Robert Kramer
October 18 to November 28, 2024
"Hello: I'm from NYC. The 50's were bad. I got reborn in the 60's. I left the states at the end of the 70's. I've been living around, mostly based in Paris, and I make movies." It was with this laconic, short biography that Robert Kramer began a letter to Bob Dylan in 1998. He proposed to the musician a collaborative film project: "Not a movie about you, not a documentary or a report, but the two of us, make a movie together over a period of time." Nothing came of the project. Kramer died at the age of 60 in Rouen, Normandy in November 1999.
In Wim Wenders' Chambre 666 (Room 666, 1982), Kramer describes his path to film: "I started out writing and I wrote these novels, and I felt like I was trapped inside this enormous tradition. And movies for me were free, there were no rules, it was my turf. I could do anything I wanted to do, just like anybody else was doing." It is at least equally important that Kramer came to filmmaking through his political engagement. Troublemakers (1965) by Norman Fruchter and Robert Machover, who later became important allies, show the twenty-something as an activist in the civil rights struggles of Newark's Black community. In one of the tense discussions in the film, Kramer describes his ambivalent relationship to politics: "I come burdened with enormous prejudices against politics. My whole life has been spent trying to figure out how stinking the political system is, and I don't really understand how all of a sudden we're going to step in and change it." The founding of the Newsreel Collective, in which Kramer was involved in 1967 as one of the initiators and main protagonists, seemed to offer a way out. The program: To act politically, but with filmic means and as part of an independent, self-organized production and distribution model, shoulder to shoulder with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), various anti-war groups and the usual alternative media of the opposition movement.
With his first films, the black-and-white trilogy In the Country (1966), The Edge (1967) and Ice (1969, camera: Machover, sound: Fruchter) Kramer dealt directly with the contradictions of the New Left. From the start, the question of violence is present, from the start, uncertainties and doubts can be felt on all levels, ranging from the widespread utopia of a future society to group dynamics and isolated individuals.
Milestones (1975, co-director: John Douglas) presents the splintering of the movement in a wide-ranging panorama. Very different ways of life, an arsenal of characters cast from nearly 50 comrades who, despite post-1968 disappointments, tried staying true to their political ideals. Alternative communes in Vermont, restless drifting across the country, new orientations after prison terms, intensive exchanges about experiences. Always present: the awareness of the violent roots of the United States in the genocide of the Native Americans and of the brutal transport and enslavement of the Black population. But also: the miracle of new life in a long, painfully beautiful birth sequence.
Early on, Kramer's films already attracted more enthusiasm in Europe than his home country. French cinephiles especially saw an affinity to Jacques Rivette and the 1968 activists Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker. The Carnation Revolution drew the filmmaker (like his later friend and colleague Thomas Harlan, with whom he made the diptych Wundkanal/Notre Nazi in 1984) into the post-revolutionary excitement and led to Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal (1977). In 1979, he relocated to Paris with his wife Erika and their daughter Keja Ho (born in 1974 and named after Ho Chi Minh), where he managed over the following two decades to direct more than 20 productions: for TV and cinema, between four and 255 minutes long, in different analog and digital media, including 16mm and 35mm, Hi8 and DigiBeta.
Always finding documentary in fiction and fictional moments in documentary, Kramer's films indeed can be divided into phases. He himself suggested the first phase ends with the film about the Portuguese revolution. Likewise, the productions of the early 1980s after the enigmatic Guns (1980) could be summarized as another working phase. The Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA) in Paris made it possible for Kramer (and many other experimental filmmakers of the time) to direct short and mid-length commissions. For the 1990s, we can speak, to cite Hironobu Baba, of a "European Trilogy," encompassing Berlin 10/90 (1991), Walk the Walk (1995) and Le Manteau (1997). The search for traces of his mother's Jewish origins in Odessa and his father's time at Charité hospital in Berlin around 1930 appear as important themes in these films.
At the same time, such a clean classification of Kramer's work is unfair. On the one hand, Kramer continually went back to places (Portugal, Vietnam, Berlin, the US) and people – a sign of his commitment and his personal and intellectual fidelity. On the other hand, in conversation with Bernhard Eisenschitz, he himself highlights the unity of all his films: "In fact, since the very beginning, I've been into describing my movies as one big movie – that all the movies put together make one movie of a life."
Individual lines stand out: Doc's Kingdom (1987), made possible by producer Paulo Branco, shows Kramer reuniting with one of the guerilla streetfighters from Ice. The further development of this fictional character, "Doc" (Paul McIsaac), who returns to the reality of everyday American life and travels through the US past and present from Maine to Key West, led to Route One/USA (1989), a milestone in film history.
For Kramer's characters – they can almost never be labeled protagonists – national, cultural and religious ascriptions are of secondary importance. Their roots tend to reside elsewhere and they are, like all the films, always in motion, driven by nomadic restlessness. Cinema is, for Kramer, a tool for channeling his own anxiety and curiosity, and getting a handle on the world: "Everyone mainly thinks of the movies as something that is being done to tell you. I think the first thing, for me at least, is to tell me, to give me some handle on what's really going on here." Filmmaking as reflecting, feeling, breathing. Twenty-five years after his death is a good time to discover Kramer's films again or for the first time. Perhaps it is only now possible to recognize how early Kramer diagnosed the decisive problems of the 21st century. In the mid-1960s, he had already recognized in the fight for Black rights the need to question himself and his own privileges. His ongoing engagement in Vietnam led him to subject the standards of the Global North to a radical revision: "North and South in the body, in the mind. In the psychology. In the view of things, in values and dreams. The North ('us, me') seen from the South. 'Our' instinctive world turned upside down." And regarding the reckless destruction of the planet, he wrote in 1998: "I am afraid that we are getting weary of this planet. We are using it up, its resources and its wonder. [...] [W]e have made a mess, it is doubtful that we can learn less destructive, less competitive, communal ways."
Despite his pessimistic intuition that exploitation, profit motive and recklessness have permeated all levels, Kramer held onto cinema in all its forms: "Filmmaking is a practice. Filmmaking could be anything – street-sweeping, window-washing, making pots, being a critic. That's your vehicle to move through your life with. There's no part of it that's not part of it: neither your negotiations with the festivals, how you feel about what hotel they put you in, nor who they send by train and who they send by plane. All of that's a part of that experience." (Volker Pantenburg / Translation: Ted Fendt
Volume 37 of the FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, Starting Places: A Conversation with Robert Kramer, by Bernard Eisenschitz in collaboration with Roberto Turigliatto, edited by Volker Pantenburg, has been published on the occasion of the retrospective (224 pages, in English) and is available at the Film Museum until November 28 at a reduced price (20 instead of 24 euros).
A joint retrospective of the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum
Keja Ho Kramer, Bernard Eisenschitz, Richard Copans, Paulo Branco, and Volker Pantenburg are expected as guests.
Special ticket regulations apply during the Viennale.
"Hello: I'm from NYC. The 50's were bad. I got reborn in the 60's. I left the states at the end of the 70's. I've been living around, mostly based in Paris, and I make movies." It was with this laconic, short biography that Robert Kramer began a letter to Bob Dylan in 1998. He proposed to the musician a collaborative film project: "Not a movie about you, not a documentary or a report, but the two of us, make a movie together over a period of time." Nothing came of the project. Kramer died at the age of 60 in Rouen, Normandy in November 1999.
In Wim Wenders' Chambre 666 (Room 666, 1982), Kramer describes his path to film: "I started out writing and I wrote these novels, and I felt like I was trapped inside this enormous tradition. And movies for me were free, there were no rules, it was my turf. I could do anything I wanted to do, just like anybody else was doing." It is at least equally important that Kramer came to filmmaking through his political engagement. Troublemakers (1965) by Norman Fruchter and Robert Machover, who later became important allies, show the twenty-something as an activist in the civil rights struggles of Newark's Black community. In one of the tense discussions in the film, Kramer describes his ambivalent relationship to politics: "I come burdened with enormous prejudices against politics. My whole life has been spent trying to figure out how stinking the political system is, and I don't really understand how all of a sudden we're going to step in and change it." The founding of the Newsreel Collective, in which Kramer was involved in 1967 as one of the initiators and main protagonists, seemed to offer a way out. The program: To act politically, but with filmic means and as part of an independent, self-organized production and distribution model, shoulder to shoulder with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), various anti-war groups and the usual alternative media of the opposition movement.
With his first films, the black-and-white trilogy In the Country (1966), The Edge (1967) and Ice (1969, camera: Machover, sound: Fruchter) Kramer dealt directly with the contradictions of the New Left. From the start, the question of violence is present, from the start, uncertainties and doubts can be felt on all levels, ranging from the widespread utopia of a future society to group dynamics and isolated individuals.
Milestones (1975, co-director: John Douglas) presents the splintering of the movement in a wide-ranging panorama. Very different ways of life, an arsenal of characters cast from nearly 50 comrades who, despite post-1968 disappointments, tried staying true to their political ideals. Alternative communes in Vermont, restless drifting across the country, new orientations after prison terms, intensive exchanges about experiences. Always present: the awareness of the violent roots of the United States in the genocide of the Native Americans and of the brutal transport and enslavement of the Black population. But also: the miracle of new life in a long, painfully beautiful birth sequence.
Early on, Kramer's films already attracted more enthusiasm in Europe than his home country. French cinephiles especially saw an affinity to Jacques Rivette and the 1968 activists Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker. The Carnation Revolution drew the filmmaker (like his later friend and colleague Thomas Harlan, with whom he made the diptych Wundkanal/Notre Nazi in 1984) into the post-revolutionary excitement and led to Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal (1977). In 1979, he relocated to Paris with his wife Erika and their daughter Keja Ho (born in 1974 and named after Ho Chi Minh), where he managed over the following two decades to direct more than 20 productions: for TV and cinema, between four and 255 minutes long, in different analog and digital media, including 16mm and 35mm, Hi8 and DigiBeta.
Always finding documentary in fiction and fictional moments in documentary, Kramer's films indeed can be divided into phases. He himself suggested the first phase ends with the film about the Portuguese revolution. Likewise, the productions of the early 1980s after the enigmatic Guns (1980) could be summarized as another working phase. The Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA) in Paris made it possible for Kramer (and many other experimental filmmakers of the time) to direct short and mid-length commissions. For the 1990s, we can speak, to cite Hironobu Baba, of a "European Trilogy," encompassing Berlin 10/90 (1991), Walk the Walk (1995) and Le Manteau (1997). The search for traces of his mother's Jewish origins in Odessa and his father's time at Charité hospital in Berlin around 1930 appear as important themes in these films.
At the same time, such a clean classification of Kramer's work is unfair. On the one hand, Kramer continually went back to places (Portugal, Vietnam, Berlin, the US) and people – a sign of his commitment and his personal and intellectual fidelity. On the other hand, in conversation with Bernhard Eisenschitz, he himself highlights the unity of all his films: "In fact, since the very beginning, I've been into describing my movies as one big movie – that all the movies put together make one movie of a life."
Individual lines stand out: Doc's Kingdom (1987), made possible by producer Paulo Branco, shows Kramer reuniting with one of the guerilla streetfighters from Ice. The further development of this fictional character, "Doc" (Paul McIsaac), who returns to the reality of everyday American life and travels through the US past and present from Maine to Key West, led to Route One/USA (1989), a milestone in film history.
For Kramer's characters – they can almost never be labeled protagonists – national, cultural and religious ascriptions are of secondary importance. Their roots tend to reside elsewhere and they are, like all the films, always in motion, driven by nomadic restlessness. Cinema is, for Kramer, a tool for channeling his own anxiety and curiosity, and getting a handle on the world: "Everyone mainly thinks of the movies as something that is being done to tell you. I think the first thing, for me at least, is to tell me, to give me some handle on what's really going on here." Filmmaking as reflecting, feeling, breathing. Twenty-five years after his death is a good time to discover Kramer's films again or for the first time. Perhaps it is only now possible to recognize how early Kramer diagnosed the decisive problems of the 21st century. In the mid-1960s, he had already recognized in the fight for Black rights the need to question himself and his own privileges. His ongoing engagement in Vietnam led him to subject the standards of the Global North to a radical revision: "North and South in the body, in the mind. In the psychology. In the view of things, in values and dreams. The North ('us, me') seen from the South. 'Our' instinctive world turned upside down." And regarding the reckless destruction of the planet, he wrote in 1998: "I am afraid that we are getting weary of this planet. We are using it up, its resources and its wonder. [...] [W]e have made a mess, it is doubtful that we can learn less destructive, less competitive, communal ways."
Despite his pessimistic intuition that exploitation, profit motive and recklessness have permeated all levels, Kramer held onto cinema in all its forms: "Filmmaking is a practice. Filmmaking could be anything – street-sweeping, window-washing, making pots, being a critic. That's your vehicle to move through your life with. There's no part of it that's not part of it: neither your negotiations with the festivals, how you feel about what hotel they put you in, nor who they send by train and who they send by plane. All of that's a part of that experience." (Volker Pantenburg / Translation: Ted Fendt
Volume 37 of the FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, Starting Places: A Conversation with Robert Kramer, by Bernard Eisenschitz in collaboration with Roberto Turigliatto, edited by Volker Pantenburg, has been published on the occasion of the retrospective (224 pages, in English) and is available at the Film Museum until November 28 at a reduced price (20 instead of 24 euros).
A joint retrospective of the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum
Keja Ho Kramer, Bernard Eisenschitz, Richard Copans, Paulo Branco, and Volker Pantenburg are expected as guests.
Special ticket regulations apply during the Viennale.
Related materials
For each series, films are listed in screening order.
