YESTERDAY GIRL (ABSCHIED VON GESTERN)
& PART-TIME WORK OF A DOMESTIC SLAVE (GELEGENHEITSARBEIT EINER SKLAVIN)

These two films by Alexander Kluge both star his sister Alexandra Kluge in the leading role. YESTERDAY GIRL (1966) is about Anita G., a young East German woman who travels to West Germany in search of a better life. Encountering troubles with the law, she is ultimately unable to deal either with a Communist regime or a free-market economy. In PART-TIME WORK OF A DOMESTIC SLAVE (1973), Roswitha Bronski is a married mother of three at the center of the protest movement. She finds her plans for social change are easier to realize outside family life.

The 2-disc DVD also offers five short films by Alexander Kluge related to the two feature films.

“Though often acknowledged as one of the most important avant-gardists of his generation in Europe, Alexander Kluge does not think of himself as such. He considers himself a partisan of an “arriere-garde” whose project is not to push into new aesthetic territory or be the vanguard of a new kind of film art, but to “bring everything forward”—to bring forward all the lost utopian aspirations of past political and aesthetic projects, all the wishes and hopes that history has left unrealized. His is a project of redeeming past failures. This might seem an odd claim by Kluge, who was a pioneer of the German New Wave as it emerged in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, and a signatory and moving force behind the famous OBERHAUSEN MANIFESTO of 1962 which declared “The old film is dead.” But like his intellectual precursor Walter Benjamin, Kluge has always thought any project for authentic renewal must consciously detour through the past in order to avoid creating what another of his great intellectual mentors, Bertolt Brecht, called the “bad new”— essentially the recreation of existing oppressive social relations and tired aesthetic forms in the guise of a glossy, marketable and illusory “New.” For Brecht, Fascism was the exemplary “bad new”; for Kluge, the “bad new” consisted of the dreary products of the “culture industry” and the tedious social conditions prevailing in Germany—about which he once said that they were bad enough that no one was really happy, but not bad enough to make anyone do anything about them.”

– Christopher Pavsek, Cinema Scope

  Contents

Format: DVD-PAL / Region 0
(No Regional Code)

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YESTERDAY GIRL (ABSCHIED VON GESTERN)
(West Germany, 1966)

Director, writer: Alexander Kluge (based on his story "Anita G.")
Cast: Alexandra Kluge, Günter Mack, Eva Maria Meineke, Hans Korte, Ursula Dirichs & Alfred Edel

• 84 minutes
• 35mm   
• B&W
• Sound

     _________________________________________

PART-TIME WORK OF A DOMESTIC SLAVE (GELEGENHEITSARBEIT EINER SKLAVIN)
(West Germany, 1973)

Director, writer: Alexander Kluge
Cinematography: Thomas Mauch
Editor: Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
Cast: Alexandra Kluge, Bion Steinborn, Sylvia Gartmann, Traugott Buhre, Ursula Dirichs & Alfred Edel
Production Company: OKO-Film K Dirkaarel

• 87 minutes
• 35mm
• B&W
• Sound

     _________________________________________

Bonus Material

BRUTALITY IN STONE (BRUTALITÄT IN STEIN)
(West Germany, 1961)

Director, writer: Alexander Kluge
Cinematography: Wolf Wirth
Music: Hans Posegga
Editor: Bessy Lemmer

• 11 minutes
• 35mm
• B&W
• Sound

◊

AN EXPERIMENT IN LOVE (EIN LIEBESVERSUCH)
(Germany, 1998)

Director, writer: Alexander Kluge

• 13 minutes
• Video
• Color
• Sound

◊

TEACHERS (LEHRER IM WANDEL)
(West Germany, 1963)

Director, writer: Alexander Kluge
Cinematography: Alfred Tichawsky
Editor: Uschi Werthner
Cast: Peter Berling

• 11 minutes
• B&W
• Sound

◊

AN VERTOV
(Germany, 1998)

Director: Alexander Kluge

• 1 minute
• DV
• Color
• Sound

◊

SAM REMEMBERS PAPA KONG
(Germany, 2006)

Director: Alexander Kluge

• 1 minute
• DV
• Color
• Sound

◊

• News From the 1966 Venice Film Festival (1966, 1 minute)

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Total Running Time: 04:04:00 (2 Discs)

Language: German & English. German, English, Italian and French subtitles.

Booklet Text: Werner Schroeter (German & English), Wolfram Schütte (German & English) & Carole Bouquet (French)

Published By: Edition Filmmuseum

Institutional Price: $300 (plus shipping)

To order call: 212.280.8654 or click here for information on ordering by fax, e-mail or post.