THE EDGE
Dir. Robert Kramer, 1968.
United States. 100 min.
In English.

THE EDGE follows Danial Rainer, a disillusioned political activist, over the course of six days as he navigates the inner politics of his organizing group as they struggle to have any effect on the actions of their government and its war on Vietnam. Dan is tired of theory, and wants to take decisive action, but the rest of his similarly white and middle class cohort are going to be difficult to get out of their comfort and on board. The plan? Assassinate the President of the United States.

Robert Kramer presents the events unfolding like an intelligence outfit surveilling and gathering evidence. The cast of characters; introduced like that of a police debriefing or dossier; names, ages, and political histories. The camera; at times a lingering distant voyeuristic point of view like that of an observing agent gathering intel. The audio of conversations; as if they were being picked up by planted bugs.

Kramer deftly showcases that feeling of despair as one hears the numbers of deaths grow daily as war wages on the other side of the globe. The cognitive dissonance of the comfort of your bohemian day to day not lining up with the horrors being perpetrated by your own government. Do you want to affect change with a single violent revolutionary action? Or are you comfortable to play activist while talking shit about the president over a bottle of wine at your friend’s flat? When Dan is driven to the brink, but left high and dry by his comrades, does the plan have any chance of success?

“What interests me is this: How do you understand cinema? How do I understand cinema? Why has nobody seen my films here in the United States, etc.? Most of the time, my films don’t relate to what people believe. Without a doubt this is a flaw in the films. They all deal with such questions as: how people fulfill themselves and assume a role in history, how do or don’t they rejoin the principal current of history. All this, …, in the context of the United States and of the specific kind of isolation that we’ve made for ourselves here—we, the subjects of films. There is this rhythm between political engagement where we lose a lot of things—relations between people, families, children, nature—not as ideas but as bodily experiences. In The Edge, we can see the two very clearly.”
—Robert Kramer, December 1978 Cahiers du Cinéma interview