With the U.S. election fast-approaching, we’re showing a series of films that contextualize our political moment.

There have been two assassination attempts on former President Trump this election cycle. The would-be assassins’ motives have been murky both times, gesturing at an ambient sense of antipathy toward U.S. politics on behalf of American citizens. The revered mid-Atlantic filmmaker Robert Kramer’s work zeroed in on similar feelings as they manifested themselves at the height of the Vietnam War and his second feature film, The Edge, remains a deeply affecting portrait of how disillusioned activists and artists were coping through a political horror show.

The Edge is about a Civil Rights activist who develops an irrepressible urge to assassinate the President and how that desire for radical action stirs conflict among his group of friends — a 16-member underground cell of despondent leftists. It is also a film built from gestures and glances, gently observing the body movement and emotion of collective dialogue and the suddenness of conflict. According to Kramer, his characters existed in the “world of their looks and their words.”

“The Edge embodies something of the transitional conditions in present American society: structures of belief have broken down; the society has destroyed its own reason for being, its own rational; there is no longer meaningful activity within the society itself; but this non-significance has not yet been translated into a thrust for other alternative, into an awareness that social change and personal change are indeed possible — that is, into a movement that understands the terms of revolutionary change.” ROBERT KRAMER

After completing the loose trilogy The Edge forms a part of, Kramer moved to Europe — first to Portugal, then to France. He’d eventually make his way back states-side, where he shot the monumental Route One/USA in 1989. Kramer’s commitment to politics remained unwavering throughout his career, even if his films revealed that the U.S. had set itself on a path that ran contrary to what he and his fellow activists had fought for throughout their entire lives.

Robert Kramer (1939 – 1999) was born in New York City and died in Paris. He considered himself a mid-Atlantic filmmaker, having filmed and organized across the region. He became a filmmaker through his engagement with the New Left and co-founded Newsreel, which he later broke off from due to ideological differences. Works such as Milestones, Scenes from the Class Struggle, and Doc’s Kingdom remain classics of political cinema.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to RE:VOIR for granting us permission to screen this film. Copyright Keja Ho Kramer & RE:VOIR Video.