Kramer abandoned filmmaking for a Vermont commune before Ice even opened

Evidence

Dramatizing the difficulty in making a revolution, Ice can be understood as Kramer’s missive to his comrades. By then, however, the filmmaker had moved on. Before Ice opened, Kramer withdrew to a commune in Vermont, announcing that he was no longer making films. The New York Times was respectful if unenthusiastic. Vincent Canby called Ice “an awfully proud and humorless film.” Roger Greenspun felt the movie demonstrated that “revolution, like everything else we do, lives in our awareness as a succession of personal relationships.” In a thoughtful New York Review of Books essay that covered all manner of counterculture productions, Elizabeth Hardwick, a writer of an age to remember the 1930s and ’40s, found it interesting that Ice felt “old-fashioned,” something that might have been produced by doctrinaire Maoists or the Progressive Labor Party and, anything but with-it, spared viewers “endless fornications and commune banalities.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1661

Categorization

• XREF: The filmmaker withdrawing to a commune mid-project parallels the broader ‘scene becomes market’ arc — artists leave just as their work is being absorbed, echoing the gentrification-advance-guard thesis elsewhere in the book.