Medium Cool (1969) Directed by Haskell Wexler
There is a story here. John (Robert Forster), a freelance photojournalist, travels from one US hotspot to another, documenting with his handheld camera various kinds of political and social carnage. It is not until he arrives in Chicago for the Democratic Convention of 1968, the one that was called "a police riot" later by the Illinois legislature, that we begin to find out more about him. He develops a relationship with Eileen (Verna Bloom), a widow from Appalachia, and her 13-year-old son and he finally allows himself to get emotionally involved in something when she tells him her son has gone missing on the most violent day of the convention. Later, still looking for the boy, they die in a car accident.
I mean, that's roughly what happens. But what makes
Medium Cool interesting is its form. One could call the movie an early conception of a hybrid film, one that mixes reality with fiction. Or as critic Roger Ebert put it "fictional characters are in real scenes and real characters are in fictional scenes." The development of the plot seems almost random as the photographer's story is mixed with scenes of photojournalists discussing the dangers of their trade; Chicago cops in training for when the hippies arrive; live beatings during the actual convention; scenes that take place virtually on the convention floor; and Mayor Daley at the convention acting like the thug he was. We are given not a straightforward account of the story, but a series of scenes that we build our impressions upon. In other words, the audience is expected to do a lot of work in this film coming to their own conclusions about what is going on and the gravity of the situation. It is like each scene adds a slightly different colour to the palette, certainly not always in any kind of straightforward, linear fashion--but it all changes the story in sometimes unexpected ways.
Sometimes
Medium Cool can be maddening as when the car accident occurs out of the blue at the end, seeming so very arbitrary. But the scenes of Bloom wandering through the police lines at the height of the violence took my breath away the first time I saw the movie. She could have been arrested or maimed or worse. Yet these sequences become both part of her personal story and the story of the real convention. The movie blurs the lines between reality and fiction. A family in crisis mirrors a country in crisis in a confusing time that may have marked the end of the myth that all Americans are in it together.
Medium Cool captures the zeitgeist of its moment like no other film that I have ever seen
Even more surprising is the fact that
Medium Cool was not relegated to small art theatres but was part of a major release in big theatres. It speaks volumes for the sophistication of the general audience in this period, an audience that had been weened on French New Wave, Godard experimentalism, Bunuel's surrealism, Truffaut's shorthand, and Pontecorvo's near documentary realism. Tackling a movie such as
Medium Cool was seen by most young movie goers as a challenge, not a chore, a work by a great cinematographer turned first-time director that stretched the possibilities of cinema itself. The sad thing is I can't imagine a similar work finding even a hint of an audience today outside of the major festivals.
Medium Cool (the title taken from Marshall McLuhan's description of television--"cool" meaning it necessitated more audience involvement than "hot" media do) is the absolute polar opposite of a Marvel comics movie. If you are not willing to participate in the construction of its meaning, it will leave you not just cool, but stone cold. At the time, it seemed like the movie was part of the reality that was going on in the streets. To me its innovation and its power are still startling today.
