The Ice House by Erinn Springer
Erinn Springer
The Ice House
May 2, 2025
343 min
HD video / color / sound
In July of 2024, Erinn Springer spent more than six hours standing in one place and observing the single, continuous drama that comprises “The Ice House.” In the process she managed to capture the languid, everything-and-nothing- is-happening nature of a typical summer day. She also captured something much more than that.
Over several weeks I watched footage from “The Ice House” over and over, trying to understand the strange undertow of feelings it stirred in me. I am afraid of water, and never learned to swim. Because of that, I suppose, my initial response to the clip was a sort of mute terror. Yet the film has the action, pace, and ambient soundtrack of a dissolving dream, and the more it drew me in, the more magical and hypnotic it became. The film’s drama revolves around a mysterious structure (the Ice House of the title) out in Lake Superior. This structure appears to be collaps- ing, on the verge of sinking into the lake. Time passes. The light slowly changes. Disembodied voices carry. You hear fog horns, sirens, the con- versations and observations of passersby; figures swarm in the water and scramble around out on the Ice House. Occasionally these figures— singly or in groups—creep to the edge of what inevitably begins to re- semble a sinking ship and launch themselves overboard. The metaphors begin to swarm as well—freedom, darkness and light, danger and brav- ery, fear and fearlessness, the terror and ecstasy possible in any single moment, the pecking order and proving ground of adolescence, the per- ceived immortality of youth at precisely the moment it begins its confron- tation with the stark reality of gravity and time. A sort of reverse Rapture is taking place. The Ice House becomes time itself. It moves, inexorably. It breathes. You can hear its heart beating. Those young people out there navigating that spectacular metaphor and throwing themselves again and again into the dark unknown are fiercely and unquestionably alive, and it’s likely they don’t yet recognize that they may never again be so young, so free, so beautiful, so brave.
– BRAD ZELLAR, 2025