With the headline “Papas Kino ist tot!” (dad’s cinema, as they called the old guard in the industry, is dead) a group of young german filmmakers declared a new beginning of west german cinema at the 8th Oberhausen Short Film Festival in 1962. This would be known as the “Oberhausen Manifesto”. Much like their colleagues in France, England and Czekoslovakia, this new generation of filmmakers became tired of the old and reigning conventions of their country’s film industry, and decided that it was time for a change. This was the birth of the so called New German Cinema (Neues Deutsche Kino), a movement that would define the country’s film history from that point on. To this generation belong directors such as Wener Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Völker Schlöndorff. Another great director, who was actually one of the first to proclaim the movement and was always at the forefront of this revolution, but sadly hasn’t received as much attention in the years and decades following the movement, was Alexander Kluge. “Yesterday Girl: Anita G.” (Abschied von Gestern) was his first feature film, and it embodies all the early ideas that proclaimed the death of dad’s cinema.

Based on a short story written by Kluge himself, the film tells the story of Anita (Alexandra Kluge, the director’s sister), a young woman from East Germany, who migrates to West Germany and struggles to find ends meet. She often runs into trouble with the law, jumps from one job to another, tries to find an education and falls in love more than a few times. Without a concrete dramatic thread to follow other than Anita’s efforts for survival, the film defies conventional narrative and even aesthetics, well establishing Kluge’s vision to what a new german cinema should look like.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film is how, as I said, it defies traditional film aesthetics. It employs elliptical and experimental editing, resulting in a pace that at times might look a bit woeful or even off, but all this ultimately results in giving the film’s its auratic sense of uniqueness. More than once we get the feeling of a disociation between image and sound, as if this two categories could perfectly well exist independently from one another (what we don’ usually get to see in regular cinema) and each one gets to tell its own story. The camera is usually hand-held and it offers a distant look at its protagonist’s life, instead of getting too close in an effort to convey (superficial) pathos. There are some tracking shots of Anita just walking that tend to go a little too overlong, what ultimately leads to irritation and bafflement by part of the viewer, but I believe this was Kluge’s intention all along: a rejection to the notion that everything in a movie should be meaningful and lead to something else. Wheather he succeeds or not is up for debate, but there is no denying the man’s ambition.

Thematically, this movie falls in line with many modern theories and twentieth century philosophies. Kluge was a personal friend from and influenced by Theodor Adorno and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. In the simplest terms, the Frankfurt School argues that a theory is critical when it acts as a “liberatory influence” that seeks to “emancipate mankind from institutional slavery” (vgl. Critical Theory, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). In “Yesterday Girl” we get the representation of this in Anita herself: her struggle with a society that supposedly works because of the principle of democracy, and yet it buries her systematically due to her status as a nobody. In its core, the film thematizes the conflict between individuum and society, a central topic in modernist philosophy. It isn’t a stretch to argue that Kluge, who’s also a reknown author of philosophical and academic writings, perfectly encapsulates this dichotomy in the less than 90 minutes he needs to tell Anita’s story.

If the Oberhausen Manifesto represents the ideological beginning of the period known as the New German Cinema, Alexander Kluge’s “Yesterday Girl” represents the actual cinematic start of the movement (much like Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” represents the cinematic start of the French New Wave in 1959, even if its ideological inception can be found much earlier in the writings of the critics of Le Cahiers du Cinema.) Beyond a desire for innovation and the rejection of conventional techniques and storytelling, we can see that Kluge also had some very concrete ideas regarding the substance of what a new cinema should be. He remains as one of the most experimental filmmakers of the lot, and yet he is one of the most visionary. I would also like to shortly address Alexandra Kluge’s central performance, powerfully subdued and yet ultimately so real. The Kluge siblings do present a great collaboration. So summing up, “Yesterday Girl: Anita G.” is the perfect example of what the Oberhausen group wanted to achieve and what the New German Cinema was all about (even if it may not be its best movie): a break with tradition, experimentation on the narrative and aesthetic front, and a thematic resonance that reflects many ideas of philosphical modernism.

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