Extract from "Ice" (1969)
By Robert Kramer
A pioneering work that blurred the boundaries between fictional and documentary styles, Ice was hailed by filmmaker and Village Voice critic Jonas Mekas as “the most original and most significant American narrative film” of the late sixties. An underground revolutionary group struggles against internal strife which threatens its security and stages urban guerrilla attacks against a fictionalized fascist regime in the United States. Interspersed throughout the narrative are rhetorical sequences that explain the philosophy of radical action and serve to restrain the melodrama inherent in the “thriller” genre. Shot in the gray landscape of New York City in a gritty cinema-verité style, the film has been compared to Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville. Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Chicago Reader: “One of American independent Robert Kramer’s strongest “underground” features (1969), arguably his best, made in and around New York before he resettled in Paris. This potent and grim SF thriller about urban guerrillas of the radical left, shot in the manner of a rough documentary in black and white, has an epic sweep to it. (Like many politically informed art movies of the period, starting with Al…
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