Yesterday Girl
Alexander Kluge
1966
84 Minutes
Date
June 6–July 17, 2024
A young girl, Anita G., steals a sweater to keep warm. She serves her sentence, then makes several attempts to start a new life. But after a zigzag escape movement, she ends up in prison again.
Her parents—Jewish—were picked up one morning by the Third Reich. She is from the East of Germany, at the time a separate socialist state. Now she’s freezing her way through the West. Three kinds of Germany.
With Alexandra Kluge as Anita G.
“Kluge—I have just seen the film for the second time because the first impression turned out to be rebellious—does nothing other than communicate a real case in a very real way, so real that it becomes more diverse and without the assumption that the case was exemplary, suddenly exemplary. The story of this young woman is not entirely made up… the first time I watched it, I didn’t understand many steps, accepted them, but didn’t notice them: a university secretary tells the girl that she doesn’t need anything other than the school leaving certificate to enroll, cut, that Girl can’t pay for the hotel room and sneaks out as a carouser. In order to study (the refugee from the East still has to learn this), you not only need a certificate, but also money… even the poetry that this hard film has probably comes from the editing… It’s shocking what the film can do.” —Max Frisch, Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 18, 1966