Robert Kramer
Starting Places : A conversation with Robert Kramer
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Add rightsAuthor(s) Bernard Eisenschitz, Volker Patenberg
Format paperback book
Year 2024
Language(s) English
Pages 224 pages
Description
In the summer of 1997, French critic and historian Bernard Eisenschitz met with Robert Kramer on three occasions to discuss Kramer's life and work in detail, covering thirty years of filmmaking. The exchange between friends begins with his early years of activism and involvement in the Newsreel Collective, considers essential films like Ice (1969) and Milestones (1975), and traces Kramer's shift toward Europe and his move to France in the late 1970s. Moving back and forth between Europe, the United States, Portugal, and Vietnam, Kramer was always able to work and make films like Doc's Kingdom (1987), Route One/USA (1989), and Starting Place (1993). He died in 1999. The conversation was published in French in 2001 under the title Points de départ. More than 20 years later, Starting Places: A Conversation with Robert Kramer makes this illuminating account of a "mid-Atlantic" filmmaker available in its original language for the first time. The book is complemented by three of Kramer's essays from the 1980s and 1990s as well as an updated bibliography and filmography.
Bernard Eisenschitz in collaboration with Roberto Turigliatto
edited by Volker Pantenburg
FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen Vol. 37
Vienna 2024, 224 pages, in English
ISBN 978-3-901644-95-5
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Starting Places—25 Years Later. Editorial Note - Volker Pantenburg & Bernard Eisenschitz
Trajectories: An Email Exchange
Introduction by Bernard Eisenschitz
I. July 21, 1997, Paris
Timeline Questions [21] Troublemakers [22] In the Country and The Edge [23] The Six-Day War, Europe [25] Newsreel and Ice [29] The End of the Movement and Milestones [35] To Europe [36] How to Make a Living [38] FALN [39] Toller [42] City and Countryside [43] The Filmmaking Process [44] Actors [45] French Body [48] Territory and Structure [50]
II. July 30-31, 1997, Le Landin
Commissions [53] A Difference in Perspective with the Vietnamese [54] A Rambling Story [56] Birth [57] Laure [59] Our Nazi [62] Emblems That Work Everywhere [63] Servants of the World [65] Reunion [66] The Best Adaptation of Under the Volcano [69] Roots Are the Film We Make Together [71] Just a Map [74] Doc: A Lucky Man [75] Route One/USA [77] Moving and Shooting [77] Another System [82] An Unfinished Film [85] The Gulf War in One Shot [86] At the Bomb's Point of Impact [87] What Was Happening Was Vietnam [90] Return to the Scene of the Crime [92] Survival Manual [93]
III. August 19, 1997, Paris
Man with a Movie Camera [95] Cards on the Table [98] The Nature of Movement [101] Dear Doc [103] Berlin 10/90 [104] I Wanted to Be a Warrior [108] Video Letters [109] The References Are Jazz [111] Other Sources of Information [114] The Coat [115] I Entered History [117] A Beautiful Word That Doesn't Exist in English [119] Starting Place [121] What to Say About Israel? [126] Gestures, Fragments, State of Things [127] Barre Phillips Is Everywhere [132] The Main Path of Our Fragility Is the Body [136]
ESSAYS BY ROBERT KRAMER
Notes from Inside the Fortress (1989)
Return to Vietnam (1991)
Gunshots (1997)
Filmography
Bibliography
Glossary of French Terms
Contributors
Image and Text Credits