THE EDGE

The revered political filmmaker Robert Kramer’s work zeroed in on feelings of political chaos and antipathy as they manifested themselves at the height of the Vietnam War. THE EDGE remains a deeply affecting portrait of how disillusioned activists and artists were coping through a political horror show.

A troubled antiwar activist develops an irrepressible urge to assassinate the President of the United States. His resolve forces others in a fragmented and disillusioned group of political allies to face the threat of government counterintelligence and the temptations of middle-age security. It is also a film built from gestures and glances, gently observing the body movement and emotion of collective dialogue and the suddenness of conflict. According to Kramer, his characters existed in the “world of their looks and their words.”

“THE EDGE embodies something of the transitional conditions in present American society: structures of belief have broken down; the society has destroyed its own reason for being, its own rational; there is no longer meaningful activity within the society itself; but this non-significance has not yet been translated into a thrust for other alternative, into an awareness that social change and personal change are indeed possible — that is, into a movement that understands the terms of revolutionary change.” - Robert Kramer