Robert Kramer
Biography
Robert Kramer (June 22, 1939 – November 10, 1999) was a left leaning American film director, screenwriter and actor. He directed 19 films between 1965 and 1999, most of them political cinema made from a left-wing point of view. His film À toute allure was entered into the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. Description above from the Wikipedia article Robert Kramer, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Known For & Full Filmography23 Titles
Movie - 1998, 2h 15m • as Meyers
A philosophy teacher restless with the need to do something with his life meets a young woman suspected of driving an artist to his death. He finds the very simple Cecilia irritating but develops a sexual rapport with her. Obsessed with the need to own and tormented by her inability to respond to him, he becomes increasingly violent in a quest he can't name - a quest that slowly begins to undermine his certainties.
Movie - 1990, 2h 15m • as Narrator
Lyrical video letter by Robert Kramer to his friend Paul McIsaac captured during the editing of “Route One/USA”.
Movie - 2013, 2h 15m • as Himself
This distinctly personal journey into the artistic possibilities of independent film is not to be missed. Jonas Mekas, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Robert Kramer and many other visionaries and mavericks of the silver screen – as well as a book seller, a critic and a psychoanalyst – discuss what cinema has meant to them, what it is and what it could be and, implicitly, how it has changed over the 18 years in which this film was shot. Director Boris Lehman leads the charge, drawing in moments of absurdist humour and inventive camera work; he keeps things raw and spontaneous. His encounters with the now much-missed Jean Rouch and Stephen Dwoskin are particularly touching and stand testament to their personal playfulness and candour. An engaging, absorbing, epic odyssey of a movie.
Movie - 1983, 2h 15m • as Le garçon d'étage de l'hôtel
During a robbery that goes wrong, Valentin Tralande kills his accomplices and bank customers.
Movie - 1984, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role
An old man is kidnapped. His interrogation uncovers the biography of a mass murderer: The 80 years old man was a SS leader and responsible for the killing of thousands of people in the Soviet Union. He also "invented" an evil technique of eliminating political prisoners: the manipulated suicide. Thomas Harlan reconstructs the history of a bureaucratic murderer, he also develops a direct connection between the Nationalsocialism and the treatment of prisoners of the RAF terrorists in the Stuttgart isolation prison. Robert Kramer filmed the shooting of Harlan's Wundkanal: Notre Nazi documents a social experiment in which the children of Nazis and of victims meet a real culprit. The reality seems to be stronger that the fiction in Harlan's film. (Edition Filmmuseum)
Movie - 1991, 2h 15m • as Félix Beauvoir
In Brazzaville, in 1944, Alex Emmerich was sentenced to wander the seas by Hélène Latray, the wife of Félix Beauvois, the man Alex loved. In 1962, exiled on Hatray cruises and feeling the coming death, Alex decides to compose for his love a testament: the photographic report of his agony.
Movie - 1985, 2h 15m • as Self
During the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders asked a number of global film directors to, one at a time, go into a hotel room, turn on the camera, and answer a simple question: "What is the future of cinema?"
Movie - 1970, 2h 15m • as Robert
An underground revolutionary group struggles against internal strife to stage urban guerilla attacks against a fictionalized fascist regime in the United States. Interspersed throughout the narrative are rhetorical sequences that explain the philosophy of radical action and restrain the melodrama inherent in the thriller genre.
Movie - 1982, 2h 15m • as Camera Operator
On location in Portugal, a film crew runs out of film while making their own version of Roger Corman's The Day the World Ended (1956). The producer is nowhere to be found and director Munro attempts to find him in hopes of being able to finish the film.
Movie - 1966, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role
Machover and Fruchter's intimate documentary follows the trials and tribulations of a group of Students for a Democratic Society militants in their attempt to politicize and organize the people of Newark, New Jersey. For Amos Vogel, Troublemakers was one of the best films of the New Left because it eschewed "both clichés and propaganda" in favor of "honesty" and "careful exploration." A must watch both for activists and political documentarians. (Doc Films)
Movie - 1978, 2h 15m • as N°122
Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.
Movie - 1968, 2h 15m • as Mental Patient
A troubled antiwar activist plans to assassinate the President of the United States. His resolve forces others in a fragmented and disillusioned group of political allies to face the threat of government counterintelligence and the temptations of middle-age security, and to reexamine their commitment to radical action.
Movie - 1991, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role
The French Ministry of Culture commissioned films on the cultural decade "en chantiers". Robert Kramer makes one of the six short films that illustrates the cultural side of the decade Mittérand. Here we see a director of cinema in the suburbs of Caen, in her room lined with flower paper. This for art and essay cinema. There, the critic Serge Daney in a sailor's cap, for a chat by the fire. An overview of French cinema today, "Pickpocket" on television. Then back on you. The camera slides on the desk that we imagine to be Kramer's. Finally, the camera flies over Paris, slides along the facades, stops on a window, entering the skylight: "The films invite to see ... I invite you to see Jean Genet's hotel room."
Movie - 2002, 2h 15m • as Himself
Devotion investigates the extremely complex and heirarchical relationships among a committed group of Japanese filmmakers who dedicated up to 30 years of their lives making films for one man-Ogawa Shinsuke. Members of Ogawa Pro filmed the student movement of the late 60's; the fight by farmers to save their land from government confiscaton for the Narita airport at Sanrizuka; and the village life of a small farming community, Magino Village, in northern Japan. These heartbreaking and sometimes funny stories have never been told on film before. Rare footage, stills, and diaries with interviews with Oshima Nagisa, Hara Kazuo and Robert Kramer make this historical inquiry visually exciting as well as valuable.
Movie - 2000, 2h 15m • as Peter
Lucien Lourmel, in his fifties, lonely and tired, runs the nightclub "P'tit Bleu", where young talent performs. He is a member of a mafia-like organization that he runs with two friends
Movie - 2024, 2h 15m • as Himself
“I talk about my 20 years of work with the filmmaker Robert Kramer, who died in 1999. It is an account of the gestures and practices of this filmmaker. A way of recalling the central place he attributed to experience to better circumvent the pitfalls of the scenario. It is also the story of a friendship that transformed me. » (Richard Copans)
Movie - 1980, 2h 15m • as Robin
The film concerns a group of disparate types who support themselves by running guns to the Arabs. On the surface, it would seem that these characters are bad guys. In fact, the guns are to be used by a resistance group who hope to continue shipping oil to the West, despite the despotic curbs imposed upon fuel shipments by their leaders.
Movie - 1981, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role
An outstanding performance featuring brilliant storytelling, high stakes drama, and unforgettable character arcs.
Movie - 2000, 2h 15m • as Andy Hellman
The lives of three people faced with an uncertain future. Marguerite, 17, is uncomfortable with her family enviroment and turns to God. Claire, who desperately wants a child, encounters again a former lover. Eva asks the unemployed Jacques, who has been left by his wife and his daughter, to find a missing friend.
Movie - 2000, 2h 15m • as Self
The Portuguese Revolution (1974-75) seen through the eyes of some of the most important photographers and filmmakers that witnessed the event. Their dreams and expectations and what came out of the revolution. With outstanding historical footage.
Movie - 1983, 2h 15m • as American journalist
"Essay on the Military and the Power", a phrase that also belongs to the title of "Gestures & Fragments", sums up the spirit of the film, based on three points of view on the same theme: Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho and Eduardo Lourenço, in their own roles, and the one played by Robert Kramer, as an American journalist bent on seeking explanations for the process of the Portuguese Revolution.
Movie - 1971, 2h 15m • as himself
An outstanding performance featuring brilliant storytelling, high stakes drama, and unforgettable character arcs.
Movie - 2010, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role
On the occasion of the 7th meetings of Digne, Pour un autre cinéma, organized by Pierre Queyrel and which presented a retrospective of Philippe Garrel's cinematographic work, this film is the sound recording of the discussion that the filmmaker made with the audience after the screening of his films Marie pour mémoire, Athanor, Voyage au jardin des morts and Le Bleu des origines.