Additional Particular Screenings, Etc. 1 // Date: Monday, 13.9.2010 // Time: 20h // Duration: 195min   Milestones, Robert Kramer and John Douglas, 1975, English, DVD   Written and directed by two founding members of Newsreel group (a militant collective), after The People's War (1970) and before Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal (1977), Milestones is described as, "a many-faceted portrait of those individuals who sought radical solutions to social problems in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. It cuts back and forth between six major story lines and more than fifty characters, and across a vast landscape, to explore the lifestyles and attitudes of the American left who faced both personal and historical transitions in the period following the Vietnam War." (Laurence Kardian). And as, "interweaving different modes of address and multiple story lines about his generation’s move toward spiritual and familial pursuits, Milestones plays on a theme evident in earlier Kramer films: the idea of revolution as a living process." (Michael Joshua Rowin). The film is dedicated to the people of the former state of North Vietnam. Featuring writer and poet Grace Paley among others. This supplemental screening series begins with an extended look at the so-called abolition of the distinction between art and life to which this film portends.   Milestones was screened in 1975 at Cannes, as part of the 'Critic's Fortnight' series. Termed, "one of the greatest and most committed of all radical American filmmakers", by AFA, Robert Kramer nonetheless could only generate film financing in France, and moved to France in 1980. A supposed quote: " To all filmmakers who accept the limited, socially determined rules of clarity of exposition, who think that films must use the accepted vocabulary to "convince," we say, essentially: "You only work, whatever your reasons, whatever your presumed 'content,' to support and bolster this society. You are part of the mechanisms which maintain stability through re-integration. Your films are helping to hold it all together. And, finally, whatever your other descriptions, you have already chosen sides. Dig: Your sense of order and form is already a political choice. Don't talk to me about 'content' - but if you do, I will tell you that you cannot encompass our 'content' with those legislated and approved senses, that you do not understand it if you treat it that way. There is no such thing as revolutionary content, revolutionary spirit laid out for inspection and sale on the bargain basement counter." We want to make films that unnerve, that shake assumptions, that threaten, that do not soft-sell, but hopefully (an impossible ideal) explode like grenades in people's faces, or open minds up like a good can opener." (Imdb)   Interview with Robert Kramer and John Douglas: www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC10-11folder/KramerDouglasIntLevin.html       >>upcoming: 27.9. Additional Particular Screenings, Etc. 2 11.10 Additional Particular Screenings, Etc. 3 25.10 Additional Particular Screenings, Etc. 4     > September 13, 2010   <- Back to: general public
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