Film Love: Milestones

<div>Presented by Film Love! More info to come.</div><div><br></div><div><i>MILESTONES is a lilting, free-associative masterpiece that follows dozens of characters — including hippies, farmers, immigrants, Native Americans, and political activists — as they try to reconcile their ideals with the realities of American life. In intimate discussions of subjects from communal living to parenting, pregnancy to family, Vietnam to Cuba, city life to country life, and the workplace to the bedroom, the film's diverse protagonists negotiate jealousies, relationships, and the logistical challenges of their rapidly changing world.</i></div><div><i><br></i></div><div><i>Shot in vivid color 16mm, using innovative, layered sound design and editing techniques as well as slides and archival footage, Milestones tracks its subjects through scripted and unscripted moments. It follows them as they share their emotions and dreams, their idealism and disillusionment, their triumphs and defeats of the past, as well as the possibilities for the future.</i><span style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Among the watershed works of 1970s American cinema, Robert Kramer’s and John Douglas’s sprawling 1975 Milestones occupies a unique place. An epic of everyday life, it balances dozens of characters and seamlessly blends fiction, documentary and re-enactment in telling the story of ‘60s radicals grown up, mourning the sense of hope that defined their youth and trying in their own ways to move forward. They traverse the country roads and highways across the U.S. as they try to rekindle lapsed friendships or reboot family arrangements. An octogenarian playing herself teaches her daughter (and us) about immigrant experience in 1930s New York. A pregnant woman prepares to become a parent amid her insecurity about the future, eventually giving birth onscreen among a large group of friends, in the film’s joyous climax. A young man emerges disoriented from his jail time for activism; a returning Vietnam vet faces a crisis of belonging; and various communes and collectives struggle with their identities and tensions. Milestones introduces each of these situations and more in its own time, weaving an increasingly engrossing, cumulative tapestry of an extended milieu of friends, lovers, and acquaintances.</span></div><br style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Milestones is often compared to the ensemble pictures of Robert Altman, especially Nashville. It certainly belongs in that company, along with Martin Scorsese’s ambitious mid-70s works and other, much better-known canonical 1970s films. But Kramer and Douglas had a vastly different relationship to their characters. They had themselves come out of ‘60s radical movements, from the Newsreel filmmaking collective to armed revolutionary communes, and they populated their cast with other movement participants. Worlds away from the naturalistic post-Method acting then dominant in American film, these performances have a lived-in quality and achieve a consistent authenticity that, together with the film’s flow between documentary and fiction, give Milestones an almost magical sense of grace.</span><br style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The struggles of parenting, finding work, life after jail or Vietnam, and – especially – how to live out radical ideals as white people in a country with a deep legacy of oppressive racism, all weigh deeply on these characters. Yet through its makers’ unrelenting compassion and empathy, Milestones manages to avoid despair without denying its constant proximity. A brave and inspiring film, and an essential work of American cinema.</span><br style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Milestones (Robert Kramer and John Douglas, 1975) 195 min, digital projection</span><br style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">ROBERT KRAMER’S AND JOHN DOUGLAS’S MILESTONES is a Film Love event. The Film Love series provides access to great but rarely seen films, often important works unavailable on consumer video. Programs are curated and introduced by Andy Ditzler, and feature lively discussion. Through public screenings and events, Film Love preserves the communal viewing experience, provides space for the discussion of film as art, and explores diverse forms of moving image projection and viewing.</span>DocumentaryPT3H15MNot Rated2026-08-27USen
Mary Chapelle
Sharon Krebs
Jim Nolfi
Robert Kramer
John Douglas
Barbara Stone
David C. Stone
Film Love: Milestones"Film Love: Milestones"

Showtimes

August 27, 7:00 pm

Plaza Theatre