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Le cinéma retrouvé. Kramer. A WarriorLe cinéma retrouvé. Kramer. A WarriorLe cinéma retrouvé. Kramer. A WarriorLe cinéma retrouvé. Kramer. A Warrior

In Berlin 10/90, Robert Kramer delivers, in commenting the

structure of his film, a profession of faith which is valid for the

ensemble of his work: “Perhaps time is continuous, but we smash

it in an explosion of particles, jumping between interior and

exterior. I detest hiding all that. I hate this false fluidity. This

illusion of ‘it happens,’ ‘it flows,’ ‘I found myself there by chance.’”

by Cyril Neyrat

Translated by Sally Shafto

n Berlin 10/90, Robert Kramer delivers, in commenting the structure of his film, a profession of faith which is valid for the ensemble of his work: “Perhaps time is continuous, but we smash

it in an explosion of particles, jumping between interior and exterior. I detest hiding all that. I hate this false fluidity. This illusion of ‘it happens,’ ‘it flows,’ ‘I found myself there by chance.’” Berlin 10/90 was the response to a commission by Arte to make a single shot (plan sequence) lasting an hour. Nothing more contrary to his cinema than the idea of a Kramer walking and filming for an hour in the streets of Berlin, of a filmmaker at the crossroads in direct of the real and its accidents. Kramer gives himself over to the exercise, but gets bored and interrupts the shots after ten minutes. To fulfill Arte’s brief, he must use cunning, find again the construction, inject discontinuity into the flow. He shuts himself up into his bathroom and divides the space in two: on one the side, a chair, where he can sit facing the camera; on the other, a t.v. monitor that diffuses a montage of aborted shots. Kramer improvises the to and fro of the camera from one spot to the other, and adjusts his monologue to the sequence of televised fragments. The closed space opens itself onto multiple exteriors, snippets of past time break the continuity of the present; the recording is not so much that of fluid time as of a time of several speeds, succession of short-circuits, digressions, developments, and suspensions.

With his skull shaved and his khaki vest, Kramer has given himself the appearance of a warrior. He ends his monologue by repeating: “ Perhaps I

filmed to fight against…, ” without saying against what. The phrase is easy to complete. Making a film, for Kramer, is to fight against the dogma of the objectivity of the real, common base to the conservative vision of the world and to the doxa of cinema, notably documentary, as the recording of the same “reality.” Beyond his successive commitments, this combat designates the very form of Kramer’s life, his way of being in the world, of which the cinema is only one privileged mode. If so few works have been as essentially political as

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his, it is not because each film fights for or against a cause or an enemy, but because their form and their method are those of a perpetual war. War, violent or not, of the power of thought against the tyranny of fact. This war has its own geography: type of place and quality of space. Kramer’s privileged place is the margin, the periphery. In Doc’s Kingdom, Doc elected his kingdom in a harbor zone of Lisbon, far from the center. The titles of the first fictions- In the Country, The Edge¬- name this choice of de-centering. To install the narrative “in the margin” is to evade the political struggle that leads the young leftists to the profit of his continuous questioning. The characters do not act, they talk, roam around the action-the fact that it is revolutionary doesn’t change a thing; it comes under the objective fact from which it is a question of subtracting the cinema in order to render it in the infinite power of thought. In these films, the center and the action appear only in the guise of photographs or of brief shots, fleeting scraps of past restored by the movement of thought. To this strategy of withdrawal in the closed places of the word, Milestones

adds a network of margins stretched to the scale of the country. If Daney was able to compare the world explored by this film to an “aquarium,” it is because Kramer’s editing converts the exterior fragments into a single interiority; not because the marginals “live in their world,” isolated from the center and the norm, but because the filmmaker weaves the narrative series in a tight woof of connections which project immediately the least event in a sort of second space. In an exemplary manner, the image of an aquarium defines not so much a sequence as a movement of thought that associates the contemporary series of childbirth, prison, and Vietnam with the past evocations of the youth of the characters, the riots of the 1960s and the genocide of the Native Americans. Although more linear, Route

One/USA recalls this process in its middle, when the editing creates the mental space of the war by the weaving of series: monument to the dead of Vietnam, training camp for the army, present and past memories of Doc, the Civil War, visit to a journalist friend who is conducting an investigation on the violence of the far right, meeting with the drag queen Diane. The other characteristic of the aquarium is its depth. After geography, history: to combat the tyranny of the event is to pierce the screen of the present in order to go back through the buried strata of time. This work of time has an emblematic animal: the tortoise wandering from film to film. There is one in the aquarium of Milestones, oscillating between foreground and background. In Route One/USA, a tortoise interrupts the filmmaker’s trajectory and crosses the road before disappearing into nature. In Dear

Doc, there is another swimming in the river on whose bank Kramer and the doctor reminiscence about the film that they’ve just made together. Tortoises of stone support finally the funerary stones of the Vietnamese combatants who died in the war (Starting Place). Rather than an allegory of



the filmmaker-traveler, we read there an image of time: living fossil, insistent presence of the past in the present.

The bathroom of Berlin 10/90 is no exception, but the prototype of the margin-aquarium as place and quality of space where is articulated the time of time of thought. Kramer says that he found the form of the film when he understood that “the reunification was a footnote to another

story”: the 1930s, Nazism, his father in Berlin…. “What is unity of space

and time, in a situation where the implications even of this unity are only

the spirit which is everywhere at the same moment. My body is here, but

my mind roams in my history, in my associations, in the history of others’

associations. ” This analysis applies equally to Milestones or Route/One

USA: bathroom or country, Kramer’s space-time is not that of the meeting with reality, but of its explosion in the mental operation of the editing.

Still, Kramer’s cinema is never engaged in an abstract exercise, or in a dry intellectual mechanics. The power of thought experiences in a sensitive matter of a rare physical density, very close to the movement of life. There is war only between two combatants. All work of mise en scène, in fiction as in documentaries, aims at creating or at preserving “the feeling that

what is happening there is happening for the first time.” Although performed by actors, the discussions in The Country, The Edge or Ice do not seem any less spontaneous than those of Route One/USA. In Milestones, nothing distinguishes the sequences written by Kramer from the documentary footage. Childbirth is an exemplary fact, with an undeniable uniqueness, and all through the film, this narrative serie has the value of a yardstick by which is measured the degrees of distance with other series. The improvised performance in the bathroom plays the same role of counterpoint in the return of images in the t.v. monitor. The strength of Kramer’s cinema is in this sense the intensity of the tension that he establishes between the first time and the afterwards of thought.

VERSION FRANCAISE [fr]

VERSION ESPAÑOLA [fr]

VERSIONE ITALIANA [it]



N°610, March 2006, p.84-85.

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