When: Thursday, November 5th, 2026; 5 pm
Where: East Pyne 010
Anita G., a Jewish woman, has come to the West from “over there.” Suitcase in hand, she gets to know through encounters with strange people a strange country: the Federal Republic of Germany in 1966. The “farewell to yesterday” articulated by Alexander Kluge’s feature film debut is no simple matter historically—even if one believes in “Zero Hour,” the “grace of a late birth,” or the “economic miracle.” Anita G., hailing from the GDR, is the embodiment of this repressed past; consequently, she lacks the prerequisites for successfully integrating into West German society. It is not her fault that she rubs people the wrong way. Abschied von gestern (Yesterday Girl) illustrates the nature of these clashes through scenes that are almost documentary-like in style, yet which reveal a masterful eye for the grotesque moments of everyday life.
Screening with English subtitles. With an introduction by Michael W. Jennings, the Class of 1900 Professor of Modern Languages, professor of German, Princeton University. Followed by a post-film discussion led by Thomas Y. Levin, chair of Princeton University's Committee for Film Studies and associate professor in the Department of German, Princeton University.
When: Friday, November 6th, 2026; 11:30 am
Where: Princeton University Art Museum, room 134 (Tuttle Lecture Hall)
Sarah Morris employs architecture as a strategy for cinematic and theatrical potential in her films, placing her camera, the audience and herself in situations that evoke multiple meanings and scenarios. In Finite and Infinite Games, Morris shifts her lens to Alexander Kluge, the legendary German theorist and writer, who studied under Adorno and Horkheimer, a lawyer for the Frankfurt School, and paramount filmmaker of the New German Cinema; the recently finished but not yet utilized architecture of the controversial philharmonic space in Hamburg designed by the architects Herzog and de Meuron.
The short film of approximately 40 minutes was shot using the philharmonic space as the stage and context for a philosophical conflict. Morris uses the concert hall in juxtaposition with a reading and dialogue between the artist and Kluge about James Carse’s seminal text, “Finite and Infinite Games.” The work lays out two opposing worldviews of structuring activity, politics, thinking, navigation, strategy and creativity. Kluge speaks of his experience as the Frankfurt School’s lawyer, working for Fritz Lang as well as his position as a theorist, writer and filmmaker. Carse’s theory of games becomes a starting point and encompasses all sociological and individual moments, whether it is aesthetic or otherwise. The juxtaposition between the freedom of infinite possibilities versus the rule-based operation of finite game playing are at the center of a dichotomy succinctly laid out by Kluge and Morris.
With an introduction by the artist, Sarah Morris.