Newsreel / Kramer's The Edge

The day The Newsreel was founded “…a very significant coincidence occurred…” Jonas Mekas wrote in his Movie Journal “…in the evening papers…the headline Universal Newsreel Service Closed”¹.

To talk about The Newsreel, we must first talk about the New York branch of the Worker’s Film and Photo League (WFPL), created in 1930 and involving names such as Jay Leyda, Leo Hurwitz, and Harry Alan Potamkin. The group, composed of filmmakers and photographers, strove for an ideal American revolutionary cinema through the newsreel film. They established themselves counter to the productions of Hollywood and the existing newsreels of organizations like Pathé News and the Universal Newsreels. They looked towards filmmakers such as Vertov and Eisenstein as a path to this goal (Jay Leyda would end up in the Soviet Union, translating Eisenstein’s Film Form and Film Sense into English). While the effort only lasted four years, the ideas they gleaned from the Soviet pantheon would form the predecessor of the new Newsreel.

The Newsreel collective’s push for a new cinema follows from the WFPL and Vertov before them. They realized that a new starting point, away from the “limited, socially determined rules of clarity, of exposition”², was necessary to make the revolutionary films they desired. Asynchronous sound snippets from crowds, interviews, songs, or speeches clash against each other and overlap, constantly coming at odds with each other in content and texture; shots of a single event are cut between rapidly, disrupting any sense of traditional chronology—the (re)construction of each film The Newsreel group produced is filled with the tensions of its subjects. For Robert Kramer, who was a founding member, the goal was to “make films that unnerve, that shake assumptions, that threaten… explode like grenades in peoples’ faces…”³.

The opening sequence of Newsreel #22, Up Against the Wall, Ms. America (1968), commences as such: a newspaper with the headers “Delightful… Or Degrading?”, footage of the pageant itself, with a soundtrack filled with the audience's applause captured in the background of a radio broadcast. The radio presenter describes the winner’s body, followed by reports of a “disorderly woman” at the event. In a few seconds, the event is split up into fragments, completely refuting any homogeneity that dominates in the kind of coverage abiding by the rules of exposition. All this in the minute before the group’s logo appears on the screen: between the sunlit bus and the incandescent pageant, between the different forms of exposition—the newspaper, the poster saying “HERE SHE COMES”, the radio coverage—between the joy of the winning woman and her appearance on the rolling cameras. The world exists outside of the topic at hand.

Previous ventures in newsreel production were much less successful in their approaches to the question of reconstruction. Films by the WFPL prioritized chronological continuity—how to depict the event linearly—whereas The Newsreel’s success came precisely from a diametrical opposition to linear exposition. The National Hunger March 1931, one of the “major productions”⁴ of the League, opts to track the actions of the protestors across America., The intertitles and shots are structured around this line; they support it, they make it singular and clean. The outcome, is a film that would appease filmgoers already familiar with newsreels like the widely disseminated Pathé News—which, unlike the silent films of the WFPL, had soundtracks—with an approach they were familiar with. The intertitles of The National Hunger March achieve a similar effect to the softening of cuts with a clear narrative voice; their explanatory insertion in between shots avoid the tensions of contrasting images, which could provide the actions with the needed urgency. This is present in the shots from Philadelphia, those of the conflict between the policemen on horses and those marching below. The intertitle reads that the workers must meet “in defiance of police orders”, yet the particular cuts that could reveal the dissonances between the workers’ actions and the demands of the police are entirely absent.

The missing tension, brought on by the linear approach, reinforces the structural focus on the order in which the hunger marches occurred, but it is faulty, it conceals the conflicts which caused them in the first place. Leo Hurwitz voiced dissatisfaction with the film, how “certainly marching workers cannot be the only item in a one-reel film if that film is to be effective propaganda”⁵. This is only to say that linearity as it existed in early newsreels was insufficient for the ideals of a revolutionary American cinema; The Newsreel, in correcting for this, did not necessarily abandon linearity as a whole, but rather they prioritized the specific linearities of ideas, spaces, and people.

For the filming of Newsreel #14, The Columbia Revolt (1968), members of The Newsreel divided themselves into five camera teams, each assigned to one of Columbia University’s buildings. These small groups each set out knowing that they could not film everything. Activity came to a head during the police attacks on student protestors, when it became impossible to track the motion while still capturing precise material. Rather than present these blurry images in an attempt to depict the whole of the violence, the scenes are constructed from the clearest available photographs. The camera moves across them, creating the movement of the shots around what is most relevant in each photo. In one, two policemen hold a student up by the legs, the camera moves down to reveal the student's head, level with the policemen’s truncheons. In another, the camera zooms out from the policeman at the centre, to the student he’s holding his truncheon over, while other policemen stand around the two of them. The distance travelled by these revealing movements are limited by the edge of the photographs, the points at which the camera can’t show any more.

The films of The Newsreel group present the active viewer with a cumulative web of contrasts, that when taken as a whole, exhaustively and precisely delineate the linearities of the various groups of individuals and objects inside each film. The films become what Kramer says effective propaganda must be: “about something, and not everything”, and targeted at “someone, not everyone”⁶. It can be understood, then, that the individuals of The Newsreel could not take a homogeneous approach to reconstructing events. The Case Against Lincoln Center (Newsreel #16) ends with superimpositions of the building at oblique angles and footage of an explosion; Pig Power (Newsreel #23) edits zoomed-in shots of photographs to the rhythm of music. Each film has to harbor distinct choices appropriate for what it approaches: the static photographs of Pig Power could not have served the reconstruction of the Ms. America pageant, with all of its movements up and down the runway and protestors up and down the pier; the same architectural superimpositions in Lincoln Center would not have served the reconstruction of student protests across campus buildings in Columbia Revolt (Newsreel #14), with all of its attention to their strategic locations and the movement of students between them. Despite these differences, the underlying conviction, the feeling of necessity to discover the individual ways of depicting events with clarity and political vigour, remains uncompromised.

Robert Kramer’s The Edge, released the same year as The Newsreel’s The Columbia Revolt, opens with a string of photographs depicting the players in the film. Under these images, past the borders, runs their fictionalised names, ages, occupations, and known political affiliations. Each one becomes a premise, a fact that can be assigned to the face in the photograph. Based on their ages, what was American culture like in their childhoods? How would their occupations motivate or complicate their revolutionary work? Why do the entries for the housewives Anne Davis and Deidre Stein omit the section for political affiliations? What does this indicate of the slides' origins? The characters are constructed out of these rough collections of premises, nothing is evoked of the lives of the people being described. When talking with Bernard Eisenschitz in 1997, Kramer mentions that prior to filming The Edge, he would write down any idea he had, place it in a folder, and “fight off, to the absolute last minute, any attempt to either go back and read all those things or to try and figure out how they could possibly fit into one film”. Instead, he wanted to “take all these fragments and try, not to put them into a structure, but try to find what the structure was that they were describing already”⁷. The openness of the premises inversely maps out the terrain of who exactly can be cast into which role: a lesson to be learned from In The Country, as Kramer “realized that [he] had to be really careful about who [he] chose to work with…”⁸.

In these early films Kramer tends towards taking people away from their broader contexts. In FALN (1965), Peter Smollet’s voice trails over images of Venezuelan guerrillas with nothing known of the man; the jobs ascribed to the characters of The Edge, as far as one can know, are not the jobs these people held in reality. In a sense, Kramer is asking these actors to place their specific contexts into the film. Gerald Long wasn’t a militant; William Devane, the radical confined in the countryside villa of In the Country, would go on to have a prominent acting career. Kramer’s radicals have un-American names; to play them, their actors had to inherit something from the position they are thrust into: Kramer wasn’t using their “skill as an actor”, he “was going to use them”⁹. What he found in Devane was an “oppressive anger”¹⁰, one Kramer sensed in himself, perhaps an Americanism which he needed to depart from. The Edge, so distinct to 1960s America yet so far removed from it, has Kramer transpose European archetypes into an American register. For him, the listlessness and stagnation had only one escape—eventually culminating in his departure from the United States.

Another detail of note appears in this introduction: the name “Toller”. It’s an important name for Kramer, having made its way into the centre of both of his previous films: FALN, where the narrator, Smollet, takes the pseudonym Peter Tollerman (Kramer would later recount that Smollet was the only communist party member with a “truly courageous history of being a clandestine organiser”¹¹ that he had met); and In The Country, where Gerald Long first takes the name Gerry Toller, the same role he carries in The Edge. The Toller name is shared with the revolutionary playwright Ernst Toller, and indeed, for Kramer, the name is shared between all the “revolutionary maniacs”, the “…guys who were actually prepared to make all those sacrifices”¹². One can see, then, how the character of Tollerman in FALN emerges from Smollet’s commitment, and in turn, it becomes apparent that the character of Gerry Toller develops from something already present in Gerald Long. The logical conclusion could only be that, when Kramer works with militant actors, as would become apparent in his subsequent films Ice and Milestones, they would rather change the characters they play to fit their beliefs, than ever change what they themselves believe.

The profiles at the start of The Edge are followed with handheld footage of Rader walking around the White House. The first 3 shots are filmed at a distance from Rader, so that the camera can zoom in, expanding on Rader’s movements, alienating him from the space around him, making him small, surveilling his path. The Edge was Kramer’s first experience directing a film in 35mm: “Nobody ever mentioned to us that you don’t carry around a Mitchell BNC the way you do an Eclair […] In one absolutely memorable moment, [Robert] Machover actually got pinned underneath the camera when it fell on top of him.”¹³ Despite the shaking, Machover makes a sustained effort to hold the camera still as it zooms, so that the overall expanse of the space is always kept in view: the initial angle defines the range of camera movement and how to evaluate the position of the camera, whether it has drifted a little right or lowered a little from where it was initially pointing. The movements can hint elsewhere, but they cannot erase the initial position, whether it was conscious or not.

The pressure felt by Rader in the presence of the White House is palpable, its connection to his plan to kill the president all too clear. The plan itself is born out of the realization that attempts at organizing something like the student revolutions, which were collectively captured on 16mm, could never be sufficient. The weight of the Mitchell BNC didn’t allow for the same unconstrained freedom as the 16mm cameras Kramer was used to. This treatment of shooting 35mm as if it were 16 presents an alternative to Philippe Garrel’s early work in France, who consciously used 35mm for its clarity and weight. One discovers that this lineage, which continued throughout European independent narrative film in later works by filmmakers such as Alain Tanner and Jean-Claude Biette, had already been reached by Kramer across the Atlantic Ocean, when departing from a position of militancy. This approach towards the handling of the camera was also carried into the edit: the sequence begins with punch holes and is bookended by a light leak. The rhythm is dictated by the qualities associated with the film strip, the instrument that materialised the images; the rhythm of the preceding sequence was governed by the sound of a typewriter, the instrument that materialised the letters. Nothing in the film comes from a vacuum, everything is shown in relation to its origins, and yet the thought of these origins is as mysterious to us as the coming conclusions.

All of this before the title card, before the film proper begins, an introductory passage, setting the rules of the game. Kramer’s actors, more than most, form their characters by applying their impulses to the positions they take in the films. He learns about them by looking where they’re looking and have looked, comparing their impulses to his own, and seeing the perspectives that can be transformed in the process of filmmaking. No matter his ever-changing trajectories—shooting The Glacier Film and Milestones like an avant-garde film, relegating words to a secondary role; or casting someone as disconnected in generation as Vincent Gallo in Doc’s Kingdom—he builds himself anew from the people he works with. But, prior to filming, Kramer cannot know for certain how his actors will experience the events as he devises them to happen, what they will say, where specifically they will look—it is the hunt for new truths to disrupt previous ones that interests Kramer, the man who hated his own voice but placed it in so many of his films, without a body, to see what it would do.