Tribute to Kramer

Ice

Regia / Direction Robert Kramer
Con/With Tom Griffin, Paul McIsaac, Robert Kramer
Stati Uniti, 1969, 133’

The United States and Mexico are at war. In New York, a group of illegal immigrants mobilize against the fascist regime. When one of them is tortured by two government agents, the members of the group decide that it’s time to act.

Walk the walk

Regia / Direction Robert Kramer
Belgio 1995, 115’

Nellie is a researcher in microbiology she works between her laboratory and the Camargue. Abel is a runner and a coach. She is white he is black. Their daughter, Raye is a singer who just turned twenty. The three of them are a family that feels like an encounter that has come to an end. They each take off on their own: Raye is the first to leave on foot towards Germany. Abel sails to Russia aboard a merchant ship. Nellie stays and continues her journey through the micro-organisms she studies with a microscope. They want to see and feel the ways of the world, experiece the shape of the landscape, even if it means risking everything.

Berlin 10/90

Regia / Direction Robert Kramer
Francia 1990, 60’

“In 1991, thanks to a grant, I stayed in Berlin for a while. I wanted to work on the fall of the Wall and the ensuing reunification. But traces of the Holocaust kept bringing me back to the heart of history. Places bore witness to the past with a violence I had never experienced. La Sept ordered me a sixty-minute sequence shot for the “Live” series. Four times I tried to retrieve the connection with present. Nothing suited me. Finally, I settled for a minimal option. I found myself in my bathroom, the tiles of which reminded me of the torture centre in Berlin’s memorial space “Topography of terror”, and without consciously meaning it, I resumed the conversation started with Notre Nazi.”
(Robert Kramer, “La fin de l’histoire”, Documentaires n° 8, 1994.)

This 60-minute film is part of a series comissioned for a television programme. The project is to represent reality without assembling fragments of space captured in discontinuous time (editing), but through the passage of real time (a unique 60 minute take)
Berlin 10/90 calls on an intuitive perception of reality — to be in the present with time. The focus becomes less about the subject and more about the person behind the camera and his presence which records without delay or deviation what is happening. The camera rolling in real time becomes the tool through which we can see the movement of his thoughts at work.