Urban Guerrillas vs The State in Ice (1970)
Description
On this episode we wanted to see a depiciton of people resisting fascim, so we're looking at an Robert Kramer's Ice (1970). It's our first American film in this series and the resistance we're seeing comes from a cell of New York Urban guerillas. They are fighting a dystopian version of the Nixon administration and its illegal war of imperialism in Mexico.
Kramer's film is less a straightforward dystopia thriller than a raw document of the fractured leftist movements trying to organize within the belly of U.S. empire in the late 1960's. Kramer's handheld, on-location shooting style and use of non-actors offers a time capsule not just of American radicalism in 1970, but of filmmaking that rejects Hollywood polish for a Cassavetes style immediacy.
Ice is uniquely embedded in the struggles it portrays; Kramer and his peers were activists themselves, not just chroniclers. The result is a film that forgoes easy allegory or procedural clarity and instead immerses viewers in the skepticism, paranoia, and possibility of revolutionary change at a time when history felt radically contingent.
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