Kramer has described this film in interview as, in essence, following around his friends-activists, actors, theatre and film people performing themselves, versions of themselves or characters. Though this is a film whose title proclaims its desire to tackle big subjects, big events, its narrative method refuses such historical logic, or embeds it in the vicissitudes and differing scales of daily lives where it occurs as a network of relationships rather than a newspaper headline, a date, a statistic. Over the lengthy running time, we encounter large group/s of (largely) of declassé white people involved in particular with the anti-war movement, living on communes, embedding themselves in factories, involved to a greater or lesser extent with the more militant wings of movement activism (one character has just been released from jail), all of them in various ways, and for different reasons-personal, political, both-reckoning with whether or not to keep up activism as the possibility of revolutionary change fades, as the war itself ends-and with it, the movement that built up against it. It's hard to provide any total or totalising summary-though the scenes with Grace Paley reflecting on politics, gender roles and motherhood are highlights, and those featuring a blind, queer potter (played by co-director John Douglas) have an open and surprising tenderness to them. There are moments and movements of disenchantment and renewal, occasional sketches of a broader perspective, largely through historical montages: the glue of broader historical forces keeps coming unstuck, but, as the film nears its close things are brought together into a kind of statement of resolve, the film ending with footage from a live home birth, throughout which the mother is witnessed and helped-through collectively. It's at once heavily allegorical and one of the most intensely 'documentary' moments of the film. In important 1975 'Cahiers du Cinema' symposium on the film-a collective format for a collective film-featuring Serge Daney and others, several of the participants note that racialised groups are seen as focal points of exploitation and struggle, but are depicted only in pictures or identificatory rituals such as the activist released from prison who visits a hogan in a kind of restorative 'vision quest' (in another scene, his father, a doctor, invites him back into the class he'd tried to mark himself out from). Such groups thus rarely feature in the lives of these characters-suggesting that, of the dividing lines that appear in the film, and that fracture the communities they attempt to build, race is still the principal structure. Given this, Daney remarked in an essay for 'Cahiers' the following year, the films risks being apologia for 'American conviviality', based on the 'ethnological masquerade' of the 'tribe'. (On this note, Lou Cornum has an important essay in the first issue of Pinko magazine about the use of the 'tribe' metaphor in a host white radical writings, from David Wojnarowicz to Leslie Feinberg, and a complex identificatory history, the way the American white (New) Left positions itself vis-à-vis the non-white might equally apply to Kramer's film). For Daney, though, while there may be elements of such thought, reflected in the positions of the filmmakers as well as the figures in the film, 'Milestones' also suggests the fragility of this re-imagined community, specifically through two moments-an attempted break-in and sexual assault and the sudden death of a demobbed GI, about to join a collective house, who accepts an invitation to a break-in and is killed by a cop. In terms that suggest both what unites the individual figures to their various collectives (family, lover(s), activist group, commune, etc) and what unites the narrative strands of the film to each other, he describes the film's structure not a 'chronicle', nor a 'document', but a 'fabric', one which 'spreads, getting progressively larger, with invisible knock-on effects'. As such, the unknown is both space of political possibility, of dialectical process (and hopefully, progress) and risky territory in which the most vulnerable-or simply the unlucky-can succumb to the daily dangers against which the provisional collective(s) here envisioned can't always protect them. Daney: 'Human relationships don't knit together with complete dependability; they are tied together over an empty space, on a wire without a net. To fall through the meshes of the net, to pass through a void, is to die'. And literally so. Milestone's shelters are provisional, flimsy, and in constant negotiation, and if their dreams might seem alternately smaller or larger, more idealistic or more problematic than those we might be able to cultivate now, they resonate all the more for that: rather than a milestone to be mourned in left melancholy, nor a glowing icon of exemplary action, like Daney's thread, they're still unspooling, spreading, in all their complexity.
Review of Milestones
