Film Screening
Yesterday Girl

70 Years of German Films

Wed, 12/18/2024
7:00 PM ByTowne Cinema

The anniversary film series shows some of the most successful German films of the last seven decades.

Yesterday girl

Abschied von Gestern

Director: Alexander Kluge
Year: 1965/66
Runtime: 88 min
Screenplay: Alexander Kluge
Cinematography: Edgar Reitz
Editor: Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
Cast: Alexandra Kluge, Günter Mack, Eva Maria Meineke

Festivals and Awards
Venice Film Festival 1966 (Golden Lion)

“We declare that our ambition is to create the new German feature film.
This new cinema needs new forms of freedom: from the conventions and habits of the established industry, from intervention by commercial partners, and finally freedom from the tutelage of other vested interests”, so reads the legendary Oberhausen Manifesto signed by 27 young and not so young German filmmakers advocating a new aesthetic, new content and a new economy for German cinema in 1962. The group’s militant motto: “The old film is dead. We believe in the new. “

One of the most important authors and advocates of this manifesto was the filmmaker and lawyer Alexander Kluge, whose films from the outset more than lived up to his self-imposed ambitions. His first full-length feature film YESTERDAY GIRL made three years after the manifesto, then made it clear what to expect from the self-proclaimed Young German Film.

Kluge recounts the story of the barely 30-year-old Jewish woman Anita G. (played by Alexandra Kluge, the director’s sister), who has fled from Leipzig to West Germany during the years of the particularly chilly Cold War and has been trying in vain to gain a foothold. Instead, she encounters the personified ruthlessness of the justice system and the world of business and can only keep her head above water through private anarchism before finally giving up and seeking freedom in prison.

The life as a drifter and his protagonist’s instability through no fault of her own give Kluge the opportunity to experiment with form and content while at the same time remaining very close to his subject matter. The unusual and very agile camera of this black-and-white film was operated by Thomas Mauch and Kluge’s kindred spirit Edgar Reitz, a co-signatory of the Oberhausen Manifesto and 20 years later the creator of the groundbreaking HEIMAT trilogy.

This film saw Alexander Kluge taking the liberties he had demanded of himself and making a film that attracted worldwide attention for the cinema “Made in Germany”. YESTERDAY’S GIRL won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and turned the festival on the Lido into a real hotspot for German cinema in subsequent years.