And that vision presents itself not only to our imagination but also to our looking. Film for me offers the sole medium in which we can explore our collective labor of mourning for the cultural paralyzing of our bodies, our eyes, and our space-time relations. The goal: recuperating the means to reconstruct symbolically. This throws into question filming's own premises. Film becomes filming’s content, not as the burden or joy of a tradition, within which you are confined to sitting for hours in movie theatres. It’s not as "real life," the way the French New Wave formulated it. I mean recuperating our capacity to look.
This has nothing to do with a specific style. There is no one feminist style. Nor can stylistic "innovations" be introduced like exotic commodities or clothes fashions. I am talking about new questions and new points of departure.

My films are all autobiographical. Autobiographical motivations counter the false generalizations into which we have been molded for years. These generalizations are false for men too; they simply don't realize it. We women tend to notice them more because our individuality simply cannot be contained within these generalizations. We must not just constitute images out of the small banalities of daily life. To do only that is false realism. Rather, we must find new forms to narrate private life, to recognize collective gestures in the most banal ones. For example, the way a wife hands her husband a cup of tea in the morning. To what extent does this collective gesture destroy me because it has nothing to do with me and makes me into a trained dog? I am trying to disrupt the habitual ways in which people see.

HUNGERJAHRE (YEARS OF HUNGER)
1979, 100 min, 35mm, b/w, dist: Basis Film (Berlin)
Primé à Sceaux 1980, Festival du Film de Femmes (Bruxelles) 1981

Set in the sexually and politically restrictive fifties, the film reconstructs the memories of an adolescent girl who refuses to become a woman. She finds herself so alienated from her body and her emotions that she finally attempts suicide.

"J'ai voulu montrer comment une jeune fille - ce qui était notre cas à toutes dans les années cinquante - arrivait déjà déformée au seuil de l'existence adulte, du fait d'un certain type d'éducation qui vous détruit et qui peut avoir une issue mortelle."

Hungerjahre is a film about being young in the 1950s.Thirteen-year-old Ursula is the only child of lower-middleclass parents who want to give their daughter a better life through social advancement. The world of the adults is that of the German postwar boom (Wirtschaftswunder): plentiful food, housing, clothes, and the restoration of traditional values. Ursula is confronted with the political lies of her materialist father and the sexual antagonism of her mother. Whatever Ursula does, her mother’s anxiety follows her everywhere, stifling her daughter’s hunger for life every step of the way. Ursula begins a dangerous separation between her inner and outer lives.

HITLER CANTATA
D 2005, 114 min, ov-vo D, st-ond E

Aspiring young composer Ursula Scheuner (Lena Lauzemis) has two passions in her life: Hitler and music. She is obsessed with the Führer and hopes to become a famous composer.

After being rejected by the music conservatory, she uses her connection with Gottlieb Just (Arnd Klawitter), a high ranking SS colonel and her fiancé, to get an assistant position to famous composer Hanns Broch (Hilmar Thate). Broch is secretly opposed to the Nazi regime and struggles with the moral dilemma of having to compose a cantata for Hitler´s 50th birthday.

At a remote Finnish estate, Hanns and Ursula are thrown together while working on the composition. They fight not only about their opposing ideologies, but also against the romantic feelings that have evolved between them and threaten to take over their lives.

"This film is about the power of music. It demonstrates how music can become a catalyst to a higher awareness of your surroundings and how it can make you examine your own personal convictions!"

"Music can really have a deep impact on your life. It can question everything that you have ever believed in and that´s exactly what Jutta Brueckner is howing in this film."

"Hitler sells. But Jutta Brueckner does not merely exploit the thrill of the evil. I have rarely seen a story told in such a complex way as Jutta Brueckner does in her latest film."

"HITLER CANTATA shows how much the fascist regime uses the power of eroticism and deduction. Brueckner gives an emotional and intellectual insight into the psychic dimension of totalitarism. This film is important."

"Jutta Brueckner's HITLER CANTATA makes us understand the hysteria surrounding Hitler. Her analysis of the social infantilism is ironic, but not without compassion and her glimpse on those, who fell for the dictator, is laconic, without sentimentality."