The People's War

This documentary provides an in-depth examination of protest activities surrounding the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It documents draft resistance, the growth of G.I. coffee houses, the development of alternative media and the early days of Newsreel itself. It is particularly useful in its exploration of the problems the movement faced in using mainstream media to broadcast its message. It is also a document of the philosophies, tactics, and problems of the student movement in the crucial year of 1968. It is most useful when background information can also be provided.

Filmed in Mississippi through the winter and spring of 1966. Six tractor drivers and their families were thrown off the plantation on which they had been working for $6 a day, because they were striking for higher wages. The film follows the families, who lived in tents through the winter, as they began to build their own homes. They were urging people in the surrounding Delta area to go to Washington to demand housing for the many, many others who needed decent and affordable housing. They put up tents across from the White House, hoping to bring the plight of the people of Mississippi before the nation and the world. Made with support from the Delta Ministry, the National Council of Churches, and Neighborhood Developers.

Two films in one that brings together material from the "national security collection” Sporting an M16 and nothing else, Douglas appears in this series of images as a literal "one-man army" -- duplicated photographically and armed to the teeth in a procession of tableaus that confront the power and impotence of firepower. "Home Security" offers a sardonic dissection of America's current pre-emptive 'go it alone' military foreign policies and a delirious portrait of primal 'citizen soldiers' in native habitats (trailors, tracks, flag-draped coffins, and -- most chilling of all -- seated stoically around a TV set in the darkness, lit only by its cyclopean light). It's brilliant, funny, unnerving, confrontational, disturbing stuff; you haven't lived 'til you've seen a small platoon of nude, armed, and dangerous Douglas clones poised for action.

A portrait of those individuals who sought radical solutions to social problems in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Cutting back and forth between six major story lines and more than fifty characters. Exploring the lifestyles and attitudes of the American left during the period following the Vietnam War.

Examines the aims and accomplishments of the New Jewel Movement and the reasons for the Fall 1983 U.S. military invasion. The film puts these events in perspective by tracing Grenada's early history, from the annihilation of the indigenous Carib Indians by the European colonial powers which vied for control of the region and then imported African slaves to grow cash crops for European export, to the evolution of modern Grenadian society, including the oppressive regime of Eric Gairy (1974-79).

This documentary provides an in-depth examination of protest activities surrounding the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It documents draft resistance, the growth of G.I. coffee houses, the development of alternative media and the early days of Newsreel itself. It is particularly useful in its exploration of the problems the movement faced in using mainstream media to broadcast its message. It is also a document of the philosophies, tactics, and problems of the student movement in the crucial year of 1968. It is most useful when background information can also be provided.

Machover and Fruchter's intimate documentary follows the trials and tribulations of a group of Students for a Democratic Society militants in their attempt to politicize and organize the people of Newark, New Jersey. For Amos Vogel, Troublemakers was one of the best films of the New Left because it eschewed "both clichés and propaganda" in favor of "honesty" and "careful exploration." A must watch both for activists and political documentarians. (Doc Films)

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.