Abschied von gestern - (Anita G.)

"What separates us from yesterday is not a chasm, but a changed situation." Kluge's work, starting from his first short film Brutality in Stone, displayed a critical reflection on Germany's Nazi past and, as a student of the author of "Dialectic of Enlightenment," he consistently advocated for critical vigilance against the consequences of Western modernity throughout his career. The story of uprooted Anita combines both motifs, but fortunately, the film does not try to be another Foucault or Adorno - it borrows not only formal methods from the French New Wave but also a fresh youthful perspective, without excluding precise diagnosis. The diagnosis exposed by modern society on the main protagonist is clear - the marginalization of the unassimilable individual, condemned to futile attempts to fit into a world where they have no place (except in prison). The road-movie approach allows Kluge to employ his favorite fragmentary narrative structure, with each collision between the main character and the institutions of modern society serving as a case study, demonstrating the uprootedness of a person without the abilities and means to merge with a society that authoritatively distributes resources (Anita as an unsuccessful saleswoman), knowledge (an unsuccessful student), correction and moral uplift (reckless former inmate), love (a woman in the arms of a man, whether as a mistress or a wife). Nazism did not end, but in the changed situation, it survived and dissolved into a society that had been a Nazi society long before the rise and fall of the Third Reich. (15.10.2015)