This article appeared in the November 8, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Guns (Robert Kramer, 1980). Courtesy of Re:Voir.

One of the oldest and best-known festivals in the German-speaking world, the Viennale is as renowned for its historical programs as for its new films. Each year it offers several significant retrospectives, along with other “monographies,” tributes, and ancillary programs. The retrospectives often feel like a defiant statement of purpose, a refusal on the part of the programmers to follow well-trodden patterns of curation or surrender to the difficulty of assembling a program made up of many disparate pieces. In 2023, for instance, the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum, with which the festival regularly collaborates on the main retrospective, mounted a large program dedicated to the great Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz. This year, the Viennale turned to another peripatetic master, though one with a more manageable oeuvre than Ruiz, relatively speaking: Robert Kramer.

Like Ruiz, Kramer was an unsettled filmmaker, moving between countries—the United States, where he was born in 1939, and then Vietnam, Portugal, France, Switzerland, Ukraine—and varied production contexts. Politically, he identified with the far left and became involved in revolutionary movements in several of these countries; as a matter of conviction, he worked in a fiercely independent fashion, shrugging off, for all but one film (1985’s Diesel—not in the program due to rights issues), larger budgets and crews. His more novelistic films, such as Milestones (1975, co-directed with John Douglas), frequently feature massive casts of friends, strangers, and comrades; others, like Ghosts of Electricity (1997), were shot on video in Kramer’s backyard, with only himself, his wife, and his daughter as the subjects. As with any great artist, it is only by parsing this remarkably heterogeneous collection of films in their totality that the connections among them, across gulfs of time and space, become readily apparent.

As has been the case in the past, the program is accompanied by a book—Starting Places: A Conversation with Robert Kramer—produced as part of the Austrian Film Museum’s well-loved series of volumes dedicated mostly to individual filmmakers. Yet this excellent collection of interviews with Kramer, edited by Volker Pantenburg, is not exactly “new”; it is a reworking, in English, of a 2001 book by the French historian, biographer, and—as he likes to be known—subtitler for films, Bernard Eisenschitz. The original dialogue between Eisenschitz and Kramer, his longtime associate and friend, took place over three sessions in 1997. Their free-flowing conversation is itself Krameresque: it darts from one subject to another, refusing much in the way of imposed order, and follows inspiration wherever it leads. In the final third of the book, Pantenburg and Eisenschitz include three of Kramer’s own essays, including one in part about death and dying—a subtle reminder of the fact that Kramer fell ill with meningitis right after Eisenschitz met with him to prepare for a last interview, in 1999. He died mere days after that.

While in Vienna, I spoke with Eisenschitz about the genesis of this indispensable book, and about his lifelong association with Robert Kramer and his films.

Robert Kramer died suddenly, just as you were about to get together to speak about what would become his final film, Cities of the Plain (2000). Can you talk a bit about this moment, and how you got involved in the project again, two decades later?

Certainly, his sudden death cut the whole project short. But also, we didn’t have an itinerary for all the things I wanted to cover in the first place. Once I started reading the text again a couple of years ago [to prepare the new version of the book], I discovered that Robert had spoken about a lot of things that still mattered to me. And I found that the lack of specificity in our conversation was not frustrating, but was actually a considerable source of interest. Ours was not the Hitchcock/Truffaut style of doing extended interviews: “Let’s look at this sequence. Tell me how you did that?” Instead, there were a lot more general thoughts about cinema. I found that was still useful to me. It was still exciting.

You were exchanging letters with him in the mid-1960s—somewhat, it seems, before he became “popular” in France, when Milestones (1975) premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. Through archives, and through new reissues of the films, you have been continually thinking through these films and this man’s work.

Well, we [each] knew what the other was doing, even if we didn’t meet that often. I can’t say we were friends who would have lunch or dinner or go to a movie every week, but we met on a regular basis. He was always working on new films, and thus translating one language—French or English—into another, working on subtitles, so I would help with that. That was something that he enjoyed a lot about working in France. He enjoyed doing English subtitles so much. Our first close collaboration was subtitling Guns (1980) in English, and he understood the methods of doing subtitles intuitively. He treated them like silent intertitles, with each title telling a story. Or many were instead like an exclamation, like something that had a weight of its own, even if it related to the flow of talking.

I wanted to ask you about where you were politically when you first started to exchange letters with Kramer, and when you later met in Paris.

Well, it started with May ’68. He had written to me with his impressions of what was going on in France and also in the United States. Right away, we knew we were talking about the same things. And I had discovered his work at [the] Pesaro [Film Festival], thanks to Adriano Aprà [Aprà did not officially become director of the festival until 1990]. The left had a hold over that festival. Then when Robert and I spoke, it was interesting to hear about his failed attempt to bridge the generational divide to an earlier era of leftist filmmakers. I related much more than he did to previous generations of left-wing filmmakers. I always wonder why he was unable to make that connection. He had a bad experience with [documentarian and blacklistee] Leo Hurwitz.

I’ve heard that story, but I didn’t know it was Hurwitz with whom Kramer had such a bad experience.

When Robert went to meet him with some other young leftists, Hurwitz was patronizing, even scornful, saying, in substance, “You young people, you don’t know what it’s like to do political filmmaking. You’re nothing.” Kramer was very hurt by that. In fact, I more or less had the same experience with Hurwitz, but our interaction was very short. And of course, he was speaking to a European, so it was a different matter. When Robert told me that, I suggested he talk to someone like [American documentary filmmaker] Emile de Antonio, who was more or less working from the same basis as he was, thinking through the idea of what violent political action means. I was surprised that they had not crossed paths at some point, and they never did. [Robert] was much more interested in meeting younger people.

Around the time Milestones premiered at Cannes, Kramer immersed himself in the Portuguese revolutionary movement immediately following the Carnation Revolution of April 1974. And what struck me on rewatching his film Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal (1977, co-directed with Philip J. Spinelli) last week was how comprehensive it is, as if he had been able to make the relevant contacts immediately and draw a considerable amount of detail from the people involved in the situation, despite coming from a completely different context.

Well, he did his homework. And from the start, he had an understanding of European culture. He was really between cultures. Even though he was an American, very deeply an American, he felt he belonged to Europe. And then, of course, Portugal was not really Europe at that time. We would say “Europe and Spain and Portugal.” Those were countries out of the European family because of their fascist governments. Robert immersed himself in the Portuguese situation like he did in Vietnam for The People’s War (1970, co-directed with John Douglas and Norman Fruchter), which he made as a part of [the leftist filmmaking collective] Newsreel. At one time, Portugal was as important for the left as Vietnam had been. But Vietnam was a victory [for the left] and Portugal was not. Portugal was a defeat.

There’s a story mentioned in the book that is quite characteristic of why I find Robert Kramer so fascinating. He talks about being asked by some of his fellow comrades to cut a sequence of drunken workers singing “Bella ciao” at the end of Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal. As an artist, he never saw a tension between his political convictions and the complexity of human beings. But for others, they were in obvious tension, and this is an example of it. Some felt he was making the workers look like drunks.

You’re right. Well, Robert was not a solitary man; he was always mixing with other people. He had very easy, superficial—or maybe not so superficial—relationships with all kinds of people. He had absolutely no interest in being organized politically, and when he joined a movement, as in the case with the Portugal film, it was exceptional. Obviously, this openness was extremely important to him as a person and as an artist. It’s not something that you can attribute to anything, other than to Robert. It’s not “typically American” or “typically European.” Nothing like that. That’s just the way he was, the way he functioned, which was also exceptional. That also explains the way he was able to develop a great political culture and film culture around himself, a culture that he built for himself. You characterized it another way when we spoke earlier: he changed emotions into physical action, which is, of course, a very good definition of what his filmmaking is about. Movement was important for him. He was always training for things, and even did physical exercises with the camera. He had an extreme curiosity about everything.

There’s a great part in the book where he mentions that practicing martial arts taught him to move the camera.

Absolutely. I’m glad I led him to say that. [Laughs] That was from one of the in-between sessions we had. We didn’t think too much before recording, but this is one of the things I thought before that I should lead him to speak about. It became one of those discoveries that you make while talking to someone, which is different from, and better than, being more specific about the films. At the same time, as I said before, I feel a certain remorse that we didn’t do the other method as well. Even though I know the book is good the way it is—it stands on its feet. But I look at some sequences in Robert’s films today and I think of how much I would like to ask him about one or another very specific moment.

I hadn’t realized that you were with Kramer the day before he fell sick, and neither did I know how quickly he died after that—falling into a coma after catching infectious meningitis and then dying 10 days later.

Yes, I left him at lunchtime one day. He lived very near to where Serge Daney had lived [in Paris]. He had showed me a work print of Cities of the Plain, with the picture locked. I was going that afternoon to collect an award, and I almost asked him if he wanted to come along. But I realized it would be ridiculous to get an award and show up at the ceremony with a famous director. So I let him go on his way and have his fun. He was heading to the general store, and I was going to the Place de la Bastille.

The next day I learned he had fallen ill. He died within days—it didn’t happen in Paris, which added to the complications. Obviously, it would have been interesting to talk about Cities of the Plain. In making this new version of the book, I was tempted to discuss what I saw as a series of changes in his way of looking at things and his way of making movies at that time. With Ghosts of Electricity, Say Kom Sa (1998), and Cities of the Plain, I felt there was a change there. I’m not sure it would have been a change for the better, quite honestly, but as an artist, he felt a change was necessary to bring in more of what is unsaid—to bring in more magic, which is a temptation that we materialists often have. At some point we say, “Yes, we are materialists, but why don’t we, as materialists, cope with the unknown, with the unseen?” That’s part of our job, and maybe we materialists are better equipped than other people to do it.

Christopher Small is a writer, programmer, and publisher who lives in Prague, Czech Republic. He is responsible for the texts and publications of the Locarno Film Festival, and is co-editor of Outskirts Film Magazine.