Starting Place
(Point du Départ)
France, 1993, 16mm, color, 83 min.
English, French and Vietnamese with English subtitles.
Produced late in his career, Robert Kramer returns to Hanoi after nearly twenty-five years to re-envision the city’s struggle through an uncertain and daunting past, present, and future. The Vietnamese characters in the film are diverse: Kramer’s former guide from an earlier visit in 1969; a tight-rope walker in the national circus; a man who took photos of B-52s, and another who lost his fingers shooting them down.
As editor of New Left Notes, the newspaper of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), filmmaker Saul Levine was at the center of multiple radical political movements. For this film, he employs a rapid fire editing style to create a frenetic, kaleidoscopic portrait of the antiwar movement, women’s liberation and the Black Panthers.