Film Screening
Yesterday Girl

Alexander Kluge's classic film follows a young woman who flees the GDR to West Germany

Thu, 06/13/2024
6:00 PM Goethe-Institut Chicago

Dir. Alexander Kluge
Germany, 1962
DVD, 88 min

In 1962, the legendary Oberhausen Manifesto was signed by 27 German filmmakers advocating a new aesthetic, new content, and a new economy for German cinema. 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. Yesterday Girl was his first full-length feature film, made three years after the manifesto, and it made 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 the GDR to West Germany in search of a better life. With no home or job, she is caught stealing and sent to prison. After her release her probation officer tries to help her, but she has trouble adjusting to life in a new society and becomes a drifter. When she falls in love with a married civil servant, she finally begins to feel a sense of security, until she is recognized by a woman she betrayed.

This film saw Alexander Kluge taking the liberties he had demanded of himself and making a film that attracted worldwide attention for German cinema. Yesterday's Girl won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and turned the festival on the Lido into a hotspot for German cinema in subsequent years.