Near the start of Robert Kramer and John Douglas’s Milestones (1975), a panoramic docufiction that charts the unravelling aspirations of the New Left from Vermont to Utah, Ho Chi Minh’s poem ‘The Milestone’ appears in full as text on screen:
Neither high up nor far away,
On neither emperor’s nor king’s throne,
You’re only a little slab of stone
Standing on the edge of the highway.
People ask you for guidance;
You stop them from going astray,
And tell them the distance
O’er which they must journey.
The service you render is no small one;
People will remember what you’ve done.footnote1
The road, the distance, the journey, the memory, all evoked within a gesture of Third Worldist solidarity—immediately, the contours of Kramer’s universe come into view. Milestones, with its sprawling portrait of a radical milieu in retreat, was the last film that the director made as a resident of the United States. From there, it would be Portugal, Angola, France, Germany, Vietnam; bigger and smaller budgets, video and television and commissioned works; the attempt to respond to the emergence of an era of no alternative, image glut, endless war. It was by listening intently to the ‘rumble of the world’—to borrow the title of Serge Daney’s review of Route One /usa (1989), perhaps Kramer’s greatest film—that the director would make more than thirty films that take little heed of the documentary/fiction divide, some as short as four minutes and others over four hours long. Across them, no consistent stylistic signature emerges, yet they are united by something more fundamental: the encounter, cruel and beautiful, between subjectivity and history. As Kramer suggested, ‘all the movies put together make one movie of a life’.footnote2
Another milestone, this one a gravestone: Robert Kramer has now been dead for a quarter century, his life cut short by meningitis at the age of sixty in 1999. Although there has been little commemorative fanfare of the sort beloved by cinematheques—how often institutions rush to justify programming choices with anniversaries—the year has been a significant one in the filmmaker’s posthumous reception. In March, Parisian festival Cinéma du réel hosted the premiere of Looking for Robert (2024), an essayistic tribute by Kramer’s longtime collaborator Richard Copans. Addressing his departed friend in voiceover in the informal second-person, Copans pays homage to a life’s work through its material remains: film rushes, videotapes, Polaroids, musical scores, maps, photographic slides and printed-out emails provide a mixed-media archaeology of his singular path. This year also saw the French dvd label Re:Voir release two further volumes in its ongoing effort to make Kramer’s filmography officially available to home viewers, and in October and November, the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum partnered in a retrospective timed to coincide with the release of Starting Places: A Conversation with Robert Kramer by Bernard Eisenschitz.
All these initiatives share a crucial feature: none of them stems from the Anglophone world. There is likely no other American filmmaker whose domestic status is so diminished relative to the scale of their reputation abroad. The publication history of the interview that comprises the bulk of Starting Places is instructive in this regard. Conducted in English over three days in summer 1997 on the occasion of a retrospective at the Torino Film Festival, it was published in Italian (1997), French (2001), Portuguese (2000) and Spanish (2017), but is only now appearing in its original language—and under the editorship of a German film scholar, Volker Pantenburg, working with an Austrian imprint. Nor is this the only instance of Kramer’s English texts being published in translation first. In 2019, the same year as a retrospective at the Cinémathèque française, an indispensable anthology of the filmmaker’s writings edited by Cyril Béghin appeared as Notes de la forteresse (1967–1999). Three major essays from that book—‘Notes from Inside the Fortress’ (1989), ‘Going (Back) to Vietnam’ (1991), and ‘Snap Shots’ (1997)—appear in Starting Places alongside a useful bibliography and annotated filmography, but most of the texts Béghin assembled remain unpublished in the language in which they were written. ‘Facing this imbalance in Kramer’s reception’, Pantenburg ventures, ‘it would not be wrong to say that he remains to be discovered in his native country’.footnote3
A voluntary exile who identified as a ‘mid-Atlantic cinéaste’, Kramer was born in New York in 1939. His doctor father and housewife mother were first-generation American Jews; each had spent time in Berlin—he as a medical student, she at the Bauhaus. While an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, Kramer harboured literary ambitions, writing criticism and fiction for student publications as well as plays. After graduating, he received a scholarship to study history at Stanford but dropped out to devote himself to literature. A 1965 trip to Latin America with a press card from The New Republic proved transformative. Returning to the us upon the death of his father, he became involved with Students for a Democratic Society and began working as a community organizer in New Jersey. ‘As soon as I got to Newark I felt like I was back in Latin America again’, he told Eisenschitz, ‘This was a situation I knew very well. I understood the police as an occupying force. I understood the boundaries of this ghetto as the frontiers of a colony.’footnote4 It was this work that led to his first, somewhat accidental foray into cinema, an appearance in Norman Fruchter and Robert Machover’s Troublemakers (1966), a documentary charting three months in the life of the Newark Community Union Project. From there, he collaborated with them on his first film faln (1965), a 30-minute work of agitprop made in solidarity with Venezuela’s Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacíon Nacional. A voiceover written by Kramer accompanies an edit of footage supplied by the guerrillas, framing these images of struggle in relation to us intervention and investment. Already, Kramer recognized that here and elsewhere could not be separated.
Unlike many filmmakers of his generation, Kramer was no cinephile. In this period of his life, filmmaking was an embedded part of political action. Yet rather than producing blunt, ideological communiqués, he swiftly began to work in more creative and reflexive ways. In Starting Places, Eisenschitz notes that already with his debut feature In the Country (1966), Kramer is a filmmaker of ‘the ebb tide’, attending less to the rush of revolutionary sentiment than to disintegration and demobilization, whether real or feared.footnote5 The first words uttered in the film are a voiceover, matched to images of a city street taken from a moving car: ‘He looked at how little he’d been able to do so far. Tried to make contact with other groups. What have I tried? Nothing.’ Shot largely at Kramer’s family house, up for sale after his father’s death and his mother’s subsequent move to Israel, In the Country is a claustrophobic two-hander that follows a couple as they seek to negotiate the relationship between political activism and personal life. Informed by Kramer’s experience as a community organizer, it looks forward to concerns central to The Edge (1967) and Ice (1969). This unofficial trilogy of black-and-white films, shot by Machover in a manner indebted to documentary, depicts milieux where violent action against the government is under consideration, yet which are beset by paranoia and internal dispute. Utopian visions of insurrection, these are not. Elizabeth Hardwick described Ice, set in a near-future in which the us is at war with Mexico, as being ‘as cold as its title, a glassy radical vision, austere, masochistic, longing for the “inevitable”’; a film that depicts activism as ‘not a replacement of deadening alienation but simply an addition to it’.footnote6