In 2019, the Cinémathèque française organized a retrospective dedicated to the work of American filmmaker Robert Kramer, accompanied by the publication of Notes de la forteresse Robert Kramer, Notes de la forteresse (1967–1999), edited and presented by Cyril Béghin, translated by Cécile Wajsbrot and Cyril Béghin, Paris, Post-éditions, 2019. This collection compiles his numerous texts written between 1967 and 1999, the year of his death. The book by David Yon, Robert Kramer, une quête incandescente, continues this rediscovery of a work that is relatively little known today, despite the strong critical recognition Kramer enjoyed in France during his lifetime. As early as 1966, In the Country, his first film (whose presentation at the Pesaro festival is favored by Jonas Mekas), earns praise from Jean Narboni in the Cahiers du cinéma. The magazine will then accompany his career for a long time: Ice, in 1970, then Milestones, in 1975, will notably be the subject of roundtables « Ice de Robert Kramer. 3. Débat », Cahiers du cinéma, n°225, November-December 1970; « Milestones et nous (Table ronde) », Cahiers du cinéma, n°258–259, July-August 1975. After this first period of films made in the United States, marked as much by formal experimentation as by far-left militancy, Kramer feels the political climate harden in his country. He then decides in 1979 to settle in France, where the credit he enjoys leads him to hope for a more favorable context to continue his work and find funding. As he travels extensively, his filmography develops in very diverse formal directions: two large frescoes on the United States blurring fiction and documentary (Milestones, Route One/USA); films dictated by the urgency of a political context (People's War during the Vietnam War, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal during the Carnation Revolution); more traditional fictions (Guns, or the artistic and commercial failure that is Diesel, an incongruous science fiction film); up to video essays, sometimes close to the filmed diary (Berlin 10/90, Dear Doc, Vidéolettres Robert Kramer / Stephen Dwoskin, etc.). However, this panorama, which is not exhaustive, seems to contradict one of the filmmaker's assertions, who considered his work as "one great film. The unique film of a life." This book allows precisely to grasp, behind this heterogeneous and fragmented ensemble, the deep continuity that runs through his filmography. To do this, the author articulates three distinct approaches. The first is biographical and gives the book its chronological structure. It is based on the Robert Kramer archives, but also on numerous interviews conducted with his close ones, whether they are family members, friends or collaborators. The second aims to restore the evolution of the filmmaker's thinking, which Yon conveys through numerous quotes from Notes de la forteresse and interviews granted by Kramer throughout his life. Finally come the films themselves, whose images are related to the contextual and theoretical elements discussed. Although this last aspect is not the most convincing part of the book, due to passages that are sometimes more descriptive than analytical, the whole is worth for the precision of the portrait it composes, where the trajectory of Kramer and his work are inextricably intertwined. David Yon gives considerable importance to the numerous encounters, both friendly and professional, that nourished Kramer's work, as much on the financing and production level (Hélène Vager and Sylvie Blum at INA, Paulo Branco and especially his friend Richard Copans) as on a more intellectual and artistic level - he wrote a film with Raoul Ruiz or, more surprisingly, two screenplays with Félix Guattari. From the Hyères festival to the Digne meetings, the portrait of the ecosystem of French cinema at the time emerges indirectly. Among these encounters, that with Serge Daney occupies an important place: Kramer will for example confide that the negative review of Diesel published in Libération was for him "a real example of the role of the critic in his intimate relationship with those who make films. It was almost a personal communication that passed on a page of Libération, and which said: 'What is this guy doing with his abilities?' Robert Kramer, Points de départ. Entretien avec Robert Kramer, by Bernard Eisenschitz, with the participation of Roberto Turigliatto, Aix-en-Provence, Institut de l’image, 2001, p. 67. Cited by David Yon, Robert Kramer, une quête incandescente, Cherbourg-en-Cotentin, De l’incidence éditeur, 2026, p. 74." The dialogue continues with Kramer's participation in an episode of Microfilm (the France Culture program hosted by the critic) for the release of Route One/USA in 1989, then Daney's appearance in Sous le vent. But it is essentially in the ensemble of films shot on video from the late 1980s that Daney's influence is felt. David Yon explains having found in Kramer's archives an article published in Libération by Serge Daney, « Marché de l’individu et disparition de l’expérience », Libération, 20 January 1992., in which the critic revisits the new reality shows, which he claims announce the progressive disappearance of the very idea of human experience. This concern regarding new images, their proliferation and their new modes of distribution via television, runs through Kramer's video essays, notably Berlin 10/90 or Ghosts of Electricity: that of a world where images would eventually replace experience itself and break the relationship between the individual and reality. The notion of experience constitutes just one of the most important red threads of the work: the term appears both in the testimonies of the filmmaker's close ones, who use it to characterize his work, and in his own writings, where he seeks to think together political experience and intimate experience. Yon mobilizes it in turn to illuminate Kramer's cinema at several levels, starting with his way of considering the act of filming as a physical commitment, as early as In the Country. Robert Machover, then Kramer's cinematographer, recounts the difficulties of their collaboration: the latter insisted on shooting "uncropped" shots, with camera movements not predetermined. Yon brings this practice close to Bergson's thinking: "Acting freely is to reclaim possession of oneself, to place oneself back in pure duration. Cited by David Yon, op. cit., p. 37." This first experimental impulse deepens further through contact with two decisive encounters. The first is that of the filmmaker and educator Fernand Deligny, a libertarian educator, close to Félix Guattari and a fierce opponent of institutional asylum practices. He creates in the Cévennes places of life to welcome autistic children, breaking with institutional psychiatric practices. He also develops a cinema practice that will lead to the Moindre geste, co-directed by Josée Manenti and Jean-Pierre Daniel in 1971 at the end of the 1970s, who shows him his video experiments made with autistic children and presents him with his idea of "camérer", a way of filming consisting of "respecting what wants nothing, says nothing, does not address, in other words escapes symbolic domestication." Kramer finds a new impulse to affirm his desire to film without a preconceived script, in order to make filming an experience in its own right. The second encounter is that of the double bassist Barre Phillips, who opens the way to improvisation and jazz. For the musician, "improvisation is reading the present. Instead of imposing the present with composition, you have to understand what it is and make it live." These two conceptions find a fertile continuation with the move to video, whose lightness and flexibility allow Kramer to gain availability in the face of what happens. Starting with Notre nazi in 1984, he takes charge himself of the image, in order to be able to "film at an instinctive stage while being available to what happens" David Yon, ibid., p. 72. In a letter addressed to David Yon, Richard Copans explains that Route One/USA constitutes the culmination of this double influence of Phillips and Deligny, initiated with Notre nazi, but here deepened and fully deployed on the occasion of his return to the United States. He concludes thus: "What makes Robert Kramer a filmmaker is that, when he films, he is concerned with the idea of his experience: how is he living this moment, with his trust in time, space, relationships to the place, architecture, weather, how he lives this present time and how he is able to crystallize it in a shot he is making, and that, that is an internal work, I mean finally internal in the relationship to the world." Richard Copans cited by David Yon, op. cit., p. 73. Beyond the stage of filming, the notion of experience also illuminates his editing gesture. From the start, Kramer favors fragmented structures, partly inspired by the cinema of Alain Resnais, whom he admires. More than that, Kramer associates this practice with the stream of consciousness characteristic of American literature: "All American modernism is very close to a daily experience of life. It is linked to the functioning of consciousnesses. So I drew inspiration from the technique of these writers for Milestones by translating it into cinema." Robert Kramer, cited by David Yon, ibid., p. 28. He will again explicitly this approach in one of his video letters addressed to filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin in 1991, where he reads a passage from Faulkner's Lumière d'août: a carriage ride there becomes, in the course of the same sentence, the place of a succession of disparate sensations experienced by the character. The video will also be a precious tool to radicalize this logic of fragmentation: "I did not make the choice of digital video, of the wonderful little DV by chance. (…) The DV is fabulous for low lights, close-ups or close-ups. It is therefore an instrument that suits well the work of fragments: parts of the body, of decor, of conversation." Robert Kramer, cited by David Yon, ibid., p. 180.