Medium Cool (18.)
Directed By Haskell Wexler. 1968.
Starring Robert Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz, Marianne Hill and Harold Blanship. 110 mins.
Chicago 1968. Any film that opens with those words is giving its audience a very clear indication of where it is headed; it is something more than foreshadowing. The brutality with which the police and military attacked protestors at the Democratic Convention in the city that year is an event whose infamy has held up over the years. Tagging along beside the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, it is the encapsulation of just how crazy and unhinged the US was at that time. A terrible moment, but for an esteemed cameraman directing his debut feature about a news cameraman who would logically be covering the convention anyway, getting mixed up in the madness was both an opportunity and a responsibility.
Chicago 1968. You know where you are going to but the film's route there isn't always the surest. It does though have a magnificent opening. It starts with cameraman John Cassellis (Forster) shooting footage of a car wreck on the freeway before jumping to an enticing credit sequence shot from the passenger seat of a motorbike courier as he cruises around some notable Chicago locations, taking the footage to the news station. In the next scene we see a bunch of photo journalists at a party discussing the problems of their calling and it is here where the film really sets out its themes. Medium Cool is about the ethics of photo journalism and the ethics of photography itself, as well as the need to make news exciting and ratings grabbing. “Oh, isn't it horrible – let me see more!” God, Americans are so advanced – at this stage the news in Britain was still read by old men in bowtie during the interval at the opera, it would take Rupert Murdoch decades to besmirch our news values to the level they had sunk to across the water.
Haskell Wexler was one of Hollywood's best cinematographer, who ran a parallel career, flipping between shooting mainstream films like Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, In the Heat of The Night, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, The Conversation, The Thomas Crown Affair and Bound For Glory, while directing various radical documentaries. Given a chance to direct a feature he threw away the book he was supposed to adapt and wrote a script that it thought captured the spirit of the age.
The great merit of the film is that it was shot fast and loose and on the hoof, with a script flexible enough to take in whatever was happening. The film's chief problem is that it is like a gadfly, buzzing around trying to seek out whatever sensational events it can find. We see John going about his job, trying to look for the hot story. He is callous and hardnosed but slowly gets disillusioned with his role in the media and becomes involved with a single mother (Bloom) and her young son (Blanship) who live in a ghetto for people who have moved to Chicago from the Appalachians.
Medium Cool, the title is taken from Marshall McLuhan, is a smart, very Godardian examination of a point in history, and the act of recording that point in history. Medium Cool would be a fair gauge for its level of success too. The photography is beautiful and the sense of history palpable and still urgent but the story that connects it all becomes steadily more superfluous and irritating. Bloom and Blanship give good performances but it is always a drag when they reappear on screen, their side story seems to be wasting our time. The end of film is Bloom wondering aimlessly through the riots supposing looking for her son who, for some contrived, no good reason, has run away. The film doesn't pretend that this is anything other than a very weak excuse to insert her into the footage and the weakness of the excuse becomes ever more infuriating. For a supposedly radical film it seems like an insultingly conventional move, turning history into the colourful backdrop to a family melodrama, and not even a convincing one.
In the party scene one documentarian complains that of all the films he has made, the biggest bombs were the ones that tried to explain what was happening. Well, there's no explanations offered here, just sensationalism. It's a very 60s movie, a perfect counter culture artifact. It is so intoxicated by the importance of what is happening, the excitement of the battle, the thrill of change that it never stops to analyze what exactly it was that was happening. By the time anyone thought to take stock and wonder where we were going with all this, it was over.
Extras
A slightly abbreviated, 53 minutes, version of the documentary Look Out Haskell, It's Real.
A commentary by Wexler, actress Hill and the editor Paul Golding recorded in Edinburgh in 2001 after a screening at the Festival.
A 28 page booklet
Zabriskie Point review
Directed By Haskell Wexler. 1968.
Starring Robert Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz, Marianne Hill and Harold Blanship. 110 mins.
Chicago 1968. Any film that opens with those words is giving its audience a very clear indication of where it is headed; it is something more than foreshadowing. The brutality with which the police and military attacked protestors at the Democratic Convention in the city that year is an event whose infamy has held up over the years. Tagging along beside the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, it is the encapsulation of just how crazy and unhinged the US was at that time. A terrible moment, but for an esteemed cameraman directing his debut feature about a news cameraman who would logically be covering the convention anyway, getting mixed up in the madness was both an opportunity and a responsibility.
Chicago 1968. You know where you are going to but the film's route there isn't always the surest. It does though have a magnificent opening. It starts with cameraman John Cassellis (Forster) shooting footage of a car wreck on the freeway before jumping to an enticing credit sequence shot from the passenger seat of a motorbike courier as he cruises around some notable Chicago locations, taking the footage to the news station. In the next scene we see a bunch of photo journalists at a party discussing the problems of their calling and it is here where the film really sets out its themes. Medium Cool is about the ethics of photo journalism and the ethics of photography itself, as well as the need to make news exciting and ratings grabbing. “Oh, isn't it horrible – let me see more!” God, Americans are so advanced – at this stage the news in Britain was still read by old men in bowtie during the interval at the opera, it would take Rupert Murdoch decades to besmirch our news values to the level they had sunk to across the water.
Haskell Wexler was one of Hollywood's best cinematographer, who ran a parallel career, flipping between shooting mainstream films like Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, In the Heat of The Night, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, The Conversation, The Thomas Crown Affair and Bound For Glory, while directing various radical documentaries. Given a chance to direct a feature he threw away the book he was supposed to adapt and wrote a script that it thought captured the spirit of the age.
The great merit of the film is that it was shot fast and loose and on the hoof, with a script flexible enough to take in whatever was happening. The film's chief problem is that it is like a gadfly, buzzing around trying to seek out whatever sensational events it can find. We see John going about his job, trying to look for the hot story. He is callous and hardnosed but slowly gets disillusioned with his role in the media and becomes involved with a single mother (Bloom) and her young son (Blanship) who live in a ghetto for people who have moved to Chicago from the Appalachians.
Medium Cool, the title is taken from Marshall McLuhan, is a smart, very Godardian examination of a point in history, and the act of recording that point in history. Medium Cool would be a fair gauge for its level of success too. The photography is beautiful and the sense of history palpable and still urgent but the story that connects it all becomes steadily more superfluous and irritating. Bloom and Blanship give good performances but it is always a drag when they reappear on screen, their side story seems to be wasting our time. The end of film is Bloom wondering aimlessly through the riots supposing looking for her son who, for some contrived, no good reason, has run away. The film doesn't pretend that this is anything other than a very weak excuse to insert her into the footage and the weakness of the excuse becomes ever more infuriating. For a supposedly radical film it seems like an insultingly conventional move, turning history into the colourful backdrop to a family melodrama, and not even a convincing one.
In the party scene one documentarian complains that of all the films he has made, the biggest bombs were the ones that tried to explain what was happening. Well, there's no explanations offered here, just sensationalism. It's a very 60s movie, a perfect counter culture artifact. It is so intoxicated by the importance of what is happening, the excitement of the battle, the thrill of change that it never stops to analyze what exactly it was that was happening. By the time anyone thought to take stock and wonder where we were going with all this, it was over.
Extras
A slightly abbreviated, 53 minutes, version of the documentary Look Out Haskell, It's Real.
A commentary by Wexler, actress Hill and the editor Paul Golding recorded in Edinburgh in 2001 after a screening at the Festival.
A 28 page booklet
Zabriskie Point review
