Ice Robert Kramer

About This Screening

Born in New York in 1939, Robert Kramer ranks as one of the most original directors of American underground cinema. A committed leftist who emerged radicalized from his studies in philosophy and Western European history at Swarthmore and Stanford, he worked as a reporter in Latin America and organized a community project in a black neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, before founding the Newsreel movement—an underground media collective which made some sixty documentaries and short films about radical political subjects and the antiwar movement between 1967 and 1971. His films constantly work at wearing away the impermeability of documentary and fiction forms, paying special attention to his characters. 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.—Harvard Film Archive