Critics saw New Left revolutionary films as self-defeatingly elitist

Evidence

Alienation is a given. Kramer’s revolutionaries are burdened by a self-important sense of mission. Their way of life was both unattractive and elitist and, considering that the state’s vastly superior power is never acknowledged, pathologically self-destructive. Joan Mellen, who reviewed Ice at length in Cineaste, called it “a depressing spectacle of New Left self-indulgence,” noting that “the boredom generated by this overlong film, the endless droning of ideology and rhetoric bespeak a sense of self defeat.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1663