"Essay on the Military and the Power", a phrase that also belongs to the title of "Gestures & Fragments", sums up the spirit of the film, based on three points of view on the same theme: Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho and Eduardo Lourenço, in their own roles, and the one played by Robert Kramer, as an American journalist bent on seeking explanations for the process of the Portuguese Revolution.

Doc lives on the edge of Europe where it imperceptibly slides over into the Third World. As a doctor, he knows that the illness he has contracted ten years before in war-torn Africa is getting worse. The diagnosis is cholera, but Doc Knows the disease's real name: despair. His thoughts about his failed struggle for justice and ideals are drowned regularly in alcohol. On the other side of the world lives Jimmy, a speed-loving motorbike freak who, when his mother dies, finds a letter from Doc and discovers that his father, whom he thought was dead, is still alive. The encounter of the two men leads to a reappraisal of two worlds in opposition.

1980 film directed by Robert Kramer

"A many-faceted portrait of those individuals who sought radical solutions to social problems in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. It cuts back and forth between six major story lines and more than fifty characters, and across a vast landscape, to explore the lifestyles and attitudes of the American left who faced both personal and hhistorical transitions in the period following the Vietnam War."

In this film from late in his career, Kramer returns to Hanoi after nearly 25 years to re-envision the city’s struggle through an uncertain and daunting past, present, and future. The Vietnamese characters in the film are diverse: Kramer’s former guide from an earlier visit in 1969; a tight-rope walker in the national circus; a man who took photos of B-52s and another who lost his fingers shooting them down.

On location in Portugal, a film crew runs out of film while making their own version of Roger Corman's The Day the World Ended (1956). The producer is nowhere to be found and director Munro attempts to find him in hopes of being able to finish the film.