Starting Places: A Conversation with Robert Kramer

In summer 1997, French film critic and historian Bernard Eisenschitz met with American film director, screenwriter, and actor Robert Kramer (born 1939) three times to speak in detail about Kramer's life and work, covering thirty years of filmmaking. The exchange between friends starts with his early, activist years and his involvement with the Newsreel Collective, considers essential films like Ice (1969) and Milestones (1975), and traces Kramer's orientation towards Europe and relocation to France in the late 1970s. Going back and forth between Europe, the USA, Portugal, and Vietnam, Kramer was consistently able to work and make films like Doc's Kingdom (1987), Route One/USA (1989), and Starting Place (1993). He passed away in 1999.
 
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 book is complemented by three of Kramer's essays from the 1980s and 1990s and an updated bibliography and filmography.
 
"Trust or, to put it better, speed, came from the fact that we had a common political language that always remained with us, even if we had travelled different paths. And that we were talking about cinema. If he was a master of digression, it was a matter, in conversation as in films, of following the movement of thought."
(Bernard Eisenschitz, 2001)