Medium Cool (REPOST)
This repost (written in 2009) is in honor of Haskell Wexler, cinematographer extraordinaire, who died a few days ago. He was 93.
If you remember the 60s, you weren't there
-Dennis Hopper
I
wasn't there either. Technically I was, having been born in 1969, but
how oblivious I was to all the furor outside my gauzy, Fisher-Price
confines. I was bawling in a crib while an entire generation was on
fire. Taking to the streets. Marching across campuses. When I meet
Baby Boomers especially, I wonder if they were once part of some angry,
sign carrying collective. Perhaps one of the peaceful hippies who
slipped flowers into rifle barrels. Maybe they were flinging molotov
cocktails at shielded "pigs" on horseback. Indeed, all the imagery
we've seen time and again in documentaries of that most troubled decade.
Cliched by now. Certainly, not everyone was out in the fracas. Those
who were tended to be caught in chilling stills, immortalized as
their open mouths in not quite taciturn protest against Vietnam, the
Establishment, or maybe some political candidate, were seen worldwide.
We open a retrospective edition of Time or Newsweek and see the images of which I speak.
Fictional
films have splashed this imagery across screens, too. All those bathed
in nostalgia flicks, often romantacized. Then there are films like
writer/director/cinematographer Haskell Wexler's MEDIUM COOL, from '69,
that is as cinema verite as it gets. That French term, loosely
translated as "cinema of truth", denotes a filmmaking style which
employs naturalistic elements for and with devices of the artists. Put
another way, the filmmakers often go out to real locations, filled with
real people, adding actors to try to blend in and react to/provoke some
drama. I'd say that is an apt summation for Wexler's film.
The
setting: Chicago, 1968. Democratic National Convention. The year was
already a torrent of sorrow: Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the
assassinations of MLK and RFK. The nation was increasingly restless.
As Wexler penned his screenplay the year before, he quite presciently
believed that the stormy pot would boil over even more. The Deomocrats
were courting a peace-loving candidate but the current Democratic
Commander in Chief, Lyndon Johnson, likely couldn't show his face
publicly in 1968 without a welcoming committee of protesters. There
would be no peace at the Convention, as saying all hell broke loose is a
gross understatement.
The National Guard anticipated a
storm. Their training was intense as they prepared to keep the peace.
When the rubber hit the road (quite literally in the events of MEDIUM
COOL), any sense of organization was lost in a sea of chaos. It was all
over the news, naturally. Wexler and his actors and crew were also
there, right in the middle. Professional thesps like Robert Forster,
portraying John Cassellis, a tough and dispassionate television news
reporter, wandered through very vivid and very real conflicts. Peter
Bonerz was Gus, the sound guy who wades through the troubled sea along
with him. As Wexler frantically tries to guide his camera around the
mayhem, we see genuine looks of concern on the actors' faces. As in
"Holy shit, that billy club is about to make contact with that guy's
skull." We actually do hear someone say, during one of the many scenes
of Convention protest violence, "Look out Haskell, it's real!" Indeed
it was, but the director cheated there, as that line was dubbed in after
principal photography. He really didn't need to do that, as any visual
conveyed the urgency of that statement well enough.
Before
we see the climatic turmoil, we follow Cassellis, driven and detached,
as he investigates the ugliness of everyday urban city life. There are
car crash scenes, shocking pockets of poverty, drug abuse fallout. All
waiting to be documented and aired. John shoots miles of footage, but
remains clinical, never to become connected to what is in his
foreground. He's like a later fictional character, Harry Caul, the
surveillance expert in THE CONVERSATION. Exact at what he does, and
able to file it away without those nagging concerns of empathy. Maybe
it is the correct paradigm, as what he faces would surely eventually
wear down even the most mechanized soul. Many physicians are like this.
John
has relationships, but sex can be had (at least in the meanwhile)
without the affection and responsibility. In a film that very cleverly
flirts with the avant garde at many turns, a more
conventional narrative emerges when he meets Eileen (Verna Bloom) and
her frustrated son, Harold. They are unsophisticated folk from
Appalachia, as lost in Chicago as John is in his apathy. This will
change as the adults meet and discover a bond. Harold is further
depressed and disappears, prompting his mother to undertake a citywide
search, leading to a blunt finale that stings the longer you mull it
over. A random, devastating conclusion that puts everything we've seen
in a whole new light. Watch it again and you will see how every
seemingly unimportant moment was essential.
Wexler is
best known for his lensmanship on films like COMING HOME, IN THE HEAT OF
THE NIGHT, and FACES. The latter film shares much with MEDIUM COOL, as
both are uncomfortably voyeuristic. We sit through scenes where for
long stretches there's no cut to relieve the tension, the charcters' or
the audience's. We eavesdrop on meetings, lovemaking, playful fighting,
real fighting. Not just the actors', as you know. Fozen in time,
preserved on celluloid, are the words and actions of neighborhood folks.
Non-actors. John and Gus arrive in a ghetto and are lectured by the
locals about the black man's plight. The non-actors look right into
John's (and Wexler's) camera and lay it all down, off the cuff. Spike
Lee must have seen this, as it prefaces the sort of breakways of the
"fourth wall" we would see decades later in his DO THE RIGHT THING and
THE 25th HOUR. The energy is similiar, too. The authenticity of these
scenes are a treasure. They do not feel engineered like that of many
other documentaries, and Lord help us, not like any of the dozens of
reality programs that have plagued prime time TV in the last decade
plus.
As a cinematographer, Wexler composed masterful
shots of the whims of other masters. In MEDIUM COOL, his tour-de-force
behind the camera electrifies an already potent scenario. I'll bet if
he just locked the camera down on a tripod and let it run, he still
would've captured a good chunk of the natural drama that was the 1968
Democratic National Convention. Life doesn't necessarily need to be
enhanced with art. But by composing a mash-up of the real and surreal,
he has made a valuable document that serves both as a time capsule and an artistic groundbreaker. Well worth your time.
Comments