MILESTONES (1975) – 205 mins.
GHOSTS OF ELECTRICITY (1997) – 19 mins.

Milestones was co-directed with John Douglas, a member of the agitprop documentary film group The Newsreel.

This was an introduction written by both Kramer and Douglas before the film’s premiere at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival:

“a vision of America in the Seventies and […] a journey into the past and the future. It is a film with many characters. People who are conscious of a heritage founded on the genocide of the Indians and the slavery of the Black Man. A nation of people—trying to correct the errors of the present—the attempted genocide of the Vietnamese people. Milestones is a complex Proustian mosaic of characters and landscape which weave together to form the fabric of the film. There are many scenes in many cities, faces and voices without endings but many beginnings. The film crosses America from the snow-covered mountains of Vermont, to the waterfalls of Utah, to the caves of the Hopi Indians, and the dirt and grime and energy of New York City. Milestones is a film about rebirth, of ideas and faces, of images and sounds.”

Laurence Kardish, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York:

“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.”

Ghosts of Electricity was one of Kramer’s final films, commissioned by the Locarno Film Festival for its 50th anniversary. It imagines a world in which both the cinema and the sciences share a humanist interest in the bettering of our lives.

Format DVD plus Blu-ray BD50 Interzone (original formats video, 16mm)
Language: English, French subtitles.
Booklet in French and English, 44 pages.