Director: Robert Kramer
Year Released: 1970
Rating: 2.0
Revolutionaries in NYC are fighting against American Imperialism (our country, in this fictitious scenario, is at war with, of all places, Mexico) in this experimental exercise in semi-futuristic cinéma vérité. While Kramer gets the atmosphere of paranoia down to a fault - this was made during the Vietnam era when disgust with the government was more than apparent - he conveniently skips out of political particulars (lots of jargon and platitudes are used) and engages in heated rhetoric: scenes begin and end at random, characters discuss matters only they seem to comprehend and some segments feel almost arbitrarily included without adding to the subject matter. Kramer intended the movie to be a kind of call-to-arms, but in its fragmented form all it seems to produce is a lot of anxiety - with the group members making more than a few questionable decisions on their own, it could be viewed as a critique of the radicalism of the era, which I don't actually believe was Kramer's intention.
