Politically committed critics read Ice as personal fantasy, not politics

Evidence

On the other hand, Ice was excoriated by politically committed critics. Writing in Film Quarterly, Berkeley-based James Roy MacBean, a prominent exegete of the new Godard, called it apolitical and irrational. Essentially a paranoid thriller in the tradition of Fantomas and Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse (or, unmentioned, Rivette), Ice was “more of a science-fiction horror film than a political film” and, despite its documentary style, a personal expression of the filmmaker’s “fantasies and fears about revolution.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1662

Categorization

• XREF: A left-wing avant-garde film rejected by left-wing critics as ‘apolitical and irrational’ — relevant to cultural-stagnation claims about how political art gets policed from within its own scene.