“A practicing lawyer and author before teaching film, Alexander Kluge based this, his first feature film, on his own story, ‘Attendance List for a Funeral,' and cast his own sister Alexandra Kluge in the lead role. She plays Anita G., a Jewish refugee from East Germany. After a jail sentence for shoplifting, she drifts into occasional prostitution, relationships, possibilities of employment, harassed and frustrated by officialdom and the empty promises of social workers.
“Two themes of Kluge's later work are evident: looking at things from the perspective of a woman as outsider (exemplified in Occasional Work of a Female Slave (1971), another collaboration with his sister), and using recent German history as a source for both fantasy and confusion (most evident in his last film The Patriot (1980)).
“The critical acclaim bestowed upon this debut (it won six prizes at the 1966 Venice Film Festival) and on Schlöndorff's first feature, Young Torless, in the same year, helped establish New German Cinema internationally, as Peter Cowie's comments demonstrate: ‘Anita G. is the face of the Sixties, typical of a generation that has grown up since the war, hovering on the edge of delinquency and frustrated by the pettiness of bourgeois society.... There is one improvised scene, when a dog-training demonstration drifts into farce in the rain, that justifies Anita's distrust of order, and belongs unmistakably to the anti-heroics of Godard, Skolimowski, Pasolini and Bertolucci.'” --Richard Kwietniowski