Why Yesterday Girl is an obscure film

Who knew that in the mid-60s there was a German New Wave as well? The wave petered out, I guess, before rolling into shore. One of the few examples, or one of the few I've ever heard of, is the now-obscure "Yesterday Girl," directed by Alexander Kluge, and starring his sister Alexandra. All of the techniques that Truffaut and Godard, et al., explored from the mid-50s on show up here - the break with conventional narrative, the interpolated dream or fantasy sequences, the odd moments of addressing the camera, the quick jump cuts in space and time, the incredibly long langourous post-coital discussions about art and life, the "text cards," the bandit on the run, the glamorous low-lifer, the long panning shots in open space - but when seen through a German lens, surprise!, they're not as funny and full of verve, but more heavy-handed and portentous. Still, even after 40 years, Yesterday Girl is fresh in many ways, it still has the fresh-air spirit of young filmmakers in love with the medium and willing to try any technique to tell their story. And by the end you do fell that you get to know this sad character, Anita G., an E German struggling to get a footing in the West but with no chance. The trenchant critique of the German justice system and university system is still powerful (and funny) today. I wonder what happened to Kluge (or the Kluges) - he never emerged as a recognizable cultural figure, as so many of his European contemporaries did. Perhaps he was just a bit too derivative. Yesterday Girl is a good film that would be much more widely seen and appreciated if the director has developed an entire auteur corpus.