A preeminent filmmaker of the American left, Robert Kramer was a significant presence in the independent film movement of the 1960s.

Born in 1939, he grew up in New York City and went on to study philosophy and Western European history at Swarthmore College and Stanford University.

By the time he graduated, he was heavily involved in political activism, and worked first as a community organizer in Newark, and then as a reporter in Latin America.

After making The People’s War, a film on the guerrilla movement in Venezuela, he moved back to New York City and helped to found Newsreel, an underground media collective which produced some 60 documentaries and short films about radical political subjects and the anti-war movement. It was during this time that Kramer developed his highly distinctive cinematic style, a blending of fiction and documentary filmmaking.

In the early 1980s, Kramer relocated to France, where he remained a prolific filmmaker until he died in 1999.

Icarus Films distributes four films by Kramer, plus Chris Marker's Prime Time in the Camps (Narrated by Robert Kramer) and a retrospective of Kramer's work directed and narrated by his longtime cinematographer and producer Richard Copans, Looking for Robert. Discover more of our featured filmmakers.

"The most politically committed American-born filmmaker to come on the scene in the 1960s... his unwavering commitment to anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, and anti-racism and antipathy for Hollywood (and corporate media more generally) dashed any hopes for his commercial integration into the culture industries... a self-critical cinema of political contemplation that found acceptance in Europe, where he relocated in 1979 and where, to this day, he is considered second only to Jean-Luc Godard in the pantheon of political modernists."—David Fresko, Metrograph