Robert Kramer

“I talk about my 20 years of work with the filmmaker Robert Kramer, who died in 1999. It is an account of the gestures and practices of this filmmaker. A way of recalling the central place he attributed to experience to better circumvent the pitfalls of the scenario. It is also the story of a friendship that transformed me. » (Richard Copans)

Open details →

This last testimony of Robert Kramer (1939-1999) is a moving documentary with the independent American film director, in which he speaks of his political activism, his way of filmmaking, his relationship with Portugal and the revolutionary movements.

Open details →

This distinctly personal journey into the artistic possibilities of independent film is not to be missed. Jonas Mekas, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Robert Kramer and many other visionaries and mavericks of the silver screen – as well as a book seller, a critic and a psychoanalyst – discuss what cinema has meant to them, what it is and what it could be and, implicitly, how it has changed over the 18 years in which this film was shot. Director Boris Lehman leads the charge, drawing in moments of absurdist humour and inventive camera work; he keeps things raw and spontaneous. His encounters with the now much-missed Jean Rouch and Stephen Dwoskin are particularly touching and stand testament to their personal playfulness and candour. An engaging, absorbing, epic odyssey of a movie.

Open details →

On the occasion of the 7th meetings of Digne, Pour un autre cinéma, organized by Pierre Queyrel and which presented a retrospective of Philippe Garrel's cinematographic work, this film is the sound recording of the discussion that the filmmaker made with the audience after the screening of his films Marie pour mémoire, Athanor, Voyage au jardin des morts and Le Bleu des origines.

Open details →

Devotion investigates the extremely complex and heirarchical relationships among a committed group of Japanese filmmakers who dedicated up to 30 years of their lives making films for one man-Ogawa Shinsuke. Members of Ogawa Pro filmed the student movement of the late 60's; the fight by farmers to save their land from government confiscaton for the Narita airport at Sanrizuka; and the village life of a small farming community, Magino Village, in northern Japan. These heartbreaking and sometimes funny stories have never been told on film before. Rare footage, stills, and diaries with interviews with Oshima Nagisa, Hara Kazuo and Robert Kramer make this historical inquiry visually exciting as well as valuable.

Open details →

Lucien Lourmel, in his fifties, lonely and tired, runs the nightclub "P'tit Bleu", where young talent performs. He is a member of a mafia-like organization that he runs with two friends

Open details →

The Portuguese Revolution (1974-75) seen through the eyes of some of the most important photographers and filmmakers that witnessed the event. Their dreams and expectations and what came out of the revolution. With outstanding historical footage.

Open details →

The lives of three people faced with an uncertain future. Marguerite, 17, is uncomfortable with her family enviroment and turns to God. Claire, who desperately wants a child, encounters again a former lover. Eva asks the unemployed Jacques, who has been left by his wife and his daughter, to find a missing friend.

Open details →

A philosophy teacher restless with the need to do something with his life meets a young woman suspected of driving an artist to his death. He finds the very simple Cecilia irritating but develops a sexual rapport with her. Obsessed with the need to own and tormented by her inability to respond to him, he becomes increasingly violent in a quest he can't name - a quest that slowly begins to undermine his certainties.

Open details →

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."

Open details →

In Brazzaville, in 1944, Alex Emmerich was sentenced to wander the seas by Hélène Latray, the wife of Félix Beauvois, the man Alex loved. In 1962, exiled on Hatray cruises and feeling the coming death, Alex decides to compose for his love a testament: the photographic report of his agony.

Open details →

Lyrical video letter by Robert Kramer to his friend Paul McIsaac captured during the editing of “Route One/USA”.

Open details →

During the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders asked a number of global film directors to, one at a time, go into a hotel room, turn on the camera, and answer a simple question: "What is the future of cinema?"

Open details →

An old man is kidnapped. His interrogation uncovers the biography of a mass murderer: The 80 years old man was a SS leader and responsible for the killing of thousands of people in the Soviet Union. He also "invented" an evil technique of eliminating political prisoners: the manipulated suicide. Thomas Harlan reconstructs the history of a bureaucratic murderer, he also develops a direct connection between the Nationalsocialism and the treatment of prisoners of the RAF terrorists in the Stuttgart isolation prison. Robert Kramer filmed the shooting of Harlan's Wundkanal: Notre Nazi documents a social experiment in which the children of Nazis and of victims meet a real culprit. The reality seems to be stronger that the fiction in Harlan's film. (Edition Filmmuseum)

Open details →

During a robbery that goes wrong, Valentin Tralande kills his accomplices and bank customers.

Open details →

"Essay on the Military and the Power", a phrase that also belongs to the title of "Gestures & Fragments", sums up the spirit of the film, based on three points of view on the same theme: Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho and Eduardo Lourenço, in their own roles, and the one played by Robert Kramer, as an American journalist bent on seeking explanations for the process of the Portuguese Revolution.

Open details →

On location in Portugal, a film crew runs out of film while making their own version of Roger Corman's The Day the World Ended (1956). The producer is nowhere to be found and director Munro attempts to find him in hopes of being able to finish the film.

Open details →

Reel 13 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

Open details →

Open details →

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.

Open details →

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

Open details →

A woman translates the front page of H.P. Lovecraft's book “The Silver Key”. Her husband, a journalist, listens. The book describes the conflicts between the real and the imaginary, and tells how Randolph Carter, the film's character, leaves everyday life in search of his childhood dreams.

Open details →

Open details →

An underground revolutionary group struggles against internal strife to stage urban guerilla attacks against a fictionalized fascist regime in the United States. Interspersed throughout the narrative are rhetorical sequences that explain the philosophy of radical action and restrain the melodrama inherent in the thriller genre.

Open details →

A troubled antiwar activist plans to assassinate the President of the United States. His resolve forces others in a fragmented and disillusioned group of political allies to face the threat of government counterintelligence and the temptations of middle-age security, and to reexamine their commitment to radical action.

Open details →

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)

Open details →

A very rare film "manifesto" by Mekas made in 1968 in New York, in the activist spirit of positive revolutionary change; his source for inspiration is the American Declaration of Independence.

Open details →

The final film from expatriate American filmmaker Robert Kramer, who died in France in 1999. Kramer and collaborators tell the somber life story of Ben. After leaving his homeland as a youth, he is greeted in France by menial jobs in industry. In time, he opens a fruit market, finds a wife, fathers a child, and has it all come crashing down when he learns his mother is in danger back home. Upon his return to France, he finds his life in ruin.

Open details →

[...] "History has made Vietnam one of my favourite places... The links that you establish with people and places very often seem totally unexpected. But it is not a question of chance. It is, among other things, a question of history, of a sequence of events, "that's how it is". Once that is admitted, you can spend a lot of time trying to understand why that is how it is." (Robert Kramer)

Open details →

In DES GRAINES DANS LE VENT, the handful of British workers tramping towards Amsterdam to fight for their rights in the “European March Against Unemployment, Insecurity and Exclusion” look pretty lost. Kramer accompanies the little group, but is overcome with doubt from the beginning: “You shouldn’t being doing something like this if you don’t want to, Robert.” Kramer leaves the group after a week, after being given advice about what isn’t working in the film that is still in the process of being made.

Open details →

A house in the countryside. The trees, the cliff, the fire. A prehistoric image. Erika in the garden. Keja in the house. The river. A road tunnel. Television images: war, sports, porn movies, disasters in Africa, action movies. A man in dark glasses (Kramer) speaks of the man of the future, who can transmit the totality of his sensory experience, without the projection is no longer necessary: ​​there will be more here, more body. "All the movements in" Ghosts of Electricity "are tai chi movements, I try to work with the hands and the lower part of the body, pivoting only on the hips, without moving my feet. it comes from a whole physical tradition, it exists in "performance art", and many other people have followed the same path. "

Open details →

I saw this happen: Raye left home. Why? To see what was waiting for her out there. Europe! It didn't matter where she went, the Mediterranean coast, Strasbourg, Zurich, Berlin, she's young. Then her father, Abel, left. Perhaps he wanted something else to happen to him. Things began to happen on the ship, but Odessa is where it really began. So Nellie was left there alone. Maybe she couldn't have said it, but that's what she needed. I mean, to be alone with herself. That's why she sent Raye and Abel away. So without moving, with everything around her moving very fast and also in the microscope which is her work, Nellie had her own trip to make. As for this kind of travelling, that's what each of us did. I know, I was there.

Open details →

In this film from late in his career, Kramer returns to Hanoi after nearly 25 years to re-envision the city’s struggle through an uncertain and daunting past, present, and future. The Vietnamese characters in the film are diverse: Kramer’s former guide from an earlier visit in 1969; a tight-rope walker in the national circus; a man who took photos of B-52s and another who lost his fingers shooting them down.

Open details →

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."

Open details →

MAQUETTE is an excursion into the world of dance and other cultural activities in Toulon: “There is a film that I didn’t complete. I shot it in Châteauvallon with a dance group called Artefact. A rough cut of it exists entitled MAQUETTE, but that’s all I did with it.”

Open details →

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.

Open details →

An angry young man goes to Europe to find his father, a '60s radical turned doctor in exile.

Open details →

A short film commissioned by the Société Lyonnaise de Banque to present its business plan to the staff.

Open details →

A film about birth Robert Kramer directed for TV.

Open details →

In Our Nazi, we are plunged into a situation we barely, and only slowly, understand: the filming of Thomas Harlan’s experimental feature Wundkanal (1984), in which true-life ex-SS officer Alfred Filbert, now very old, is ‘put on trial’ for the camera, without him suspecting what is to come or why he is really there. Kramer’s confronting film is an essay about the sticky complicity of everyone present at this event, each bringing their own history, their own political ideology, their own desires to take revenge, to seek redemption or compassion, or just to put their heads down and ‘get the job done’ professionally, or (in the case of Filbert) to be a star, a part of the magnificent, magical, seductive world of cinema, even if it kills him.

Open details →

"Essay on the Military and the Power", a phrase that also belongs to the title of "Gestures & Fragments", sums up the spirit of the film, based on three points of view on the same theme: Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho and Eduardo Lourenço, in their own roles, and the one played by Robert Kramer, as an American journalist bent on seeking explanations for the process of the Portuguese Revolution.

Open details →

On location in Portugal, a film crew runs out of film while making their own version of Roger Corman's The Day the World Ended (1956). The producer is nowhere to be found and director Munro attempts to find him in hopes of being able to finish the film.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

An underground revolutionary group struggles against internal strife to stage urban guerilla attacks against a fictionalized fascist regime in the United States. Interspersed throughout the narrative are rhetorical sequences that explain the philosophy of radical action and restrain the melodrama inherent in the thriller genre.

Open details →

A troubled antiwar activist plans to assassinate the President of the United States. His resolve forces others in a fragmented and disillusioned group of political allies to face the threat of government counterintelligence and the temptations of middle-age security, and to reexamine their commitment to radical action.

Open details →

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.

Open details →