It wouldn’t be a stretch to call Alexander Kluge the “father” of New German Cinema. Kluge was an original signatory of the Oberhausen Manifesto and it was his early films (along with those of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet) that first brought international attention and prestige to a new generation of German filmmakers. Kluge’s early works investigate German national identity and the legacy of fascism while, in terms of form, rejecting tradition de qualité.
The aesthetic overlap between the early years of New German Cinema and the French New Wave is not accidental. Kluge had seen the films of Rivette and Godard and embraced their pop sensibilities and unabashed modernism. However, the political and social aims of these two movements differ drastically. The French New Wave was an act of rebellion and an assertion that, as Godard would say, “everything is cinema” whilst New German Cinema attempts to assert a new national cinematic identity that must simultaneously acknowledge the atrocities of WWII. It’s really a matter of revisionism versus invention in this context.
Alexander Kluge’s first feature film Abschied von gestern (1966) is an elaboration upon a short story that Kluge wrote some six years earlier that, as a film, barrows its structure and use of inter-titles from Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962). Kluge cast his sister Alexandra as the lead character Anita G. and set the film in the FRG of 1959. Anita is Jewish and an immigrant from the GDR whose inability to find work spurs her into a life of crime.
For Kluge, West Germany is a capitalist state glued together by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. The bureaucratic systems of the state make up institutions so exclusive that Anita G. can never truly integrate herself into society. At her trial at the start of the film the judge dismisses Anita’s claims to being able to recall the terror of being Jewish in Nazi Germany. Likewise Anita’s incomplete A-levels render her all but unemployable. She is systematically devalued and delegitimized.
While in bed with a lover the national anthem of the FRG comes on the radio and Anita hums along. As this patriotic music cue dominates the soundtrack Kluge cuts to images of Jewish headstones in a cemetery. Kluge makes it all too plain that Germany’s response to the holocaust is one of “out of sight, out of mind”. It isn’t a matter of outright denial, just one of convenient ignorance; and it’s people like Anita G. who must pay for that ignorance.
Anita’s itinerant existence is a byproduct of her sociological circumstance. She shuffles through menial jobs and lovers at a rapid pace. The men in her life all endeavor to “educate” her in their respective fields but to no avail. Anita can no easier transform herself into a mod West German girl than she can stop being Jewish. Kluge’s point of emphasizing Anita’s “education” in this way only stresses further the degree to which she is an outsider and just how far into the popular culture that this philosophy of exclusivity extends.
One of the greatest achievements in Abschied von gestern is the affectivity of the direct-address sequences. Usually men in a prolonged dialogue with Anita will begin to soliloquize and then Kluge cuts to a direct-address shot. This roots the audience in Anita’s perspective beautifully. Similarly, Kluge will cut to a sustained close-up of Anita where she doesn’t speak at all. The camera and the spectator’s gaze just takes in Alexandra Kluge’s large dark eyes with their expression of bewildered horror.
Abschied von gestern ends with Anita surrendering herself to the police. Back in jail for committing the same kinds of petty crimes as before, Anita has a bed of her own and enough food to eat. The cost of her self-sustainability is her freedom. Allegorically speaking this scenario could represent both the woman’s experience and the general immigrant’s experience in Germany at the time. For Alexander Kluge it is simply an undeniable truth about our world and its ultimate tragedy.
