Low-budget 16mm political cinema embodied both world-changing idealism and solitary estrangement

Evidence

As a New York film, Ice, capped the period of the underground 16mm narratives: on one hand, fueled by the passionate world-changing idealism advanced in Jonas Mekas’s Guns of the Trees; on the other, haunted by the solitary estrangement characterizing Peter Goldman’s $1,600 production Echoes of Silence—a film Mekas had hailed as a major debut after it screened at the Tek in February 1965. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1650

Categorization

• XREF: Supports the reader’s thesis about cheap production costs as a material condition for avant-garde density — parallels the cheap-rent argument for art scenes.