The Edge (Robert Kramer, 1968).
“My films are, in the beginning, a sort of large area, like a geography,” Robert Kramer told critic Bernard Eisenschitz in 1997, “…and I don’t know where I’m going.”1 Anyone mildly familiar with the American maverick’s oeuvre will recognize the feeling: his own putative disorientation behind the camera sounds like the kind you experience while watching his works unfurl on the screen. Between 1965 and 1999, when he suddenly died of complications from meningitis, Kramer made more than 40 films, some as short as four minutes and others spanning four hours. He shot on Super 8, 16mm, 35mm, and a whole variety of video formats. He started out chronicling the rise of the New Left in his native US and then trained his camera on more far-flung places: Portugal, France, Vietnam. And like their solitary, deracinated protagonists, all of his films exist in a state of flux. I do not mean this in any abstract way. I mean that—beyond doubling as travelogues, as many of them do—his works often seem to unfold in real time: you enter them not knowing where you are, much less where you’re headed.
He was surer of the journey than the destination, which is perhaps why he liked to describe his filmmaking with the French term trajet; it captured the human scale of movement much more fluidly than its English counterpart, trajectory. As he told Eisenschitz, he wanted to shoot “in such a way that you would believe that what was happening was happening for the first time before your eyes,”2 and his improvisational approach allowed his projects to embrace the unexpected. Which is why venturing into them can sometimes feel like watching something undergo a phase change, like a liquid coagulating. “He invents cinema with each new shot,” Serge Daney once wrote of Kramer, the kind of praise that’s only liable to sound hyperbolic if you’ve never come across any of his films.
That wouldn’t be surprising. In October, the Viennale organized a superb retrospective of the filmmaker’s oeuvre, accompanied by a book—Starting Places: A Conversation with Robert Kramer—featuring some illuminating conversations with Eisenschitz and others. But similar efforts have been all too rare; only a fraction of Kramer’s output is presently available to the public on home video, which is a shame, because few directors can boast a body of work as heterogeneous as his.
Top: In the Country (Robert Kramer, 1967). Bottom: Ice (Robert Kramer, 1970).
Kramer happened into filmmaking almost serendipitously, while toiling as a community organizer in Newark, and for a while his cinema seemed indissolubly bound to political action. Shortly after his debut feature, In the Country (1967), he became a founding member of Newsreel, a filmmakers’ collective designed, per the initial statement he cowrote in 1967, “to make ourselves and our work relevant to others involved in the struggle for change here and abroad.” But while his earliest projects were all forged in the militant fervor of that political milieu, romantic tributes to the American Left they most certainly are not.
As affectionate as they might occasionally be toward “the Movement”—an umbrella term for the many leftist agitators seeking to transform US society in the 1960s—Kramer’s first three features are just as interested in investigating its shortcomings. Not for nothing does In the Country center on a former radical who’s already dropped out of the Movement and now fritters his time away in a self-imposed exile while kvetching about his alienation like an Antonioni character. With The Edge (1968) and Ice (1970), the focus shifts to the collective, but the overall tone is no less disillusioned. In the first, a gaggle of largely white urban guerrillas debate the pros and cons of violent action before finally disintegrating after a failed plot to assassinate the President. In the latter—an even more fragmentary piece of political speculative fiction—a militant cell in New York City tries to topple an openly fascistic government and eventually collapses under the weight of internal feuds, police brutality, and the difficulties of rallying everyday people behind their cause.
All three films traffic in the same dichotomies that would haunt Kramer’s entire filmography: an irreconcilable tension between the group and the individual, between theory and praxis, between “revolutionary” and family life. There are no heroes here, no “perfect” revolutionaries—only a smattering of outcasts anxiously questioning their commitment to armed struggle, to the Movement, and to each other. The groups’ revolutionary fervor—the belief that, as someone prophesies in The Edge, their selfless courage might “release more energy and more people that used to be afraid”—animates the films’ aesthetics. Shot in black and white by Robert Machover, in a cinema verité style propelled by handheld camerawork, the trilogy exhibits an ebullient “let’s just do it” spirit, emanating as much from its young protagonists as its images. Even a chamber drama as claustrophobic as In the Country is alive to the tumultuous emotions and outbursts of its characters; at their best, these films treat you not as an observer but as a privileged eavesdropper.
Top: Milestones (Robert Kramer, 1975). Bottom: Guns (Robert Kramer, 1980).
A proclivity for self-critique would remain a salient feature of Kramer’s practice. It also accounts for his premature departure from Newsreel, a collective that showed little tolerance for such introspection, and eventually ruled against distributing Ice, which was made entirely with its members. Kramer’s next film, arguably his masterpiece, would sponge some of that early discontent. Codirected with Newsreel colleague John Douglas, Milestones (1975)—a sprawling, cross-country journey from Vermont to the Southwest—doubles as an unflinching portrait of another “lost” generation, one that came of age during the Vietnam War. Dozens of characters—artists, activists, draft evaders—reckon with their growing disconnect from organized struggle and communal living and try to find new purpose in a world that is hardly the utopia the 1960s were meant to usher in. Among them, there’s a blind potter (played by Douglas) feeling his way through the vases he shapes, and a filmmaker working on a documentary about Vietnam, probably a nod to Kramer’s own attempt to capture the country’s fight against “the most powerful war machine in the history of humanity” (The People’s War, 1970). Most of these outcasts appear to be in their twenties or thirties, but there’s something about their aspirations and meanderings that makes Milestones occasionally come across as a study of postadolescence. They’re all still figuring out who and what they’ll be, and the film’s digressive, playful form feels completely in service of those anxieties. Milestones straddles facts and fiction: some scenes (a rape, a murder) are staged, others (a birth) are not; most exist in the nebulous region between the two in a way that echoes the frictions between these drifters’ fantasies and the real world they’re up against. Everyone wants to settle—to “know some people, plant some roots,” as one wanderer quips—but the journey radiates a feeling of inescapable loneliness. That’s not to suggest that Milestones is anything funereal. For all the intermittent flashes of melancholy, the film thrums with an electrifying freedom. Kramer and Douglas move balletically from one storyline to the next, and the unpredictability makes this that rare film in which it feels like everything is possible, and nothing predetermined.
That spontaneity is, at least in part, a function of language. As spoken American English teems with detours, ellipses, and unfinished sentences, so do Kramer’s films; it’s as if the fragmented speech patterns of their casts informed their mosaic-like narratives. Following a documentary on the Portuguese people’s struggle against the Salazar regime (Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal, 1977), Kramer decamped to France, where he entered a particularly fertile production environment. Support from such organizations as the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA, the same that financed projects by Chantal Akerman, Raúl Ruiz, and Jean-Luc Godard, among others) offered him a chance to think outside conventional genres or norms. That’s one way of looking at Guns (1980), his first feature made in France, and a much more anfractuous watch than any of its predecessors, not least because of the stark differences in dialogue and performance. Working with French actors, he told Eisenschitz, meant working with “people who have accepted the idea that you don’t speak together the same way you speak in a movie.”3 In contrast to the exuberance and cacophony of its American forebears, Guns has the quality of a still life. A two-part tale—one about a woman tending to her dying mother, the other about an international plot to smuggle firearms out of Marseille—Guns uses artificiality to its advantage. The theatrical deliveries and stilted dialogues heighten the film’s unreality: none of these people register as flesh-and-blood humans so much as silhouettes on one of De Chirico’s empty squares. In many ways, Guns stands as a fascinating outlier, finding a middle ground between more conventional approaches to filmmaking and Kramer’s previous attempts to create a space where actors could simply exist and things would naturally happen.
Top: Doc's Kingdom (Robert Kramer, 1988). Bottom: Route One/USA (Robert Kramer, 1989).
All of Kramer’s films are governed by competing centripetal and centrifugal forces. There’s a mutual desire to belong to something larger, yet no one can resist the individuating urges that sooner or later lead us to drift away. And nobody embodies that tug of war more vividly than Paul McIsaac’s Doc. Nearly twenty years after playing one of the guerrillas in Ice, McIsaac, an activist Kramer had met through Newsreel, was cast as the director’s alter ego. In Doc’s Kingdom (1988), McIsaac is an American MD—and former militant—whose secluded and alcohol-fueled life in Lisbon is upended by the arrival of his estranged son, Jimmy (Vincent Gallo). Doc’s rootlessness is the default state of all of Kramer’s characters—even the young folks he first followed in the US felt like strangers in their own land. What’s most striking about the film is how personally it speaks to the director’s own experience. Jimmy and Doc’s reunion keeps splintering into fourth wall–breaking monologues that invite characters to open up about their alienation. In this sense, Doc’s Kingdom marks a transition within Kramer’s oeuvre, anticipating the more overtly confessional vein of his later work, which are increasingly committed to probing the director’s own restlessness as well as the limits of his medium.
Take Route One/USA (1989). Kramer’s first film in the States since Milestones is another vast and polyphonic voyage, this time tethered to the perspective of two wanderers only (Kramer and McIsaac, reprising the role of Doc) as they travel along the titular highway, from its starting point in Maine all the way down to Florida. Here too, the A-to-B path is constantly derailed by rivulets of digression and narrative cul-de-sacs. Every chance encounter begets another; everyone has things to say, fights to remember, secrets to reveal. There’s almost a canine quality to Kramer’s camera, hyper-receptive to the inexhaustible stimuli of the road and happy to hopscotch from one trail to the other. We meet waitresses, workers, migrants, cops, Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson, and Reverend Jesse Jackson. Early on, Doc recites a poem by Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road,” a hymn to freedom that echoes all through the film. But where Milestones was largely concerned with the future of its nonconformists (and ended, tellingly, with a birth), Route One is haunted by the past. This is a homecoming of sorts, for McIsaac and Kramer both, marred by the tragic suspicion that there might be no home to return to. “The character [of Doc] is both you and me,” Kramer would confess in Dear Doc (1989), a short conceived as a sort of letter from the director to his sometime travel companion, stitched together from scraps of Route One. He’s right: there is between the two wanderers and former activists a shared history, a shared vocabulary, but also, and most importantly, a shared malaise, perched somewhere between lust for life and chronic drift. Toward the end of Route One, a rare staged scene in an otherwise documentary film: Doc decides to settle in Florida and leave Kramer to resume the trip alone. It’s a pivotal moment, both in the film and in his career. Left to his own devices, the director becomes the story’s protagonist, taking on the witness-storyteller role he’d reprise in his later projects, while the narrative and the images (bridges, cranes, empty beachside houses) become more confounding.
Top: Our Nazi (Robert Kramer, 1984). Bottom: Berline 10-90 (Robert Kramer, 1990).
Reviewing Route One, Daney described Kramer’s craft as that of an “audiovisual doctor” responsible for “measuring up the state of populations” and “taking their pulse.” A witness. Another way to think of him is as a filmmaker-archaeologist, someone who wasn’t just interested in providing snapshots of this or that era, but who sought to put the past in conversation with the present, blurring the boundary between the two as he did between facts and fiction. That’s one entry point into Kramer’s most terrifying work, Our Nazi (1984), a behind-the-scenes look at the shoot of Thomas Harlan’s Wundkanal (also 1984). Harlan’s fiction film follows an 80-year-old former SS commander, Alfred Filbert, as he’s kidnapped by revolutionaries and forced to own up to the atrocities he committed. In a most disquieting twist, the real Alfred Filbert plays himself. In 1962, Filbert was found guilty of massacring thousands of Jews across Eastern Europe and sentenced to life in prison. By the late 1970s, when Harlan approached him, he had already been released due to poor health. Wundkanal reenacts the trial, with bilingual Harlan whispering his questions to Filbert in German (through an earpiece) and then translating the Nazi’s sickening confessions to the French crew. Though the man is never asked to restage those horrors, like the old Indonesian paramilitary leaders in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), Our Nazi likewise forces its protagonist to reckon with the inhumane acts he’s committed. As Harlan’s voice grows louder and his questions more confrontational, the octogenarian mass murderer stutters, wilts, and finally collapses. Though the director never needles him into an admission of guilt, the shoot amounts to a kind of torture. Is Harlan’s way of handling Filbert ethical? Should it be? The former SS officer isn’t the only one being interrogated: working with close-ups that thrust us unbearably close to Filbert’s cadaverous face—so close that the effect sometimes recalls another portrait of blood-curdling evil, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Caniba (2017)—Our Nazi bridges the distance between audience and subject. Filbert’s a monster, but he is still a human being, and our proximity to him might well be the film’s most horrific aspect.
Our Nazi heralds a shift toward a more self-reflective phase in Kramer’s filmography. It doubles as a prequel to Berlin 10-90 (1990), another work concerned with the spectral accumulations of the past and with the unbridgeable rift between the director’s generation and that of his parents. Kramer’s father, a Jewish doctor, fled Berlin for the US in 1933. The city felt oddly familiar to the filmmaker on his first visit, a few months after the fall of the Wall, though he had never heard his father speak of it. Designed as an uninterrupted hour-long shot, Berlin 10-90 is a meditation on “different kinds of coming home,” as Kramer puts it, a project that is especially remarkable for a director whose life and career were defined by perpetual motion. Filming within the confines of his flat’s bathroom, Kramer takes turns behind and before the camera to reflect on his ties to his father, to Berlin, and to pasts “that are encoded in my body in ways I couldn’t imagine.” How strange to see him face his own camera for a change: dressed in an olive vest, head completely shaved, he looks like a disenchanted reincarnation of Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz. Fatigue and frustration billow from his baritone. He claims he needs to “deal with Israel,” needs to “deal with Europe,” before offering a précis of his practice as one of fragments and scraps: “a mosaic of facts.” The bare-breasted vulnerability of his musings, and the readiness to question his own beliefs and the scope of his craft, would inform Kramer’s late style.
Top: Leeward (Robert Kramer, 1991). Bottom: The Ghosts of Electricity (Robert Kramer, 1997).
Edward Said conceived of an artist’s “late period” not in terms of “harmony and resolution,” but rather “intransigence, difficulty, and contradiction.” Such a definition, in Kramer’s case, feels somewhat reductive: his last works, for all their unresolved frictions and open-ended questions, are neither austere nor alienating, but crackle with the same passionate inquisitiveness of his earliest ones. In Leeward (1991), Kramer embarks on a journey up the River Seine, reflecting on the role and future of cinema in the face of popular media and omnipresent images of war. A cast of talking heads—Daney among them—chimes in along the way, but the camera, as in Milestones or Route One, is always on high alert, ready to jump from one idea to the other, from one rendezvous to the next. Some years later, when the Locarno Film Festival commissioned him to make a short on the future of cinema, Kramer answered with one of his most enigmatic films, The Ghosts of Electricity (1997), a diptych. The film’s first half captures scenes of bucolic bliss, with Kramer’s wife and daughter loitering in and around their countryside home in France. The second, which follows a montage of increasingly morbid news footage, centers on Kramer himself, who speaks from an undefined Cronerbergian future in which people can upload and share their consciousness. It’s a radical departure from anything else in his oeuvre, a film that grows more puzzling with each new shot. Kramer’s idea of what the future of cinema might amount to is nothing short of disturbing, but what’s most notable about Ghosts isn’t its dystopian conclusions nor the sight of the ponytailed director bedecked in big round shades and holding a CD in midair as if he were an illusionist. It’s the realization that even a work as apocalyptic as this still radiates the same unadulterated curiosity as all its predecessors; as Kramer’s output grew more hermetic, his faith in the medium and its capacity for wonder never faltered.
“I’m here to prove a certain type of cinema still exists,” Kramer says early into Leeward, meaning a cinema that is entirely sui generis, made of dead ends and erratic images, powered not by commercial calculations so much as an openness to the world and all those who roam it. If the art of filmmaking is one of movement, he turned his works into journeys; as with the best of them, nothing ever feels planned.