ICE is one of the most attractive black-and-white achievements ever made, a remarkable film set in a totalitarian regime in the United states, that's centered in NYC. The episodic script revolves around an underground leftist organization as they plan guerrilla activities, imagining a mass urban insurrection in New York. They protest American influences in Mexico, deal with internal disputes, and eventually coordinate a major, city-wide, heavily armed offensive against the State.
Often bizarre, dialogues act as a distorted segment of some philosophical discussion or move along absurd paths of a labyrinth from which there is no way out. Characters whose patterns of behaviour are unusual, the psyche is torn, emotions are pushed into the background, and some unexpected reactions quite understandably radiate coldness (and eventually come to a standstill), since they are completely separated from their environment. They are acted in Goddard's style, with occasional bursts of theatricality. What allows Robert Kramer to keep this (experimental) construction stable, and it becomes clear in the first few minutes, is the flawless and equally unconventional. Beautiful, fascinating, and ultimately inscrutable ICE is a film that haunts with its refusal to explain itself and is likely to reverberate in the mind long after the final credits have rolled. I recommend this to the fans of The Killing of America (1981), Peter Watkins Punishment Park (1971), Miklós Jancsó's Silence and Cry (1968), Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool (1969), Kazuo Hara's Extreme Private Eros: Love Song (1974), Gilles Groulx's The Cat in the Bag (1964), John Gianvito's The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (2001), Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Vampires of Poverty (1977) directed by Carlos Mayolo & Luis Ospina.
Often bizarre, dialogues act as a distorted segment of some philosophical discussion or move along absurd paths of a labyrinth from which there is no way out. Characters whose patterns of behaviour are unusual, the psyche is torn, emotions are pushed into the background, and some unexpected reactions quite understandably radiate coldness (and eventually come to a standstill), since they are completely separated from their environment. They are acted in Goddard's style, with occasional bursts of theatricality. What allows Robert Kramer to keep this (experimental) construction stable, and it becomes clear in the first few minutes, is the flawless and equally unconventional. Beautiful, fascinating, and ultimately inscrutable ICE is a film that haunts with its refusal to explain itself and is likely to reverberate in the mind long after the final credits have rolled. I recommend this to the fans of The Killing of America (1981), Peter Watkins Punishment Park (1971), Miklós Jancsó's Silence and Cry (1968), Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool (1969), Kazuo Hara's Extreme Private Eros: Love Song (1974), Gilles Groulx's The Cat in the Bag (1964), John Gianvito's The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (2001), Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Vampires of Poverty (1977) directed by Carlos Mayolo & Luis Ospina.