When I first took interest in Robert Kramer, as a grad student in Los Angeles around 2003, it was nearly impossible to see his films. Later, I caught a substantial 2009 retrospective at Anthology Film Archives in New York City, commemorating the tenth anniversary of his tragically early death at sixty, but even then, Kramer remained shrouded in mystery and obscurity, a shadowy revolutionary filmmaker seemingly written out of history.

That was what prompted me to begin the research that ultimately led to Films That Explode Like Grenades: Robert Kramer and the Search for a Radical Cinema, just published by the University of Chicago Press. Even today, Kramer’s work can be elusive—for a few films, I had to watch them on a computer in his archives, located in a monastery in northern France still bearing WWII bomb scars. OVID has been a godsend for making Kramer available, with Ice (1969), Milestones (1975), and Route One/USA (1989) forming an astonishingly expansive set of national snapshots in three different decades, tracking the climax and disappearance of Kramer’s Sixties revolutionary dreams. He moved to France in 1979, and his longtime cinematographer Richard Copans’s Looking for Robert (2025) offers a loving, critical portrait of their fraught but productive collaboration.

For my selections, I picked five works with organic connections to Kramer—his scattered emanations, of which there are many more buried on OVID and elsewhere, since to sift through post-1968 radical film is to rarely be more than one step removed from Kramer’s legacy.

Whitney Strub is associate professor of history at Rutgers University–Newark. He is the author of Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right (2011), co-editor of ReFocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay (2023), and editor of Queer Newark: Stories of Resistance, Love, and Community (2024), among other books.