Goodbye to yesterday

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Movie
Original title Goodbye to yesterday
Country of production BR Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1966
length 88 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Alexander Kluge
script Alexander Kluge after the chapter Anita G. from his book CVs
production Kairos-Film ( Alexander Kluge )
Independent Film ( Heinz Angermeyer )
camera Edgar Reitz
Thomas Mauch
cut Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
occupation

Farewell to Yesterday (working title Anita G. ) is a German film by the director, producer and author Alexander Kluge , who already provided the book. The work, which is regarded as a style-defining classic of New German Cinema , premiered on September 5, 1966 at the Venice International Film Festival ; the German premiere took place on September 14, 1966 in Mannheim .

plot

At the beginning the title of the text “We are not separated from yesterday by an abyss, but by the changed situation” and even after that the action is repeatedly interrupted by subtitles and comments that Kluge himself spoke. Anita G.'s efforts to gain a foothold in the Federal Republic of Germany are told not linearly, but rather like a kaleidoscope.

She was born to Jewish parents in Leipzig in 1937 and after their return grew up in the GDR, where she was a telephone operator. After fleeing to the West, she became a nurse, committed a theft and was given a suspended sentence. She escapes her probation officer and moves to another city.

As a representative of a record company, she becomes the lover of her boss, who, however, finally shows her for the sake of his wife. She also loses her next job as a housekeeper because of a theft that she is alleged to have. Her attempt to enroll at the university fails because of her deficient educational background, which a blasé university assistant mercilessly shows her.

As the lover of the Ministerialrat Pichota, her fate seems to be changing for the better, but when she becomes pregnant by him, he pays her 100 marks. Anita G., who is now wanted, moves from one place to another until she turns herself in to the police about the impending birth of her child. The child is being taken away from her and in the women's prison she faces her coming sentencing.

background

Farewell to yesterday is one of the first feature films that sought to meet the requirements of a contemporary film postulated in the Oberhausen Manifesto . Alexander Kluge had already taken up the fate of Anita G., which was based on an authentic judicial case from 1959, in his book CVs , which had been published four years earlier . In statements and interviews, he prepared the public for the film, in which his sister Alexandra (actually Karen) took the lead role. The shooting took place from December 1965 to February 1966 in Frankfurt am Main, Mainz, Wiesbaden and Munich.

The way the film is presented is unmistakably based on the principles of epic theater . The individual scenes are largely independent, what happened is presented in a cool, documentary, detailed form. Suddenly, the real Hessian attorney general Fritz Bauer appears as an acting person in the film and pleads for a humanization of the judiciary. Alfred Edel , then a real research assistant at the time, also played one of them in the film, which was the start of a film career for him.

The FSK approval was initially controversial. The film was only released for German cinemas after it had been awarded the “Silver Lion” at the Venice Film Festival.

Reviews

  • “The emotional sympathy of the viewer is not intended; rather, it should use the example of this fate to gain knowledge about the state of our society ”(Reclams Filmführer, 1973)
  • "Milestone in young German film" (Heyne Filmlexikon, 1996)
  • “Kluge tells her odyssey with the modern means of auteur films; An exciting mixture of facts and imagination, in which the viewer can think his own film. ”(Rating: 3 stars = very good) - Adolf Heinzlmeier and Berndt Schulz in: Lexicon“ Films on TV ” (extended new edition). Rasch and Röhring, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-89136-392-3 , p. 18
  • “Stations from the life of a girl who is not integrated into society are lined up like highlights. Unconventionally designed portrait, placed in front of fragments of our reality. A cool, distant film that tries to arouse associations and reflections in the viewer; the interesting, but hardly outstanding debut by Alexander Kluge. Recommended from 16. "( Protestant film observer )
  • The Wiesbaden Film Evaluation Board gave the film the rating of Particularly Valuable. The reasoning stated in the FBW report, among other things: “Alexander Kluge shows some courage to film experiments, which, however, did not get stuck in the mere experiment, but resulted in a closed cinematic figure at the first attempt. This inner coherence in the form of the cinematic design is shown above all by the fact that Anita G. gains more and more emphatically the unity of an entire image of man, an unmistakable person and a compelling fate as she follows the film. This unity in the central human figure of the film is all the more remarkable as Anita G. is shown in separate, floating episodes that are sometimes far apart. "

Awards

  • Venice International Film Festival 1966: Silver Lion, nomination for the Golden Lion
  • Italian Film Critics' Prize (FICC)
  • Spanish Film Critics' Award
  • Prize of the OCIC (international catholic film office)
  • Cinema Nuovo magazine award
  • Cinema 60 magazine award
  • Italian Film Club CIC Prize
  • Golden rose of the film authors for Alexandra Kluge as best actress
  • Federal Film Prize 1967: Filmband in Gold for best feature film, best director, best leading actress and best supporting actor (Günter Mack)
  • Film funding (100,000 DM) from the Young German Film Board of Trustees
  • Screenplay bonus (200,000 DM) from the Federal Ministry of the Interior

literature

Enno Patalas (Minutes): Alexander Kluge - Farewell to Yesterday, Minutes, Series Cinemathek - Selected Film Texts, Volume 17. Verlag Filmkritik, Frankfurt am Main, undated

Uwe Nettelbeck : The Confusions of Anita G . First published in: DIE ZEIT from September 2, 1966. Re-published in: No idea about art and little about business - film criticism 1963–1968 . Fundus books 196, Philo Fine Arts, Hamburg 2011. ISBN 978-3-86572-660-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Statement from Alexander Kluge according to film-dienst ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Evangelischer Presseverband München, Review No. 411/1966, p. 743