Robert Kramer
Notes de la forteresse : 1967-1999
Author(s) Robert Kramer, Cyril Béghin
Format paperback
Year 2019
Language(s) French
Pages 512 pages
Publisher Post Editions
Description
Edition established and presented by Cyril Béghin | Texts translated from English by Cécile Wajsbrot and Cyril Béghin
Robert Kramer wrote extensively, before, during, after the films, "notes" and projects, fictions and essays, innumerable personal notebooks and computer files composed of fragments, as well as carefully matured texts intended for publication. This considerable body of work is one of the hidden foundations of his oeuvre, where his relationship to political subjectivation, autofiction, and the intersections between documentary, propaganda and fabulation is negotiated more explicitly than in his films.
Robert Kramer's cinematic work is the subject of growing international recognition. It is accompanied by an important corpus of preparatory texts, letters, notes and screenplays now preserved in France at IMEC (Institut mémoires de l'édition contemporaine).
The present book project was initially conceived during the author's lifetime, in friendly complicity with film historian Bernard Eisenschitz. The sudden death of Robert Kramer in 1999 as well as various editorial setbacks hindered its publication until today.
Robert Kramer's texts reveal the figure of a filmmaker endowed with an acute awareness of history and social injustices, whose engagement in the political struggles of his time is inseparable from his films. He invented unprecedented forms of cinematic expression, mixing collective experience and certain biographical aspects to produce forms of documentary fictions whose innovative aspect is far from exhausted. The texts gathered here are those that maintain the closest connection with his films (realized or not). Written before, during, or after the shooting or release of a film, they provide invaluable insight into the political and artistic commitment (the two being inseparable in his eyes), Robert Kramer's working method, and inform the understanding of his work.
Robert Kramer (1939-1999) is an American filmmaker who settled in Europe in the early 1980s. He is the co-founder of the alternative film agency Newsreel, created in 1967 in the United States, and still active today, whose objective was to produce information through images in opposition to dominant media. He is the author of twenty-five films mostly made while he resided in France. The films Route One/USA, Walk the Walk, Milestones and Ice have been the subject of recent DVD editions by Montparnasse, Cahiers du cinéma, Capricci, and Re:Voir.