Robert Kramer (1939-1999) "In the sixties, in that long-gone, almost Jurassic world, distinctions between what was political and what was art were collapsing before our eyes...everything was wonderfully in flux and all streams seemed to converge into one creative river."-Peter Gessner, "Robert Kramer: A Remembrance," The NationRobert Kramer made an important distinction about his films: they were not about the Movement, they were of the Movement. Of their time, just as Kramer himself can be said to have been of his: radicalized by studying philosophy and Western history in college, he was active as a community organizer before helping found the underground Newsreel movement. With his features The Edge (1968), Ice (1969), and Milestones (1975), Kramer made his mark as the great filmmaker of the American radical left. But by 1980, that and fifty cents got a guy on the New York subway. Kramer became a self-exile in Paris, where he had been embraced by the European intelligentsia. From there, he continued his "uninterrupted dialogue with America" in film after film.As unflinchingly political as he was, Kramer was after all an artist, with a strong visual sense and, as critics noted, a literary one as well. New York Times critic Vincent Canby wrote, "Kramer seems incapable of shooting a scene, framing a shot, or catching a line of dialogue that isn't loaded with information one usually finds only in the best, the most spare poetry." Stuart Byron, in the Village Voice, noted that both Ice and The Edge "conceal a dramatic progression within an anti-dramatic structure which represents the farthest the cinema has yet gone in the direction of the 'new novel.'" Robert Kramer imagined his films eventually would "make up one long film, one 'story' in a continual process of becoming." He was still telling the story when he died of meningitis in France last November at the age of 60. In this selection of his films, we pay tribute to the man and the story. THURSDAY JUNE 1, 2000
