Point de départ / People's War / Say Kom Sa - Robert Kramer

Vol. 9 in the WORK series of DVDs with films by Robert Kramer with the films Point de départ, People's War & Say Kom Sa

As for many Americans of his generation, the Vietnam War was a crucial 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 war, before going to Vietnam in 1969 with other members of Newsreel to shoot People’s War, a medium-length film about the North-Vietnamese struggle. Almost thirty years later, in 1998, he returned to the now pacified country in the throes of globalization, where he filmed a short video chronicle, Say Kom Sa. In between these two films,  Point de départ, a documentary masterpiece in the floating camera and fragmented editing style that Kramer developed since Our Nazi, bridges the gap between the country’s past that cannot be healed and a present without a future.

“The idea of going back to Vietnam hasn’t always been with me, but during the Gulf War, I realized that it had been a long time since I’d been abroad to film. So I made the grotesque plan of going all over the place to see what was left, in the early 1990s, of the idea of ‘the Other’. What was going on over there? The idea behind the project was really to see how things were going for the Vietnamese, but at the same time, how were things going for me? I’m always looking for that double voice.” (Robert Kramer)

FILMS

PEOPLE’S WAR : (NEWSREEL #43)
USA / 1969 40 min, b/w 16mm
Producers: Third World Newsreel
Directors: Robert Kramer, John Douglas, Norman Fruchter

POINT DE DÉPART
France / 1993 90 min, color 35mm
Producers: La Sept, Les Films d’Ici, L’Association des cinéastes vietnamiens, Channel Four
Director: Robert Kramer
Sound: Olivier Schwob
With: Linda Evans, Viet Tung, Robert Kramer

SAY KOM SA
France / 1998 19 min, color video
Producers: Les Films d’Ici, Richard Copans, Caroline Olive
Director: Robert Kramer
Sound: Le Hong Chuong