Special Screenings - The films that cot away

We focus on the work of two American masters: the photographer - turned-filmmaker Jerry Schatzberg and the mavelick independent Robert Kramer, considered by many critics to have been the preeminent filmmaker of the American counterculture. Both directors have long been held in high esteem by European critics but are too little known in their home country - filmmakers that got avay, if you will. We are pleased to recover these major works of American cinema and to present them anew.

ICE (1970), director/writer Robert Kramer, producer David C.Stone

Praised by Jonas Mekas as "the most original and most significant American narrative film of the late sixties," ICe unfolds in a vaguely defined neo-future (looking suspiciously like late-1960s NY) where US has abandoned the war in Vietnam in favor of a new one in Mexico, and where a revolutionary guerilla cell struggles to maintain unity while combating government-issued fascism. In Kramer''s own words: "We want to make films that unnerve, that shake assumptions, that threatment, that do not soft-sell, but hopefully (an inpossible ideal) explode like grenades in people''s faces, or open minds up like a good can opener."

Credits: director/writer, Robert Kramer.
Cast: Robert Kramer, Tom Griffin.
Summary: Melodrama set in contemporary New York City and elsewhere in the U.S. A radical leftist group known as the North American National Committee of International Independent Revolutionary Organizations plans resistance to American aggression abroad and repressio.

1. I spent time before a screening of Robert Kramer''s Ice reading up on Jean Renoir in the library after work. One of the books I looked at was Leo Braudy''s. Of the handful I perused, Durgnat''s was the best.

2. Ice is such a fascinating film! I''ve waited long years to see his work screened. (To my knowledge I did miss one film of his, probably completely my fault, a year or two ago. I arrived in New York in 2001, a year after the city was the site of a big retrospective.) It would make a great, momentous double bill with Garrel''s Les Amants rз█guliers. Escalation / deflation of the revolutionary drive. During one exhibition of the newsreels which the radical network makes to educate the people, the soundtrack contains people giving examples of false consciousness about their political situation (e.g., "I don''t know anything, I''m not an expert," "I have to worry about my house and kids") and black leader is intercut with still photographs of individuals who we might presume are to have made each given statement. Later in the film, when one character (not a radical) is talking to another about how things aren''t that bad, and no revolutionary changes are needed, the black leader re-appears, articulating her "false consciousness" through form even as Kramer allows this character to voice her concerns in a compelling and revealing way. This is ostensibly Kramer''s concern: to connect the revolutionary imperative to human(ist) experience. At any rate, the IMDB lists Leo Braudy as one of the actors in the film. The Leo Braudy? Whose book on Renoir I had in my hands only an hour before seeing the film? Hmmm.

3. After the screening of Ice, I went to a small party. This party was held, I am almost certain, in one of the building complexes where they shot an extended sequence of Ice. I will have to do some research ... or try anyway. But it seemed pretty unmistakeable.

* Waiting for my subway ride home, about 1-ish, I saw a poor guy who was what I guess I''d call "henpeck drunk." Leaning against the wall he would bend over as if about to pass out, and kept bobbing up in a burst of resilient consciousness. All I could do is shake my head and say to myself, "Oh man, I''ve been there." And I''m glad I wasn''t there last night.

** In case you can''t read it in the image above, the words scrawled on this person''s back in the still most often taken from Ice are: "Humanity won''t be happy until the last bureaucrat is dissolved in the blood of the last capitalist."


MILESTONES 91975) Directors/Writers Robert Kramer, John Douglas, producers Barbara Stone, David C. Stone

After a five-year filmmaking hiatus, Robert Kramer collaborated with John Doudlas on this kaleidoscopic "scripted documentary" about the small triumps and significant failures of the American radical movement, here presented in a new restoration direct from the Cannes Film Festival. Juggling six major storylines and more then 50 characters, Kramer and Douglas stare deeply into the ashes of a revolution, trying to understand what went wrong, searching for embers of hope. In the words of THE NEW YORK TIMES'' A.O. Scott, "I have the sense that any attempt to grasp the essence of the ''60s will have to pass through MILESTONES, as sad and compassionate a movie as I have ever seen."

REUNION (1989)
Director Jerry Schatzberg Writer Harold Pinter
Producer Anne Francois

The time is 1933 and the place Stuttgart, where two schoolboys - one Aryan, the other Jewish - find their friendship tested by the encroaching shadow of the Third Reich. Five decades later, the Jewish man (played by Jason Robards), now a naturalized American, returns to Germany to discover what became of his boyhood chum. Masterfully directed by Jerry Schatzberg from a Harold Pinter script that tolds time and memory into a proustain ribbon, this deeply moving portrait of individuality at odds with groupthink is one of the great unknowing movies of the 1980s.


So Iбпm preparing my final year thesis at the moment, on the subject of politically radical filmmakers who emerged in the late бп60s. Robert Kramer, probably the greatest unknown American filmmaker, is forming a significant part of it. Before I ever managed to see his films, Kramer was already one of my favourite filmmakers. Why? Because he said this:

To all film-makers who accept the limited, socially determined rules of clarity of exposition, who think that films must use the accepted vocabulary to б░convince,б▒ we say, essentially: б░You only work, whatever your reasons, whatever your presumed боcontent,бп to support and bolster this society; you are part of the mechanisms which maintain stability through reиCintegation; your films are helping to hold it all together; and, finally, whatever your other descriptions, you have already chosen sides. Dig: Your sense of order and form is already a political choice. Donбпt talk to me about б░contentб▒бкbut if you do, I will tell you that you cannot encompass our б░contentб▒ with those legislated and approved senses, that you do not understand it if you treat it that way. There is no such thing as revolutionary content, revolutionary spirit, laid out for inspection and sale on the bargain basement counter.

Writer-director Robert Kramerбпs futuristic Orwellian Ice refers to the present. Its fascistic U.S. is Richard Nixonбпs. (Surprise.)
The б░Old Leftб▒ was bugabooed by the disastrous Spanish Civil War and buoyed by the example of the Soviet Unionбкuntil Czechoslovakia 1968, the final straw that eliminated Stalin as the explanation of all things bad there. The б░New Left,б▒ bugabooed by the Soviet Union, was buoyed by the example of Cuba and those independent African nations liberated from colonialism. Ice wittily shows a battery-operated б░Empireб▒ descending upon the Third World prior to a shot of actual Third Worlders raising their hands in political victory. But weighing against this image are numerous references to the oppression of African Americans in urban U.S. ghettoes.
New Leftist Kramer, who envisions his own castration by the state (makes sense: Nixon would not want any guy to have any more penis than he had), indicates his awareness of Leftist history. His 16mm film, shot like cinижma-vижritиж, propagandizes for б░interactive collaboration,б▒ the forging of a national revolutionary effort from regional political activities. Its focus is a New York City cell that looks ahead to a national spring offensive. In the meantime, it is rife with internal arguments.
So much comes up in this nuts-and-bolt portrait. For instance, that the government controls the media, characterizing the results of the organizationбпs activismбкan industrial fire, for exampleбкas something non-political. National revolutionary activity must seem meaningless and unconnected.
Remarkably, Kramer shows inequities in the organization and its б░puppet-like,б▒ б░unfeelingб▒ aspectsбкthe cost of its necessary divorce from Soviet mythology. (This film is blissfully bereft of self-pity and paranoia.) And he scores palpable hits, such as noting the efforts by ordinary Americans to convince themselves they are still free (if ever they were).
After the spring offensive, there is an official retaliation, and the film becomes discontinuousбкform expressing content. Indeed, the filmбпs method throughout suggests that Kramer identifies straight plot as akin to reactionaryism; therefore, he plunges us into political discussions without providing an establishing context. His characters know what they are talking about, and Kramer will condescend neither to them or us by having them say things they wouldnбпt just so we can б░catch on.б▒ In the absence of such cues we have to listen hard and sit tight.
Ice visually reverses Pudovkinбпs Mother (1926) while corroborating it: б░Ideas [are] not your own ideas but [are] part of the movement of things.б▒



Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Chicago Reader: УOne of American independent Robert KramerТs strongest УundergroundФ features (1969), arguably his best, made in and around New York before he resettled in Paris. This potent and grim SF thriller about urban guerrillas of the radical left, shot in the manner of a rough documentary in black and white, has an epic sweep to it. (Like many politically informed art movies of the period, starting with Alphaville and including even THX 1138, it was set in the future mainly as a ruse for critiquing the present.) Now as then, the power of this creepy movie rests largely in its dead-on critique of the paranoia and internecine battles that characterized revolutionary politics during the 60s; the mood is terrorized and often brutal, but the behavioral observations and some of the tenderness periodically call to mind early Cassavetes. A searing, unnerving history lesson, itТs an American counterpart to some of Jacques RivetteТs conspiracy pictures, a desperate message found in a bottle.Ф

Jonas Mekas said that С Ice С was Уthe most original and most significant American narrative film of the late sixties.

Born in New York in 1939, Robert Kramer ranks as one of the most original directors of American underground cinema. This exacting loner, the bard of the counterculture, has worked on the fringe both in his homeland and in France. In 1967, he founded The Newsreel, a militant collective that was among the first to produce films about the Vietnam war and its impact in America. His films constantly work at wearing away the impermeability of documentary and fiction forms, paying special attention to his characters. In 1969, Kramer visited Hanoï and brought back PeoplesТ War. He returned 23 years later, keen on understanding what had become of Vietnam in the nineties - the result was Starting Place/Point de départ. The country was then in pieces; the old generation had its pride intact whereas the new generation had forgotten. Starting Place is also a melancholic stroll among faces, objects and vestiges that question our relationship with memory and images. His exploration of the American heartlands has been the other fixture of his work. Milestones (1976) is the polyphonic evocation of a rural community, which paints a pessimistic portrait of American society in the seventies. In 1989, he made Route One/USA - Route One is an historic, now disused, road that runs down the east coast. Through KramerТs eyes, this route becomes the focal point that condenses American history and its traditions of violence, blends fiction and documentary, sets up echoes between collective memory and private recollections. This geographerТs work evokes wars (from the Civil War to Vietnam), confronts feminists with Christian fundamentalists, examines the demands of minority communities. There gradually takes forms a mosaic of America and its history as a living organism with a thousand facets.


Bridging the gap between underground agit-prop and creative independent cinema (as well as blurring the line between drama and mockumentary), Ice is set in an unspecified time in the early ''70s, when the United States has become involved in an unpopular war against Mexico (a clear analogy to the Vietnam war) and the Federal Government has stepped up internal security at the expense of individual freedoms. A handful of radical left-wing organizations have formed a loose alliance with the shared goal of bringing down the State and launching a guerilla revolution in America. Rather than mapping out the full game plan of the radicals, or detailing their full grievances against the federal government, Ice instead focuses on the nuts and bolts of the political underground -- strategy meetings, smuggling fugitive radicals from city to city, establishing safe houses, obtaining data on police and military activities, staging violent actions, trying to encompass the goals of a number of disparate groups in a united front, activists demanding their parents take care of wounded comrades, and weary organizers easing their tensions with drugs, alcohol, or sex. Written and directed by political filmmaker Robert Kramer, a founder of the leftist film collective Newsreel, Ice was shot on a budget of only 12,000 dollars (most of which came from a grant from the American Film Institute), and features a primarily non-professional cast.
All Movie Guide


Films:
Faln (USA / Venezuela, 1965, 30'')
In the Country (USA, 1966, 65'')
The Edge (USA, 1967, 105'')
Ice (USA, 1969, 132'')
People''s War (1969, USA / Vietnam del Nord, 40'')
Milestones (USA, 1975, 206'')
Scenes From the Class Struggle in Portugal (USA / Portogallo 1977, 90'')
Guns (Francia, 1980, 95'')
Un grand jour (en France) / Naissance (Francia, 1981, 42'')
A toute allure (Francia, 1982, 61'')
La peur (serie Saga, un magazin de la connaissance) (Francia, 1983, 6'')
Sarkis at Woodrow Wilson / Musée d''Art Moderne (1984, 104'') (videoperformance con Sarkis e Barre Phillips)
Notre nazi / Unser Nazi (Francia / RFT, 1984, 114'')
Diesel (Francia, 1985, 90'')
Un plan d''enfer (Francia, 1986, 17'') (film industriale)
Doc''s Kingdom (Francia/Portogallo/USA, 1987, 90'')
X - Country (USA, 1987, video, 144'') (inedito)
Route One USA (Francia, 1989, 240'')
Dear Doc (Francia, 1989, 36'') (videolettera a Paul McIsaac, inedito)
Maquette (brouillon de film) (Francia 1990, video, 60'') (inedito, incompiuto)
Live / Berlin (Francia, 1990-91, video, 60'')
Sous le vent (serie La culture en chantier) (Francia, 1991, video, 31'')
Series of Video Letters: Steve Dwoskin / Robert Kramer (Francia / Gran Bretagna 1991, 121'') (inedito)
Pour Fidel Intrusca Fernandez, Pérou (serie Ecrire contre l''oubli) (Francia, 1991, video, 4'')
Point de départ / Starting Place (Francia /Vietnam 1993, 90'')
La Roue - episodi Lemond e Hampston (Francia, 1993, video, 7''+ 7'')
Walk the Walk (Francia / Svizzera, 1996, 114'')
Le Manteau (Francia, 1996, 67'')
Ghosts of Electricity ( serie Locarno demi-siècle: réflexion sur l''avenir) (Svizzera 1997, 19'')

Watch Robert KRAMER''s"ICE" film
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Plot of Film
Campus Unrest in late 1960s & early 1970s at UCLA
Political groups in 60th - watch