The Edge / Ice - Robert Kramer

The Edge (1967) and Ice (1969) form a definitive diptych on the temptations of terrorism and insurrection: a man wants to assassinate the President of the United States (The Edge); revolutionary groups launch a major armed offensive against the ruling regime (Ice). However, both fictions are less interested in the impact of activism than in the moral state of shock that gradually shifts relationships and beliefs as it overlays another sense of time and other types of logic on those of revolutionary efficiency. Made in parallel with Robert Kramer’s own militant activism in Newsreel and other organizations of the American left, which they contradict dialectically, they are an extraordinary application of filmmaking considered as a tool of thought in motion.

“I think that now, based on a lot of Ice’s contradictions – between men and women, between ‘activism’ and ‘living,’ between life and death – I think that now, we are starting to understand the synthesis, or at least the very diverse forms of synthesis that will help us create a higher, clearer level of consciousness, and therefore a higher level of activism.” (Robert Kramer)