Ice

So every once in a while I see a film that's different, from a time when cinema wasn't tapioca, from strange distant vents where people thought that cinema could help us to live, help to change the way the world was. I watched Ice, a film from 1970, and couldn't believe that it had survived. It was a pretty messed up copy from a DVD-r site. The film is American made and concerns a revolution fomenting in the US. The US has gotten involved in a war in Mexico, looks pretty much like a civil war that the US is playing with, it's basically the filmmakers constructing a second Vietnam only a little closer to home. Anyway the revolutionary movement in the US isn't very happy about this, and organises, all sorts of splinter groups and movements, Hispanic, black, white, with all sorts of different politics. They come together in national and regional councils. There is an armed insurrection.

The way this film is shot is so different from anything else you can see. A couple prepare to have sex quite matter-of-factly, there's no stylisation, no inappropriate voyeurism or obtrusive mise en scène. At one point a man is violently genitally mutilated (also non voyeuristically). It's real vérité.

The structure is very interesting, it's basically two hours of assault by revolutionary ideas, the form can change. At the start we see static shots of public buildings and cityscapes with superimposed logos such as "THE PEOPLE KNOW THE STATE IS THEIR ENEMY". But this can change to vérité filming of the meetings of radical groups, to newsreel footage of the Vietcong, to encounter meetings between a "square" and a revolutionary.

The achievement of the movie is that it actually does feel like a real revolution in the US is being documented, the revolution that never actually happened in the Vietnam War era. It's got a feel like a William Burroughs novel, it's fractured and splintered and confusing, just like a revolution would be. One of the best little touches I felt was when a car screeches to a halt by a city centre street sidewalk, and out are thrown bundles of revolutionary newspapers, which are cut open and left for passers by to pickup. It just had the right feel about it, the kind of feel that makes latter day revolutionary movies like Fight Club (1999) or V for Vendetta (2005) appear laughable. Then you get a scene where some of the guys are dancing in a theatre with Chinese style dragon costumes, apropos of nothing except joie de vivre.

We get back to slogans later, "WE MUST NEGATE THE PRESENT IN ALL ITS FORM AND BUILD THE FUTURE". And written on a person's back, "HUMANITY WON'T BE HAPPY UNTIL THE LAST BUREAUCRAT IS DISSOLVED IN THE BLOOD OF THE LAST CAPITALIST".

There's an interesting few quotes about ideology that I thought I might share,

"False consciousness is people not understanding their ACTUAL role in society, or their UN-FREEDOM. A ruling class propagates false consciousness among the people in order to help themselves hold onto power. False consciousness is peoples' rationalisation for the exploitation & oppression that they experience in their daily lives."

I'm no supporter of violent revolution, however I am great believer in the existence of false ideologies, and that's something this film highlights. It's also not as pushy as it sounds, it really is very much trying to engage with people.

The memory that will probably stick with me the most is of this scene where they get one of these old robot toys with cogs whirring on it's chest and set it trampling around a model they've made of a city block. It's meant to represent the zombie-like destructive state. It's quite brilliant really, I mean to do something like that and for it not to be laughable in the age of Cloverfield I felt was quite impressive.

The movie is fair-handed. It's not a presentation of this revolution as a Carnation revolution. There is internecine conflict between the revolutionary groups, failure to agree, and bloodshed. The great achievement though is that it manages to get the kind of feel of an Arthur Koestler novel, only we're seeing that transposed upon America.

Absolutely essential viewing.

I saw this film in Europe after I had been in France about 6 months and was just getting solid about the incredibly powerful control of the media in the US. Viet Nam propaganda was in full swing, and yet, here was this film! I never knew if it had actually been shown in the US until I saw the mention on this site, so I suppose that it was shown here. (The USA)

Of course this film isn't for everyone, but so few real ideas are. One could imagine that this is a blueprint for regaining control of the media and power etc. and thereby the minds of the people of this country. But heck, it's probably not important. Nope, it's OK in fact. As long as we're free to get any job they will let us have and we can go to any church we wish...hey, why complain. Some day, some Master's Degree in Sociology will write about this movie and tell you all about it, so you won't have to think too much on your own. It would have been bad for you anyway.

B.F. Skinner was right. I haven't found a way to buy a copy yet, either.

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.

A long, slow movie about a fictional '60s radical group. They talk and talk and talk about making revolution. Then they talk some more. Every so often, violence breaks out for no particular reason. It's all pretty murky and hard to follow, but I think that's supposed to be the point, as if these wannabe revolutionaries are so caught up in their socialist fantasies that they've lost track of the real world. I found it fairly mesmerizing in its gritty realism, but I have a feeling a lot of people wouldn't be able to sit through it.

To comment on a film about a special sort of politics easily seems like taking a stand on and even within that politics. And I can see that in the United States in 1969 people could get nervous, because it's hard to know how people in an audience will take things (when The Godfather came out in 1972 I saw it in a huge urban theatre with a couple of youth gangs getting in and out of their seats and patrolling the aisles). In the case of Ice, the cast is very good, but very few of them are credited (none of the strong and articulate women), and one may suspect they were afraid of a credit (like an actor worried about playing a character who is gay). But as I see it, this movie is not agitprop, though it contains what you could snip out if you want a word to live by. But make sure it's enough.

Instead, the film runs an hypothesis about its very special sort of politics, and shows what you would have to be to do it, if you want a conceptually total revolution. It is fiction about people who think their acts will be the revolution. The cause supported is a fictional uprising in Mexico: the movement has set fire to oil depots in Port Arthur, Texas, not a real event as far as brief research can tell. With African-Americans with a real and militant cause these revolutionaries have only loose contact, with opposition to the war in Vietnam about which Kramer made a movie it has only an AWOL soldier who is of interest because he could furnish "information." The movie is accurately narrated in fragments: when asked what her vision of the future is a character can only say she knows what she is doing right now. Right now is herding apartment dwellers to see an agitprop movie; right now is shooting a gun.

I can see people are put off by the fragmentation. When I saw this movie in a cinematheque there weren't many in the audience to start with and very few at the end. Yet this may be the best story around about theory-driven violent (revolutionary) action, better than movies about the Baader-Meinhof gang or the Brigata Rossa. In 1970 near Washington Square earnest people did kill themselves while making a bomb.