Route One/USA
- FRANCE / 1989 / English / Color / DCP / 255 min / With English and Japanese subtitles
Director, Photography, Editing: Robert Kramer
Editing: Guy Lecorne, Pierre Choukroun, Claire Laville, Keja Kramer
Music Composed and Performed by: Barre Phillips, Pierre Favre, Michel Petrucciani, John Surman, Floris Nico Bunink
Sound: Olivier Schwob
Lighting, Producer: Richard Copans
Cast: Paul Mclsaac
Production Companies: Les Films d’ici, La Sept
Japanese Subtitles Courtesy of: Tanaka Taketo
*For this digitization project, Japanese subtitles were added to the digitally restored version acquired from France.
An American road movie in which Robert Kramer and his friend travel along Route 1 on their first visit to the USA in ten years. 65 hours of film are squeezed into four hours. The film is profound in its content, but has a somewhat lighthearted atmosphere. It is hard to tell whether the people they encounter in the deserted landscape are symbolic representations of America or real people acting naturarlly, but the viewers who accompany them are sure to remember their faces for a long time to come. Awarded the Mayor’s Prize in the YIDFF ’89 International Competition.
Robert KramerBorn in New York in 1936. Amidst the wave of youth rebellion and the anti-Vietnam War movement in the 1960s he became a founding member of the left-wing avant-garde film collective The Newsreel, releasing numerous collaborative works. He continued throughout his life to make films on the border between documentary and fiction that examined the essence of contemporary society from a political and critical standpoint. Kramer moved to Paris in the 1980s, and came back to YIDFF ’97 as a jury member, while a posthumous retrospective was held at 2001. He passed away in 1999.