Pack 5 DVD/Blu-Ray Robert Kramer

includes a 57 page bilingual booklet

FILMS
In The Country (1966), 62 min
Videoletters (1992), 56 min
Troublemakers (1965), 52 min

Blu-ray/DVD - The Edge & Ice
The Edge (1967) and Ice (1969) form a definitive diptych on the temptations of terrorism and insurrection: a man wants to assassinate the President of the United States (The Edge); revolutionary groups launch a major armed offensive against the ruling regime (Ice). However, both fictions are less interested in the impact of activism than in the moral state of shock that gradually shifts relationships and beliefs as it overlays another sense of time and other types of logic on those of revolutionary efficiency. Made in parallel with Robert Kramer’s own militant activism in Newsreel and other organizations of the American left, which they contradict dialectically, they are an extraordinary application of filmmaking considered as a tool of thought in motion.

“I think that now, based on a lot of Ice’s contradictions – between men and women, between ‘activism’ and ‘living,’ between life and death – I think that now, we are starting to understand the synthesis, or at least the very diverse forms of synthesis that will help us create a higher, clearer level of consciousness, and therefore a higher level of activism.” (Robert Kramer)

includes a 42 page bilingual booklet

FILMS
The Edge (1967), 1h41
Ice (1969), 2h13

Blu-ray/DVD - Route One/USA
Shot over five months in 1987 and 1988 from north to south along the East Coast, Route One / USA (1989) offers a broad geographical cross-section of a precise time in United States history, and a wistful journey through a country that Robert Kramer, as an America, had never looked at so carefully. In the company of his fictional alter-ego, Doc, the doctor, the filmmaker observes people and landscapes with the care and concern of a traveling doctor. Route One / USA is also a magnificent combination, to the sound of Barre Philips' music, of a filming method that Kramer had developed a few weeks earlier in the lesser-known X-Country (1987) and an editing technique that he would perfect the following year in the video-letter Dear Doc (1990).

includes a 62 page bilingual booklet

FILMS
Route One / USA (1966), 255 min, color, 16mm
X-Country (1992), 144 min, color, video
Dear Doc (1965), 36 min, color, video

DVD - Guns
Following a series of films questioning commitment and politics in America and culminating with Milestones 1975, and a 1977 documentary on Lisbon’s Carnation Revolution, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal, Robert Kramer moved to France with his family. The first film he made there was Guns, an intricate feature which echoed the paranoid films of 1970’s Hollywood. With Guns, Kramer continues his exploration of the militant psyche, while at the same time experimenting with different forms of narration.

“There are two distinct strands of reality in Guns. One deals with the world at large. Tony (Patrick Bauchau), a journalist, speaks of ‘a nonsensical story.’ We no longer have any way to penetrate this wider world. The other strand concerns our intimate and personal experiences, as represented by Margot (Juliet Berto), who has decided to dedicate herself to caring for her dying mother. This strand comprises everything that results from her decision. I used the decline of Margo’s mother as a means of discussing certain things.”
-Robert Kramer

includes a 56 page bilingual booklet

FILMS
Guns (1980)
Naissance (1981)
La Peur (1983)