Following a series of films questioning commitment and politics in America and culminating with MILESTONES 1975, and a 1977 documentary on Lisbon’s Carnation Revolution, SCENES FROM THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN PORTUGAL, Robert Kramer moved to France with his family. The first film he made there was GUNS, an intricate feature which echoed the paranoid films of 1970’s Hollywood. With GUNS, Kramer continues his exploration of the militant psyche, while at the same time experimenting with different forms of narration.

In the United States in 1966, Robert Kramer directed his first feature film, IN THE COUNTRY, outside all existing production systems and with the political fellow travelers who had just filmed him in the documentary TROUBLEMAKERS. IN THE COUNTRY shows what is left out of TROUBLEMAKERS: the documentary shows actions (community organizing, militant activism) that the fictional film keeps outside the frame in order to focus on a relationship crisis in which the man fails to put aside, for a few days, his obsessive political activism.