Aug 26 2008
“The whole world is watching!”
With this year’s Democratic National Convention currently in full swing, I thought it’d be appropriate to take a look back to 40 years ago, when another convention was caught on celluloid, with stunning, sometimes harrowing, results.
The ’60s was a rich decade for American filmmaking, with the simmering counterculture finding ways to work its ideas and politics into mainstream movies. Easy Rider has probably come to embody that time frame and phase of cinema for most, but I’d argue that 1969’s Medium Cool is a much more audacious and important work.
Directed by renowned cinematographer Haskell Wexler, Medium Cool channeled documentary techniques and actor improvisations (before that stuff became trendy or overly exaggerated, a la today’s Paul Greengrass) to bring life to the basic, nominal story about a news cameraman and his budding relationship with a woman (Verna Bloom) and her young son. The woefully undervalued actor Robert Forster — whom Quentin Tarantino tried to bring back into the limelight with 1997’s Jackie Brown — plays that cameraman, John Cassellis.
What could have been a standard melodrama found a new form via Wexler’s revolutionary filmmaking. By having Forster pose as a real cameraman, and putting him in genuine “newsworthy” situations, the movie morphed from a small-scale relationship pic into an eye-opening portrait of America’s social turmoil of the period. The most explosive culmination of that life + art mix-up is the finale of the film, in which Cassellis covers the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. That year had already delivered some major shake-ups for this country, with the double punch of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy still fresh in everyone’s minds. That cultural unease triggered mass protests, and while Medium Cool’s cameras were rolling at the convention, riots broke out and chaos ensued. Aside from its overall aesthetic excellence (courtesy of Wexler, who also served as the director of photography), the film’s beauty lies in its ability to directly reflect a specific national mindset of the time. Granted, I’m sure not everyone in America shared its politics, but the movie addresses issues — social, political, and media-related — with a directness that seems impossible for a Hollywood studio production. Medium Cool is a genuine cinematic treasure, and it is, unsurprisingly, rather timely and relevant to our own concerns today.
There’s a terrific, brand-new interview with star Robert Forster over here, and it’s well worth reading even if you haven’t seen the film. When you read the actor’s recollections about the shooting of the movie, or meeting Muhammad Ali during the shoot, or hearing about Robert Kennedy’s death, you’ll probably want to revisit the movie, even if it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, or try to track it down for the first time.
You can watch the original trailer for Medium Cool here.
