Starting Places : A conversation with Robert Kramer

In summer 1997, French film critic and historian Bernard Eisenschitz met with Robert Kramer three times to speak in detail about Kramer's life and work, covering thirty years of filmmaking. The exchange between friends starts with his early, activist years and his involvement with the Newsreel Collective, considers essential films like Ice (1969) and Milestones (1975), and traces Kramer's orientation towards Europe and relocation to France in the late 1970s. Going back and forth between Europe, the USA, Portugal, and Vietnam, Kramer was consistently able to work and make films like Doc's Kingdom (1987), Route One/USA (1989), and Starting Place (1993). He passed away in 1999.

The conversation was published in French in 2001 as 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 and 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
Trajets: An Email Exchange
Introduction by Bernard Eisenschitz
I. July 21, 1997, Paris
Chronology 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
Commandes [53] A Difference of Perspective with the Vietnamese [54] A History Without a Head or a Tail [56] Naissance [57] Laure [59] Notre Nazi [62] Emblems Walking All Around [63] Handmaidens to the World [65] Homecoming [66] The Best Adaptation of Under the Volcano [69] The Roots Are the Film We Make Together [71] Nothing But a Map [74] Doc: A Fortunate Man [75] Route One/USA [77] Moving and Filming [77] A Different System [82] An Unfinished Film [85] Deal With the Gulf War in One Shot [86] At the Point of the Impact of the Bomb [87] What Was Going on Was Vietnam [90] Back to the Scene of the Crime [92] Survival Manual [93]
III. August 19, 1997, Paris
L’Homme à la caméra [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 Range of Information [114] Le Manteau [115] I Came Home to History [117] A Beautiful Word Which Doesn’t Exist in English [119] Point de départ/Starting Place [121] Things to Say about Israel? [126] Gestures, Fragments, The 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)
Going (Back) to Vietnam (1991)
Snap Shots (1997)
Filmography
Bibliography
Glossary of French Terms
Contributors
Image and Text Credits