SCREENING: Milestones (dir. Kramer + Douglas, 1975)

SCREENING: Milestones (dir. Kramer + Douglas, 1975)

⌚️2023-04-20 05:30:00 – 2023-04-20 09:00:00
🏢2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90057, USA

Mezzanine presents MILESTONES, directed by Robert Kramer and John Douglas. 1975, 195m, U.S., DCP

Introduced by Courtney Stephens and Kate Wolf

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Robert Kramer and John Douglas’s novel-like epic is one of the great films about the American Left, a trailblazing hybrid of documentary and fiction that captures the seismic changes experienced by radical young men and women who came of age with the Vietnam War. Wandering from Vermont to Utah, shot in verité-style 16mm with dozens of speaking roles, the film follows the filmmakers’ friends — mostly white, middle-class activists, militants, nomads and commune-dwellers — all of whom either play versions of themselves or craft separate personas (including the writer Grace Paley, co-director Douglas and producer David C. Stone) in scenes that are clearly staged or all too real. Writing in Cahiers du Cinéma, critic Serge Daney called it the “anti-Nashville”; released the same year as Altman’s classic, the film is both less prescriptive and more introspective, capturing how the fervor of political ideas give way to the unwieldy vagaries of language and personal experience.

“Chronicles the painful process through which the New Left’s collective action and utopian hopes gave way to the Me Decade’s enraged narcissism.” -Melissa Anderson, Artforum

“Mr. Kramer seems incapable of shooting a scene, framing a shot or catching a line of dialogue that isn't loaded with information one usually finds only in the best, the most spare poetry,” -Vincent Canby, The New York Times

Official Selection: Directors Fortnight, Cannes Film Festival, 1975

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Note: *Doors open 30 minutes before screening time. To respect our audience and the filmmaker, the box office will close shortly after the screening begins. Ticketholder admission is not guaranteed if guest arrives more than 15 min after announced screening time.*

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