Traces of Desire

bout six months ago, France was having a real Robert Kramer moment. A complete retrospective at the Cinématheque française in November 2019 was accompanied by an announcement from the Paris-based distributor Re:voir that they would be releasing an “OEuvres completes de Robert Kramer,” comprising 26 films in ten volumes. The first release—of (1980), Kramer’s first feature film made in France, along with the medium-length (1981) and the short film (1983)—hit the streets in January of this year. When the rest of Kramer’s corpus will actually be available remains to be seen, as only this title appears on Re:voir’s website and in their 2020 catalogue (even though, for some reason, the DVD—which arrived in my mailbox just as this piece was being edited—is labelled as “Volume 4”). The other large project at this time was the publication of Cyril Béghin’s , a 500-page collection of Kramer’s writings that translates (from English into French) an enormous range of Kramer’s writings over the course of four decades, a lot of it pre-viously unpublished “tapuscrits” (typewritten manuscripts). The book is, not