Robert Kramer
Point de Départ (vol.9)
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Add rightsFormat DVD Interzone
Format 35mm, 16mm, video
Year 1969-1998
Language(s) French, English, Vietnamese
Artist(s) Robert Kramer
Subtitles English, French, German, Italian
Booklet 52 pages
Running time 139 min
Films
PEOPLE'S WAR : (NEWSREEL #43) (1969) 40'
POINT DE DÉPART (1993) 90'
SAY KOM SA (1998) 19'
Description
Like many Americans of his generation, the Vietnam War was a pivotal event in Robert Kramer's intellectual journey. In the mid-1960s, he published two articles of political analysis and wrote an unrealized screenplay about the conflict, before traveling there in 1969 with other members of Newsreel to shoot People's War, a medium-length film about the struggle of the North Vietnamese. Almost thirty years later, in 1998, he returned to the now-pacified country grappling with globalization, where he filmed a brief video chronicle, Say Kom Sa. Between the two, Point de départ, a documentary masterpiece in the floating framing and fragmented editing style that Kramer developed since Our Nazi, bridges a national past that won't pass and a present without a future.