Following the ambiguous reception of Ice and the upheaval within Newsreel, Kramer left New York for a collective community in Vermont, an experience that inspired the fictionalized fantasia of his next film, five years later, Milestones.An epic and a mosaic, Milestones features dozens of characters gathered at a rural New England commune, refugees from the radical 1960s and allegorical figures for the country’s disillusioned entry into the 1970s. A visually striking work of seemingly improvisational form, Milestones bears comparison to the work of both Cassavetes and Altman, and especially Nashville, Altman’s nearly contemporaneous epic study of Americana.