When Robert Kramer’s 1968 film The Edge reached Los Angeles, its ad in the Free Press posed a provocative question: “Should we kill the President?” And while Lyndon Johnson survived that film’s alienated would-be assassin, Kramer’s next film left little question as to where he stood. Ice, shot in early 1969 and released in late 1970, imagined an armed leftist insurrection in New York City, taking the jolting documentary-like style of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966) and bringing its war home to the Big Apple. Watching Kramer’s revolutionaries move through Grand Central Terminal, JFK Airport, New York University, and other recognizable sites as they try to create an all-American National Liberation Front is an eerily captivating sight in 2026. It’s impossible not to think of Luigi Mangione, or Elias Rodriguez, or perhaps January 6, or the death of the revolutionary ’60s dream.

Kramer, who was born in 1939 and died in 1999, was almost indisputably the key filmmaker of the US New Left. He played a central role in shaping Newsreel, the agitprop documentary collective that forged the New Left’s aesthetics, and his political ties included everything from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to the Weather Underground to armed communes in Vermont to the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). While his closest contemporary Haskell Wexler was filming the 1968 Democratic National Committee chaos, Kramer was being arrested there for attempting to coat roads in spiked balls to hinder the police, which helped land him on the FBI’s Security Index of dangerous subversives. His resolutely independent films captured the New Left from the inside and offer its most cohesive filmic legacy.

Yet Kramer remains somewhat obscure. He’s remembered best in France, where the Cahiers du cinéma crowd adopted him early, listing him on the October 1968 cover among the Quatre Américains at the forefront of independent US film, alongside John Cassavetes, Andy Warhol, and Shirley Clarke. Kramer moved there at the end of the 1970s, stayed through his death, and has always remained visible in national film culture. Back in his native land, however, he’s a cult director at most, known almost exclusively to the sorts of cinephiles who haunt repertory theaters and the deep-cut wing of Letterboxd.