THE EDGE
Dir. Robert Kramer, 100 mins.
USA, 1968

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 15 – 7:30 and 10PM

THE EDGE
Dir. Robert Kramer, 100 mins.
USA, 1968
Shot in 1967, at the height of the American antiwar protests, The Edge captures a particular strain of ideological tension felt by the radical organizers of the time, between the pragmatism of peaceful organization and movement building, and the appeal of individual acts of insurrectionary violence — a tension that necessarily threatens the cohesion of the organizing bodies which, in this film, ultimately fracture under the weight of the resulting discord. A piercing study of the dangers of disillusionment and isolation in radical spaces, the film also perceptively deals with the friction that often exists between radicality and the maintenance of personal relationships. A radical work of narrative filmmaking, both in content and form. The late, great leftist filmmaker Robert Kramer, a founding member of the legendary Newsreel outfit, shot this ambitious project on a microbudget, fashioning aesthetic limitations into a political tool. The imagery is stark and no-frills, the overdubbed dialogue disembodied and distant — at once an expression of interiority and a seething, repressed exteriority that painfully rises to the surface.