A account of Anita G., an attractive, doe-eyed 22-year-old Jewish woman from the GDR who struggles to navigate the system and mores of an inhospitable West Germany. Anita can't keep a job or a fixed address and finds herself relying on the advances of patronizing men who are oblivious to Anita's truer needs and desires. Anita's inability to reinvent herself corroborates Kluge's dense thesis, which asserts the impossibility of divorcing the past from the present while paradoxically presenting reality as an inherent construct. Filled with Godardian flourishes, Yesterday Girl is a wild, unpredictable ride offering a cornucopia of experimental cinematic language; the chaptered and occasionally narrated vignettes are interspersed with a melange of jump cuts, stop motion, archival footage, and sped-up Chaplinesque scenes played for laughs.
| Directed by | Alexander Kluge |
| Written by | Alexander Kluge |