Rating of
3.5/4
A Farewell to Yesterday's Cinema
cacb3995 - wrote on 03/24/18
Based on a short story written by Kluge himself, the film tells the story of Anita (Alexandra Kluge, the director’s sister), a young woman from East Germany, who migrates to West Germany and struggles to find ends meet. She often runs into trouble with the law, jumps from one job to another, tries to find an education and falls in love more than a few times. Without a concrete dramatic thread to follow other than Anita’s survival efforts, the film defies conventional narrative and even aesthetics, well establishing Kluge’s vision to what a new german cinema should look like.
One of the most interesting aspects of the film is how, as I said, it defies traditional film aesthetics. It employs elliptical and experimental editing, resulting in a pace that at times might look a bit woeful or even off, but all this ultimately results in giving the film’s its auratic sense of uniqueness. More than once we get the feeling of a disociation between image and sound, as if this two categories could perfectly well exist independently from one another (what we don’ usually get to see in regular cinema) and each one gets to tell its own story. The camera is usually hand-held and it offers a distant look at its protagonist’s life, instead of getting close in an effort to convey (superficial) pathos. There are some tracking shots of Anita only walking that tend to go a little too overlong, what ultimately leads to irritation and bafflement by part of the viewer, but I believe this was Kluge’s intention all along: a rejection to the notion that everything in a movie should be meaningful and lead to something else. Wheather he succeeds or not is up for debate, but there is no denying the man’s ambition.
Full review at: https://breakingthefourthwallsite.wordpress.com/2018/03/24/yesterday-girl-a-farewell-to-yesterdays-cinema/
