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Jutta Brückner's autobiographical essay traces her own development from early attempts to write the text of her "female subjectivity" in the language of prose to her discovery of how much more suited the medium of film was for establishing an immediate relationship to her material. Arguing that autobiography is a desire, not an accomplishment, she locates the beginning of that desire in the mother, whose images have to be reconstructed in order to free the self. The dialectic of history and biography, loss of language and loss of body, is played out in the struggle between mother and daughter in the films of the body-less author. Losses that cannot be recovered via the written word can be shown in the images of film. In trying to locate the place that women can actually occupy in the cultural scripting of history and identity, Brückner traces two lines of autobiographic approach: a semiotic one in which the daughter separates from the body of the mother and a symbolic one that concentrates on the language and culture defining the autobiographical line of the father. (PH)

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