In the Country
During the Vietnam War, a young revolutionary, isolated with his lover in a country house, struggles to comprehend his self-inflicted inactivity and his alienation from former political associates.
Robert Kramer
Robert Kramer
Also Directed by Robert Kramer
The French Ministry of Culture commissioned films on the cultural decade "en chantiers". Robert Kramer makes one of the six short films that illustrates the cultural side of the decade Mittérand. Here we see a director of cinema in the suburbs of Caen, in her room lined with flower paper. This for art and essay cinema. There, the critic Serge Daney in a sailor's cap, for a chat by the fire. An overview of French cinema today, "Pickpocket" on television. Then back on you. The camera slides on the desk that we imagine to be Kramer's. Finally, the camera flies over Paris, slides along the facades, stops on a window, entering the skylight: "The films invite to see ... I invite you to see Jean Genet's hotel room."
Combining newsreel footage, still photographs, interviews, and analytical narration, this documentary focuses on the antifascist, anti-imperialist efforts of labor groups, peasants, and working-class soldiers to liberate Portugal from the control of the government of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.
Route One is the first major U.S. highway. 5000 km along the Atlantic coast, from the Canadian border to the tip of Florida. Doc, a physician who spent many years in Africa, returns to the U.S. and decides to reconnect with his home country by walking the legendary Route One.
Contre l'Oubli (Against Oblivion) is a compilation of 30 French filmmakers, Alain Resnais and Jean Luc Godard among them, who use film to make a plea on behalf of a political prisoner. Jean Luc Godard and Anne Marie Mieville's film concerns the plight of Thomas Wanggai, West Papuan activist who has since died in prison. The short films were commissioned by Amnesty International.
A young couple who are amateur roller-skating buffs practice their chosen avocation at a Parisian roller rink. Their hopes rise with a chance to go to Chicago to compete, especially when a magazine reporter assures them that his company will back them -- but then lets them know some sex-related business is a part of the package. Caught up in the couple's drama are several other characters who look like they might need some help themselves, making the problem of how to get to the Windy City seem more and more insoluble.
In 1990, Robert Kramer receives a grant from the Ford Foundation. He goes to Berlin for 6 months, where he makes an hour long single video shot (for a festival) in the bathroom of his apartment. Facing the camera, the filmmaker thinks, alone, about the fall of the Berlin wall. "I've already spent 6 weeks here. With all the events in eastern Europe, it was like a hurricane. Berlin is a city where you feel the biggest changes, where you meet Polish immigrants, or others, escaping. Berlin will become a very violent city. What happens in eastern Europe is a bit like the end of the civil war in the US. The North, and all it's power stimulated by years of war, took over the South, who has lost everything. And there is this German past, the war, on all levels.
The film concerns a group of disparate types who support themselves by running guns to the Arabs. On the surface, it would seem that these characters are bad guys. In fact, the guns are to be used by a resistance group who hope to continue shipping oil to the West, despite the despotic curbs imposed upon fuel shipments by their leaders.
Lyrical video letter by Robert Kramer to his friend Paul McIsaac captured during the editing of “Route One/USA”.
This film project was made in 1996 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the cinema.