(1969)
5
Mark Deming
Few documents in any medium captured the political unrest of the late '60s with greater clarity than Medium Cool, a remarkably accomplished directorial effort from award-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler. Wexler took to the streets of Chicago with a film crew to record how the city prepared for the 1968 Democratic Convention, and he put himself in the middle of the violent clashes between police and protestors that went on to define that event. Wexler then wove this material into a narrative about John (Robert Forster), a TV news cameraman whose ability to observe impartially the events around him is challenged by the violence of the riots, as well as by his relationship with Eileen (Verna Bloom), a young widow whose husband died in Vietnam. While it's no surprise that Wexler's footage of actual events bears the ring of truth, his staged sequences have a rough, improvised quality that meshes perfectly with the real-life sequences, and the result is a work that blurs the lines between fact and fiction. Wexler's mix of visual polemics, on-the-spot documentary, human drama, Brechtian disorientation, media-savvy analysis of television, and fashionable sex, drugs, and rock & roll made Medium Cool as intelligent and challenging as anything Jean-Luc Godard produced in Europe at the time, and Wexler's film has for the most part better withstood the test of time. It's a shame that Wexler directed so few features after Medium Cool, but, as both a work of art and a document of a central moment in American history, it remains an essential and invaluable film.
releases for Medium Cool on AllMovie
Medium Cool (1969)
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Medium Cool
Paramount
More
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December 11, 2001 |
