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Abschied von gestern - (Anita G.) (1966)
Yesterday Girl: An Expressionistic View on Breaking Free
In the 1966 movie Yesterday Girl, Anita G. Is depicted as a young woman trying to start a new life in West Germany. She is playful and childlike in her actions and movements, and she ignores any consequences her decisions entail. Viewers consistently see this throughout the film: Anita moves from place to place without paying her bills, she has fleeting relationships with married men, and she doesn't seem to take any lines of work very seriously. From one moment to the next, Anita G. Has packed her bags and left the connections she has made, only to start again somewhere else and make the same mistakes. Anita's character speaks to the larger idea of growing up, and the confusion that comes with it. She seems almost stuck in time, with her rash incompliance with the law and people's expectations eventually landing her in jail. However, Anita also represents courage, individuality, and rebellion in reaction to the workings of German society in the 1960s. Enveloped in the divide between East and West Germany, the German people fell into a hole of sexual oppression and strict familial ideals. Without room to breathe, German youth especially felt a lack of freedom in their day-to-day lives. The strong urge to be employed was also very apparent during this time: viewers see this routinely as Anita jumps from one job to the next, urged by the people around her to take anything that pays. Anita's personal experience of West Germany, and her refusal to become part of the masses reflects on the overall sentiment of German youth after the construction of the Berlin Wall: compliance with the current societal norms was to be pushed away, in favor of being their individual selves and feeling alive.
Stepping into the history of cinema, Yesterday Girl was part of the avant-garde cinematographic movement of the 1960s. Films had ceased to be purely a form of entertainment, with typical storylines and conventional character types pushed aside for abstract modes of expression. Everything from the camera to sound started to be used to express metaphorical ideas and concepts, and directors realized their expanding freedom in constructing their films. This rejection of traditional cinema practices was vocally expressed in 1960s Germany with the Oberhausen Manifesto, which declared that "the future of the German film lies in the hands of those who have proven that they speak a new film language". This new language mentioned allowed experimentation within the young directing community, which is exactly what film director Alexander Kluge does with Yesterday Girl. From the long close-ups of Anita G., to the sudden montages of dream-like scenarios (such as Anita running away from policemen in a field), the viewer is left with a cinematic experience that allows them to draw their own conclusions of the characters and situations within the plot. Nothing is shown up-front: in this new form of cinema, the director constructs scenes that connects with a feeling or idea. In this film's case, viewers connect with Anita G.'s feelings of boredom and recklessness in the reaction to the world around her.
Personally, The disjointed montages and visceral close-ups in Yesterday Girl spoke to my feelings of being a young woman in today's world. The ongoing pressure from society to be successful and the economic pressures that accompany it has the current youth lost and confused at the turning point in their life. The visual choices Kluge makes in his film draws parallels with this concept, and the sudden desire to "break free" took hold of me throughout Anita G.'s story, even if her life ends up falling apart. These sentiments and ideas that I had only proves that Kluge successfully produced an avant-garde film: the viewer has to reach within themselves to derive meaning from the film they are watching.