A more fictionalised, more extreme, more clandestine, more single-minded version of the sprawling cast of 'Milestones', Kramer's more condensed and fictionalised 'Ice' depicts the planning of a Tet-style 'Spring Offensive' by a group of would-be urban guerrillas engaged in strategy meetings, armed raids, and-in a self-conscious move no doubt relating to Kramer's own work in collective political film-making (from which some felt this individually-directed film was a step back), the making of propaganda films, whose intertitled slogans flash up throughout the film. The members of the group are all young, all white (though in one brief scene they negotiate with a group who, it seems to be implied, are the Panthers), more Weather Underground than Symbionese Liberation Army, but beset by the suspicion and isolation of the close group-the paradox where the path to accomplish total societal transformation is now felt to lie in necessarily secret and small-scale activity. The scene where the group kidnap and then explain to the residents of an apartment block their vision is the awkward test case for the beginnings of bridging this gap: having taken oneself out of circulation for the sake of one's ideas, one's methods, how to put oneself back in, how to spread such action? Filmed before the collapses and revelations of such groups documented in excruciating detail in Wakamatsu's 'United Red Army' some decades later, the film reserves judgement. The group is of mixed gender, and women appear to play equal roles in the organisation, but it's unclear to what extent Kramer shares the apparent obsession with impotence and depleted masculinity literalised here in the figure of the castrated revolutionary now in a purely defensive position, typing up reports and waiting with his shotgun behind a desk in an office. These are not glamorous rebels (as per 'The Baader-Meinhof Complex'), nor sociopathic terrorists, but, given the demands they've placed on themselves, ironically enough, professionals who must act with a total focus on the task and little time for an un-fraught human intimacy. For me, the most striking moment is one of the least flashy. Temporarily alone in the snow while on a training retreat, the figure who adapts the role of protagonist-or at least of leader (though the structure of both film and group itself refuses such roles)-imagines that thought is like a river which exceeds the subject in whom the thought supposedly originated. 'What we have here is a situation where we find ourselves in the midst of a river with very strong currents and with no way of getting out of the river, but that's not bad. And you just go ahead and do what you can't avoid doing. And your mind follows along. So, you've got to change your mind around, ...no need to even ask some of those questions you used to be asking... Interesting to think of the ideas being not your ideas but being part of a movement... What do you make of that? A little crazy?' Conceptualising the individual as part of the currents of history isn't new to revolutionary thought-or to other kinds of thought-but there's something terrifying about this-the movement of the river not that of a collective of people, but of some impersonal, natural, abstracted force. Is this the force which the melting of the titular 'ice' through revolutionary action might release? Or is that 'ice' the coldness, the suspension of affect and emotional responsiveness to accomplish revolution? Or to 'ice' someone-as when the same individual is abruptly thrown into a river on his return to the city, presumably by a group of government agents? If this is a movement, it's not the movement of public protest, marches, and declarations of togetherness, but of an atomised, fractured and precarious collective that at times seems like the mirror image of the alienated society it seeks to destroy.
