Robert Kramer Is the New Left’s Great, Forgotten Filmmaker

Robert Kramer grew up on Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, the only child of a highly accomplished physician father and an equally respected textile designer and art collector mother, both from families that had fled Eastern Europe in the Jewish diaspora. His father, Milton, was among the first doctors dispatched to Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. He never discussed the horrors he witnessed, and Robert grew up in a cocoon of affluence and alienation.

He attended Swarthmore, graduating in 1961 just before the New Left arrived en masse there. Consequently, instead of joining its early organizing, he spent his postcollegiate years as an aspiring novelist, laboring on a gargantuan modernist tome that his friends found ponderous. He was accepted into Stanford’s doctoral history program and promptly quit. His major romantic relationship, with ceramics artist Jane Doubilet, often seemed driven by inertia and ennui, and after they married unhappily, they traveled on family money to avoid confronting their mutual dissatisfaction. While they were in South America in 1965, his father died from a cerebral hemorrhage at age fifty-eight.

Only then did Kramer plunge into both film and the Left, using both as a springboard out of his malaise. His childhood friend Peter Gessner, son of film studies pioneer Robert Gessner, was working in a small production unit headed by blacklisted Hollywood exiles when they received footage smuggled out of Venezuela by revolutionaries with the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN). Gessner invited Kramer to collaborate. The resulting half-hour short, (1965), was a straightforward, inauspicious debut — except for the arresting fact that it endorsed revolutionary violence against a US-backed puppet state.FALN

By that point, Kramer had found SDS. The flagship New Left organization was attempting to move beyond its largely white college campus base by organizing in black urban areas and forging what a strategy document called “an interracial movement of the poor” premised on new forms of grassroots solidarity. Lead planners Carl Wittman and Tom Hayden decamped for Newark, New Jersey, and their presence and the proximity to media-capital New York made the city the flash point of the national project.

Kramer was too much of an individualist to be a strong community organizer, but he was nevertheless a photogenic, charismatic, and commanding speaker. When the documentary (1966) chronicled the Newark Community Union Project (NCUP), Hayden appeared as a clear leader, but Kramer brought the on-screen cool in his sporadic appearances, waving a cigarette as he cast doubt on working within existing systems, clearly thinking of the armed FALN as he declared, “My whole life has been spent trying to figure out how stinking the political system is, and I don’t really understand how all of a sudden we’re going to step in and change it.” NCUP primarily focused on block-level organizing, but Kramer appeared as a hip radical ready for revolution. One acquaintance from this era recalled him as “how all of us imagined to look, always in shades and leather jackets, looking like an angry bohemian.”TroublemakersOn the Road

He didn’t last long in Newark and was gone before the city erupted in the infamous June 1967 rebellion. But made an impression, catching the New Left at the transitional moment when it was beginning to hypothesize about the limitations of participatory democracy and warm to the idea of more radical intervention, with Kramer as the film’s avatar of this pivot. Stokely Carmichael, then the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), endorsed the film, and underground film impresario Jonas Mekas called it the “only American film I know that preaches revolution.” While he had been peripheral to NCUP itself, Kramer was suddenly at the center of New Left film culture.Troublemakers

’ directors, Robert Machover and Norman Fruchter, became his crew for a minimalist feature, (1967). The film tells the story of a couple who burns out from left organizing, retreats to a country house, and engages in sustained recriminations as their own romantic relationship disintegrates. Beholden to European art-house style, it was a bold if indulgent directorial debut (also introducing actor William Devane to the screen) which went largely unseen but served as a useful laboratory for .TroublemakersIn the CountryThe Edge

Kramer’s second feature, in which a young leftist announces his plan to kill LBJ and his friends mostly shrug, was another dissection of what he saw as the catatonia and paralysis of the Left, intended as an internal autocritique. Presidential assassination provided an alluring hook, but steadfastly refused thrills, instead confronting a movement that Kramer found frozen. While a voracious reader, devouring works by Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Régis Debray, and other radical theorists of the day, Kramer was undeniably susceptible to romantic adventurist views and constantly judged the US New Left against the revolutionary anti-colonial movements then sweeping the Global South, finding it insufficiently committed. Nothing short of revolution could end the war in Vietnam or upend the hollow hypocrisies of American daily life. With no real rising action or climax, ’s allegorization of Kramer’s dissatisfaction surely frustrated anyone seeking a political thriller, but it was precisely the coiled, unresolved tensions that led to Kramer’s adoption by . No less than French New Wave pioneer Jacques Rivette listed it as his favorite film of the year.The EdgeThe EdgeCahiers

For all that buildup, it was Newsreel and that catapulted Kramer to the forefront of international radical film. Newsreel, formed in early 1968 by an ad hoc group of leftist and experimental filmmakers, immediately became the de facto documentary wing of the New Left. It produced visceral shorts on the student occupation of Columbia University, antiwar protests, the Black Panther Party, and more. Kramer himself traveled to North Vietnam with an SDS delegation to pick up three released prisoners of war and make a film featuring Ho Chi Minh. When the leader fell ill, Kramer’s team instead shot at village schools and self-defense trainings. When they returned home, US customs confiscated their footage, releasing it only after the Newsreel team challenged them in court. The resulting film, (1969), became an immediate staple of US anti-imperialist cinema, a paean to the perseverance of the Vietnamese people.IcePeople’s War

Newsreel’s choppy, grainy-16mm style deliberately contrasted with the sanitized polish of the mass media. Kramer frequently served as an always-quotable spokesman, telling that Newsreel sought to “make films that unnerve, that shake assumptions, that threaten, that do not soft-sell, but hopefully (an impossible ideal) explode like grenades in peoples’ faces, or open minds up like a good can opener.” They didn’t seek dialogue or debate, Kramer explained. “We strive for confrontation,” he said. “We prefer disgust/violent disagreement/painful recognition/jolts — all these to slow liberal head-nodding.”Film Quarterly

That is what he attempted with , a film whose lasting impact stems partly from its bewildering contradictions. It is unambiguously a work in support of revolution. Opening with a communiqué from the National Committee of Independent Revolutionary Organizations, it tracks the efforts of “urban white people whose task must be armed struggle” to join a vanguard that includes the Black People’s Army and Mexican Revolutionary Front. Its frenetic handheld camera (manned by Machover from and Kramer’s previous two films) brings a restless nervous energy, occasionally released through prison breaks, assassinations, and the storming of an upper-middle-class apartment tower to force its residents at gunpoint to watch Newsreel-like propaganda.IceTroublemakers

Yet for all that, Kramer withholds the sort of stirring spectacle central to left cinema since Sergei Eisenstein first toyed with montage; violence in (which includes the castration of Kramer’s own translator character) is neither cathartic nor triumphant but rather crude and brutal. If the plot charts rising action, the affect retains the eerie flatness of , with characters committed to insurrection but wholly unable to relate to one another, leaving , true to its title, frozen in a revolutionary limbo, trapped between the thrill of insurrection and the existential abyss of capitalist personal alienation. For all the charge-the-barricades bravado of his public statements, Kramer proved more dialectical than didactic behind the camera, refusing the satisfying pleasures of more triumphalist agitprop while forcing the viewer to grapple with the film’s deliberate unresolvedness, which is precisely what gives its unsettling staying power.IceThe EdgeIceIce

This also allowed Kramer to maintain two simultaneous positions: more than any other film, indexed the radical currents of 1969 as SDS imploded and mass democratic politics gave way to the vanguardist tactics of the Weather Underground, some of whose explosions echoed scenes from the film (indeed, some cast members joined the group). Yet as much as Kramer himself supported the Weather Underground, including a brief affair with leader Bernardine Dohrn at the height of her fame on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, also predicted its failure. For Kramer, this stemmed more from the icy social relations of the Left than the swerve to doomed ultraleftism per se, but it nonetheless renders the film a uniquely haunted and haunting artifact of a moment that was somehow both the height and nadir of the New Left’s revolutionary strain.IceIce

took over a year to emerge on-screen, mostly due to internal debates over its politics at Newsreel, which ultimately declined to distribute it. Thus a film that predicted the Weather Underground instead appeared to follow it. Even so, when it reached the public in 1970, it caused a stir at Cannes, was widely seen and debated on the US left, and helped spur into a militant theoretical frenzy that lasted the next half-decade. Robert Kramer had become the face of radical American film.IceCahiers

It took Kramer a half-decade to complete another film, during which he spent time in Vermont with the Red Clover Collective, an armed commune that failed to inspire an -like uprising. After the collapse of SDS and the COINTELPRO-led attack on black radicalism, the early-’70s left spun in numerous directions of varying impact. On one side was the flowering of gay liberation, women’s liberation, the American Indian Movement, black feminism, and other voices that had previously been marginalized even within radical circles; on the other was the excesses and embarrassments of such fringe sectarian organizations as the Symbionese Liberation Army, which soured public opinion on radical politics.Ice

The Vermont commune scene contained all of these tendencies. Kramer was adjacent to a women-led Free Garage auto repair collective, the “underground railroad” to Canada for draft resisters, and the regional electoral organizing out of which Bernie Sanders’s early political career emerged. His main interest at the time, though, remained revolution, which he and many others still considered imminent. Red Clover stockpiled guns, pamphleteered at local high schools, staged agitprop street theater, and only slowly, painfully began to reckon with the undeniable fact that they had miscalculated.

This was devastating for Kramer, and , codirected with Newsreel comrade John Douglas, arrived in 1975 as an attempt to make sense of the new context, with a sweeping overview of life after what they saw as “The Movement” (a unity that many of those marginalized groups had long questioned). Following dozens of former New Leftists as they struggle to locate foundations for new forms of resistance, ’s three hours constitute one of the most searching examinations of the very conditions of possibility for a US Left seen on-screen in the 1970s. The film, a narrative feature shot in often improvised semidocumentary fashion, breathtakingly captured the natural beauty of America, from New Mexico and Colorado to Vermont, but coupled these observations with ruminations on the nation’s history of racial exploitation and annihilation. The title came from a prison poem by Ho Chi Minh, and as always, Kramer offered fewer answers than open-ended inquiries. But the film’s colorful humanism, somewhat akin to Alain Tanner’s contemporaneous Swiss-French meditation on the reverberations of the 1960s, (1976), marked a departure for him, surely informed by his codirector Douglas. American audiences mostly ignored , but it was one of the most celebrated films of the 1970s by French critics.MilestonesMilestonesJonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000Milestones

If Kramer saw the spirit of 1968 slipping away at home, he thought he spied it elsewhere. The Portuguese Carnation Revolution, overthrowing the world’s longest-running fascist regime, began in 1974, and when he took to Cannes the next year, he stopped over and found the atmosphere electrifying. With friend Phil Spinelli, he returned with a camera and almost no budget. Their resulting goes in search of that initial euphoria — and instead finds the revolution already being supplanted by incipient neoliberalism. Kramer then ventured to Angola, which had recently succeeded in its own anti-colonial struggle against Portugal, hoping to make a film — but he soon contracted malaria and returned home. Back in San Francisco, where he spent most of the ’70s, he lowered his sights, beginning work on a book of photojournalism with a tiny leftist press.MilestonesScenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal

The late ’70s proved a crushing disappointment for Kramer, personally and politically. The ’60s dream appeared dead, and his work went ignored in the United States, even despite such champions as critic Vincent Canby. He flirted with a Hollywood deal, then with working in a crew capacity for Jean-Luc Godard and Francis Ford Coppola, but nothing coalesced. Instead, he moved to Paris with his partner Erika and their daughter Keja, and began making smaller, art-house-oriented works, plugged into an exile network that included other itinerant filmmakers like Chris Marker and Raúl Ruiz.New York Times

Some of Kramer’s adventures landed, such as the raw, startling (1984), an on-set documentary about the making of an experimental film starring a murderous former SS officer. Others didn’t, as when his one mainstream crossover attempt, the postapocalyptic sci-fi flick (1985), deservedly flopped. But the legacies and afterlives of the New Left proved a recurring through line of Kramer’s work. One example was the father/son drama (1987) that united star Paul McIsaac with a young Vincent Gallo on the Portuguese coast. Another was (1989), a four-hour trip down the eastern seaboard from Maine to Key West on the brink of the 1988 presidential election, which finds a nation haunted by many things, including the merely spectral vestiges of a vibrant, hopeful, popular left.Notre naziDieselDoc’s KingdomIceRoute One/USA

By the time a sudden meningitis infection took Kramer’s life just after he turned sixty, he had long since abandoned the incendiary politics of his youth, but he never stopped interrogating their ramifications, or, for that matter, the nature of political cinema. The last feature-length film he completed, (1996), took its title from an old Black Panther slogan: “If you talk the talk, you’d better walk the walk,” as Kramer remembered it. He had his flaws, and in my , I’m unsparing about them. But for whatever critiques we can and should mount — and Kramer, who loved contradictions, very much also embodied them — no other artist holds as strong a claim to being the emblematic filmmaker of the US New Left.Walk the WalkFilms That Explode Like Grenades Robert Kramer and the Search for a Radical Cinemabook