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BRUISER reached out to experts on Robert Kramer — academics Benjamin Crais and Whitney Strub, who has a forthcoming book on the radical filmmaker — to reflect on Kramer and John Douglas’ Milestones, asking them what this film means to us 50 years after its premiere in May 1975. Milestones is available for rental at Baltimore’s Beyond Video.
Whitney Strub
I first saw Milestones in 2009 and have seen it about eight times since, most recently about a month ago. For a film that’s so much about historicity, it moves through time with strikingly little change in how it affects me: I sit there at the end of its 3+ hours as the closing shots of a waterfall crash down and muse, these people think they’re living in the aftermath of the Sixties, but they have no idea what’s about to come. 1975 may have felt like wreckage at the time, but it wouldn’t take long for it to appear a placid interregnum before the capitalist meat-grinder of the Eighties began to churn: Reagan’s evisceration of the welfare state, the succumbing of the New Deal order to neoliberalism and austerity, the militarization of the carceral state, genocidal AIDS neglect, the mass privatization of all those wide-open spaces John Douglas and Robert Kramer so beautifully captured. So, it’s a film haunted by what preceded it, which haunts me for what it couldn’t
know about what came next.
It’s not like Milestones allows for romantic projections of some prelapsarian Seventies, though. I can’t think of any U.S. films from that era made by and about white people that so insistently present the histories of racial violence as the conditions of possibility for contemporary white life; there is no separating the introspection, road trips, communes, and other trappings of these characters and their milieu from the slavery, Black subjugation, and indigenous genocide upon which they’re built. Most of the characters know it, and none really know what to do about it. I’m not sure Kramer and Douglas do either — Benjamin, I’ll be curious to hear your take on this — but to their credit, they offer no simple solutions. Milestones caught flak from many U.S. leftists of its moment, and not without some compelling reasons, but the sheer act of making whiteness visible, and grounding it in the foundational violence that enabled it, anticipates some of the core analyses of 1990s scholarship in critical whiteness studies. You won’t find much like this in the contemporaneous New Hollywood, love those films as I do.
Among other things, I think Milestones is critical historicization of post-New Left white bourgeois ennui and a searching portrait of an after that turned out to be a before. But that’s all intellectualizing a bit. It’s a deeply-felt film, and that first time I saw it, it absolutely floored me. I remember sitting in Anthology Film Archives on Manhattan’s Lower East Side even after the lights came on to collect myself, and walking out to Sara D. Roosevelt Park, not far from where the opening scenes were shot, in a daze. Kramer and Douglas were clearly horrified by America but intoxicated by its beauty too, which is more or less my own sentiment, and the entire film mines the ensuing contradictions so powerfully, in ways that still reverberate.
Benjamin Crais
To tell the truth, the Kramer film I’ve thought of the most over the past few months has not been Milestones, but rather The Edge. In that film, a group of friends and comrades are forced to confront the nature of their commitment to radical change — a questioning that proceeds against the background of heightened state surveillance and the ongoing bombardment of Vietnam. The film inhabits the gap between the relative ineffectiveness of existing political practices and the historical task at hand — a gulf that many of us in the imperial core are starkly facing right now. One character attempts to make the leap and falls, but the effort clarifies the situation like the cold, white light of a flare.
It’s interesting, then, to return to Milestones right now — a film which, as you allude to, was criticized for not directly depicting the struggle against the state. More than other films from that era of the New Left, it has a fascinating in media res quality that you capture well in your letter. Like The Edge (and virtually all of Kramer’s films), Milestones is really about finding one’s bearings — of orienting oneself, to use some of the cartographic language he was so fond of. For me, that’s the core of the politics of Kramer’s films: it’s never “let me tell you how things are” but rather “where am I? where are we (in history)?” And our historical distance gives us a quite different sense of their moment. For a film that appears to us as documenting the break-up of a political moment — and which is so often quite melancholic — Milestones also proposes regeneration, rebirth. Kramer in a 1976 Jump Cut interview: “imperialism has entered its final crisis . . . I think we have a better politics now than we ever had before, that we’re at the beginning of a really rich anti-imperialist politics.” It’s the childbirth at the film’s end, the water rushing over the rocks. We can read this with a kind of historical irony, but it also seems closely related to what you describe in your letter. If it’s insular in the way Kramer’s early films often are, it also faces outwards: towards histories of labor and racialized violence, the geography of the U.S., to generations past and future.
The question of what does Milestones* mean to us 50 years later?* is closely linked to that of the meaning of the sixties and seventies (and their closeness or distance from us now). I have seen discussions of Milestones enlist it in a standard declensionist narrative of the period that sees politics giving way to “micropolitics,” struggles to lifestyles, but I’m not sure Milestones is so easily assimilable. That’s the powerful in media res quality of it: you can analytically grasp the fraying threads perhaps, but it’s still a unity.
WS
That’s funny about The Edge — it’s a film I thought about a lot during the Biden years, since its depiction of a left in stasis mirrored my own experience of the fairly vicious internecine combat during that disorganized spell, as we engaged in protracted pissing matches over things like Jamaal Bowman (former New York congressman, a DSA member who controversially and unfortunately voted to fund Israel’s Iron Dome, dispatched in 2024 by an AIPAC-sponsored centrist) and really collectively missed the moment — at least, until Palestine reunited most of the left in late 2023. And Ice, for its part, returned to circulation when Donald Trump was first elected — there was a great series, again at Anthology Film Archives, called “Inauguration of the Displeasure Dome,” and I think there was fairly widespread sentiment that much of the Trump 1 era felt like 1968, or at least what people who weren’t around then imagine 1968 felt like, that escalating intensity and tearing of the
social fabric that Kramer depicted so vividly.
But to return to Milestones, I think my closest personal experience to its mood came around 2005, when it felt like the US left completely collapsed. I had been heavily involved in the 2000 Ralph Nader campaign as an undergrad, but whatever promise that and the Green Party had seemed to offer had by then evaporated entirely. Bush building the whole new post-9/11 national-security apparatus of DHS (including ICE) and getting re-elected was a punch to the gut. And I had thrown myself into the antiwar movement in the buildup to Bush’s invasion of Iraq, but we lost there too. Everything felt hopeless and demobilized, and I had a string of very contingent and uncertain academic appointments that kept me moving from Miami to Los Angeles to Philadelphia, not great for planting roots in community work. So that feeling of collapse and dislocation and lack of bearings, I know it, and I think Kramer and Douglas nail it.
What they mostly miss, though, are the ongoing collective movements of the Seventies. I definitely agree that Milestones isn’t peddling any reductive Me Generation/Culture of Narcissism nonsense, but there is a solipsism at play: because Douglas’s and Kramer’s version of the left — basically, the SDS/Newsreel version — fell, that meant “the Movement” was over. But of course, movements actually proliferated, and one of the core contradictions of Milestones for me is that here’s a film by men that has such solidarity with women — but misses women’s liberation as a movement. It’s strikingly forward-thinking for a film by straight men in its incorporation of gay characters and casual intimacy — but oblivious to gay liberation, which at that exact moment was marked by robust debate over radicalism vs. assimilation and incremental change. Speaking of Jump Cut, they issued a polemical jeremiad against the film, taking some of these points and amplifying them to quite vitriolic levels. I think it’s a bit over the top, though you have to love the title: “White punks on revolution.”
Kramer was never programmatic as a political filmmaker, even in the revolutionary Ice (this in contrast to his personal political work, where I do think he tended toward ultraleftist posturing, at least early on). I believe he was deeply influenced by Troublemakers, the 1966 documentary about the Newark Community Union Project, in which he appeared. Its makers, Norm Fruchter and Bob Machover, after chronicling the near-impossibility of achieving even minor municipal-level advances by the SDS “interracial movement of the poor” through “legitimate” participatory democracy, end not with a specific program but rather throwing the classic What is to be done? at the viewer. That’s how I take Douglas’ and Kramer’s cinematic injunction in Milestones too.
BC
In the Cahiers roundtable on Milestones, Serge Daney makes a comment that I often return to — one that I think bears on your observation about the film’s solipsism and the question about its political implications. Replying to Pascal Bonitzer, Daney emphasizes the film’s reflexive concern with its standpoint of enunciation (a problem “for the question of the collective statement: the place you are speaking from”). How, he asks, “do you not take their place and at the same time record their existence, their oppression, their resistance?” Here, Daney is referring first and foremost to the film’s treatment of race — particularly the still black-and-white images of racialized violence that interrupt the conversations between white radicals and hippies that compose the majority of the film. (Indeed, this is what
you referenced in your first missive: how Kramer and Douglas work to render whiteness visible.) This concern with not speaking in the place of another (or, conversely, of speaking in one’s own name) strikes me as a basic political and aesthetic principle of Milestones. If the film doesn’t depict the other collective movements of the seventies, some nonetheless appear at its edges (e.g. the American Indian Movement, the almost mumbled reference to DRUM, etc.) — acknowledged, but not spoken for. To me, this is one of the tensions animating the film: on the one hand, an immense cartographic and totalizing impulse — to assess the state of the left, to encompass the entire history and geography of the U.S.A. (Kramer: “Everything has to be in it. Nothing left out because of ‘considerations’”) — and on the other, this emphasis on standpoint.
When I think of the political implications of Milestones, I return to its final scene: Grace Paley’s filmmaker collecting dailies — one set for a Newsreel-style film on Vietnam (in fact, The People’s War if I remember correctly), one of intimate footage of her granddaughter. Then the rushing water over the rocks… In the Newsreel films — at least those I’ve seen — the subjectivity of the filmmakers is suppressed (and maybe rightfully so!). But by this time, Kramer and Douglas are searching for that balance rendered in Milestones’ final scene: continuing the struggle for liberation, but as something less cordoned off from the realm of experience. Perhaps what I presented as a tension earlier isn’t one: that totalizing impulse springs from a conviction that continuing the struggle requires first of all accounting for oneself, in history, personal life, etc. Whit, how do you think of Kramer vis-à-vis other filmmakers of the New Left with similar concerns (a question inspired by your post on Twitter of Garrel’s early films — another filmmaker close to my heart…).
WS
Thinking about Kramer against other New Left filmmakers is a challenge because there’s a very real generation gap between him (born 1939) and someone like Garrel, who was only a month out of his teens when he ran around the eruptions of May 1968 with a camera (the gap would close in time: Philippe’s younger brother Thierry would later work as Kramer’s producer). Kramer graduated from Swarthmore in 1961, and everyone I interviewed from that era unanimously agreed that the campus was effectively apolitical and the New Left arrived quite precisely in 1962. Even the four-year age difference with someone like Paul Williams, who made The Revolutionary (1970) and Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues (1972), registers, with Williams’ films emerging from a late-Sixties campus and counterculture milieu that Kramer experienced at a one-step remove — which also gave him a bit more analytical distance (he did move to a Vermont commune in 1969, but not a
peace-and-love one, rather the armed Red Clover collective). Ice, with its black-and-white Battle of Algiers revolutionary style, and Milestones with its sweeping color vistas and elegiac tone for the death of “The Movement,” feel very different but share a sense — perhaps the key political through-line for Kramer in this era — that successful radical or revolutionary movements in the United States are going to require modified social relations on the left. You could call it a humanistic argument, even a vaguely hippie-ish one, but I do think Kramer rightly sees it as a political issue.
His work has broad affinities with Jon Jost’s for sure — Benjamin, I know this is something you’re interested in, and we both agree that there are striking parallels over time, from Milestones/Speaking Directly to the later Route One/USA and Jost’s Plain Talk and Common Sense (uncommon senses) and beyond, though overall I think Jost is the more Godardian/semiotician filmmaker, whereas Kramer eventually settled on the foundational unit of the trajet, which he loved for being a French word with no direct translation, but broadly journey, the short modular units that became the building blocks of his later French work especially.
His real peer group, I’d say, is less US New Left filmmakers, especially if by that we mean the Hollywood left of Peter Fonda or Bob Rafelson or Bert Schneider, and more the internationalist revolutionary film movement that swept the turn of the Seventies: Solanas & Getino, Hani Jawharieh, Heiny Srour, Med Hondo, Mrinal Sen, maybe also Ivan Dixon, whose The Spook Who Sat By the Door pairs well with Ice. For Milestones, there is a whole set of “aftermath” movies: Rivette obliquely, Tanner’s Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 more directly, even John Sayles’ Return of the Secaucus 7.
But this risks listmaking in place of analysis, the kind of deflection that Kramer, to his credit, rarely indulged in (he read enormous piles of literature for each of his films and truly absorbed them, resisting the urge to flaunt it the way, say, Michael Mann can’t when he opens Blackhat with Chris Hemsworth’s prison cell conspicuously lined with Foucault and Lyotard). To be honest, I sometimes think that in the entire history of radical cinema, from Vertov and Eisenstein to Jafar Panahi’s recent Palme d’Or, the only time film has ever been directly useful for the left was the Third Cinema model of minimizing the film as artistic or aesthetic object and rendering it purely instrumental as fodder for discussion groups, including in the middle of films. Kramer — and most auteurist filmmakers — rejected that tendency, and so despite my desire for Milestones to offer some kind of usable future, that’s not a burden it takes on or carries. Instead, it leaves us with that waterfall — you and I find it compelling, and so did Serge Daney, though he named his major piece on the film not after it but rather another body of water featured, “The Aquarium” (Kramer’s films are not renowned for their humor, but I wonder whether it was an inside joke to his friend Daney when he shot through fish tanks in both Guns and À toute allure, then went back to the aquarium itself in Route One/USA).
All that water: “what America feels like to me, it grinds me down,” says one woman in the film, and surely the rocks on the bottom of the fall can relate. But there are life rafts before the plunge, at least for some; “white society always reaches out and pulls its boys back,” notes the radical lawyer Jan elsewhere in the film. Still, the currents are strong. “I don’t wanna have those privileges anymore,” admits Peter (essentially a proxy Kramer character), but racial and class standing are not so easy to shed. We’re all here, swimming through history, Milestones concludes, not drowning or being crushed equitably but all still pulled along.
Here, perhaps it’s worth scaling back to the title. It comes from a short poem, which hardly appears momentous on first glance: “Neither high, nor very far/Neither emperor, nor king/You are only a little milestone/Which stands at the edge of the highway.” Okay, fine, we can all use some humility. But then consider who wrote that: Ho Chi Minh, one of the most effective revolutionaries of the twentieth century. Kramer and Douglas might not have the answers, but they haven’t conceded the struggle. Fifty years later, we’re not in the funk of a mid-Seventies post-movement malaise, as graduating commencement speakers are being denied their diplomas for speaking out against genocide, shooters like Luigi Mangione and Elias Rodriguez have revived the idea of bringing the war home, antifascist tactics are seeking new forms at a time of unprecedented AI-driven surveillance, and just this week four captives at the new private ICE jail here in Newark broke out, pushing their way through a wall so cheaply made it was nothing but drywall (despite prison profiteer GEO Group landing a billion-dollar contract). I don’t think the mood of Milestones is echoed in 2025, but its fundamental questions still linger — after all, none of this is actually yet working to stop the awful wrenching global lurch to the far right.
BC
When I categorize Kramer as a New Left filmmaker, I’m not only thinking institutionally (e.g. his early work with SDS’ Newark Community Action Project) but also in terms of a certain discourse of experience — what you point to as the humanist dimension of his politics. Of course, this is part and parcel of his rejection of a more instrumental mode of political filmmaking. Richard Copans — Kramer’s friend and cinematographer after his move to France — has a small, interesting text titled “Testing the World” in which he discusses his own exit from “militant cinema” (i.e. the Cinelutte group) and his initial encounter with Milestones. He dates the former to a particular experience in 1974: participating in a factory occupation and filming a sleeping worker — a subjective, intimate experience that, for Copans, exceeded the militant discourse of Cinelutte. A year later, he sees Milestones and is overwhelmed. In Kramer’s film he finds that “Politics had become sensitive, a
series of images, a unique medium in which reason and feeling became confused.”
This is one of the reasons that Kramer’s cinema remains so present and alive for me: a political situation in his films is always experienced as the events of a life (or a community). Like most of Kramer’s films (with the exception of Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal — for me, his weakest effort), Milestones doesn’t provide much of an analysis of the political situation. Instead, it offers the passage of a few people through a brief period of time as they try to exist in and shape history. Here we might return to the other lines of the Ho Chi Minh poem, those that compare the life of a militant to a marker that stops “travelers from going astray and tell[s] them the distance they might journey.” This is the principle at the heart of Kramer’s cinema and notion of the trajet — and how Milestones speaks to us today. Despite the distance between the post-movement malaise of that film and the exigency of our present moment, what we might call the “political” force of the film is how it makes present — in an affective and existential way — a set of fundamental questions: how does one live in the heart of empire? what is to be done? Or, to quote Kramer from his notes on The Edge, “How much do I feel the necessity for change here, and to what extent will I alter the shape of my life to work for this change?” These are questions that we all must ask ourselves every day — Kramer’s films don’t give answers, but examples.
