Robert Kramer
October 18 to November 28, 2024
Robert Kramer (1939–1999) began his filmmaking career as an activist who regarded cinema as the most efficient and immediate way to express his political beliefs. After his involvement with the radical Newsreel Collective and a series of essential American political films of that era – In the Country (1966), The Edge (1967), Ice (1979), Milestones (1975) – Kramer has relocated to France and reinvented himself as a diaspora filmmaker observing Europe with a set of fresh eyes.
Above all, Robert Kramer was one of those very rare filmmakers for whom filmmaking was not a profession or a passion that they would pursue, but simply and primarily a way of life, a way of existing in the world. Consequently, his films exist far beyond the usual basic categories of fiction, documentary, or experimental cinema, instead presenting themselves as an extension and manifestation of Robert Kramer's remarkable curiosity and desire to understand the world, perhaps even change it a little bit. In his own words: "Everyone mainly thinks of the movies as something that is being done to tell you. I think the first thing, for me at least, is to tell me, to give me some handle on what’s really going on here."
To mark the occasion, Austrian Film Museum will also publish a book of conversations between Robert Kramer and French film critic and historian Bernard Eisenschitz edited by Volker Pantenburg, which will be presented during this year's Viennale.
In summer 1997, Bernard Eisenschitz and Robert Kramer met three times to speak in detail about Kramer's life and work, covering thirty years of filmmaking. The conversation was published in French in 2001 as Points de départ. More than 20 years later, Starting Places: A Conversation with Robert Kramer makes this illuminating account of a "mid-Atlantic" filmmaker available in its original language for the first time. The publication will be complemented by three of Kramer's essays from the 1980s and 1990s and an updated bibliography and filmography.
The joint Austrian Film Museum/Viennale retrospective will present a comprehensive overview of Robert Kramer's career.
Robert Kramer (1939–1999) began his filmmaking career as an activist who regarded cinema as the most efficient and immediate way to express his political beliefs. After his involvement with the radical Newsreel Collective and a series of essential American political films of that era – In the Country (1966), The Edge (1967), Ice (1979), Milestones (1975) – Kramer has relocated to France and reinvented himself as a diaspora filmmaker observing Europe with a set of fresh eyes.
Above all, Robert Kramer was one of those very rare filmmakers for whom filmmaking was not a profession or a passion that they would pursue, but simply and primarily a way of life, a way of existing in the world. Consequently, his films exist far beyond the usual basic categories of fiction, documentary, or experimental cinema, instead presenting themselves as an extension and manifestation of Robert Kramer's remarkable curiosity and desire to understand the world, perhaps even change it a little bit. In his own words: "Everyone mainly thinks of the movies as something that is being done to tell you. I think the first thing, for me at least, is to tell me, to give me some handle on what’s really going on here."
To mark the occasion, Austrian Film Museum will also publish a book of conversations between Robert Kramer and French film critic and historian Bernard Eisenschitz edited by Volker Pantenburg, which will be presented during this year's Viennale.
In summer 1997, Bernard Eisenschitz and Robert Kramer met three times to speak in detail about Kramer's life and work, covering thirty years of filmmaking. The conversation was published in French in 2001 as Points de départ. More than 20 years later, Starting Places: A Conversation with Robert Kramer makes this illuminating account of a "mid-Atlantic" filmmaker available in its original language for the first time. The publication will be complemented by three of Kramer's essays from the 1980s and 1990s and an updated bibliography and filmography.
The joint Austrian Film Museum/Viennale retrospective will present a comprehensive overview of Robert Kramer's career.
Related materials
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