128 minutes / Color
Release: 2011
Copyright: 1969
Ice is included on the same DVD as Milestones
ICE is an innovative independent thriller, shot in New York City, which centers on a revolutionary group plotting to attack a fascistic political regime. Using a fictitious war with Mexico as an allegory for the conflict in Vietnam, Kramer uses a documentary style to dramatize the inner workings, disputes and tensions within the group itself as they plan guerrilla attacks against the American government.
"One of the most exciting filmmakers we have. Kramer seems incapable of shooting a scene, framing a shot or catching a line of dialogue that isn't loaded with information one usually finds in only the best, most spare poetry." —The New York Times
"Despite its doggedness of tone, especially in the characters' political rhetoric (you can bet that the Red Army Faction, Weather Underground and SLA all bought tickets), Ice remains surprisingly personal and beautifully somber. Its high-contrast, natural-light cinematography is breathtaking, part of the rich, lost tradition of 16mm black-and-white image-making seen in the work of Frederick Wiseman, Robert Frank and Charles Burnett. Under Kramer's gaze, the familiar, run-down, Lindsay-era New York becomes as alien, melancholy and minatory as the Paris of Godard's Alphaville." —LA Weekly
"The politically radical fiction Ice made [Robert Kramer's] reputation." —The Boston Phoenix
"Ice can hold its own against the entire wave of committed filmmaking that accompanied the 1968 student strikes worldwide." —DVD Savant
"The film’s revolution quickly breeds infighting that has little to do with the struggles of the people. Ice shows us this truth so that future acts of rebellion can benefit and thrive." —Hyperallergic
"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... A searing, unnerving history lesson, it's an American counterpart to some of Jacques Rivette's conspiracy pictures, a desperate message found in a bottle." —The Chicago Reader