The Fever Film Club #7
Medium Cool (1969)
100 Movies You Should See Before We All Die
Oh, where were you in Chicago?
You know I didn’t see you there
I didn’t see them crack your head
Or breathe the tear gas air
Oh, where were you in Chicago?
When the fight was being fought
Oh, where were you in Chicago?
’Cause I was in Detroit
— Phil Ochs (1940–1976)
This club convenes remotely as a public service while social distancing.
When, as a teenager, I first watched Medium Cool (dir. Haskell Wexler, 1969), the thing that appealed to me most about it was the liberal use of cuts in the soundtrack from The Mothers of Invention’s third album, We’re Only In It For The Money. Frank Zappa was a favorite of mine, and the film’s story about the Chicago riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention wasn’t history to me, it was the nightly news.
It was the Chicago 8, later the Chicago 7 (after Bobby Seale, bound and gagged in the courtroom, was finally granted the separate trial he’d demanded). It was Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.
It was the trauma of 1968 that followed quickly the trauma of 1963, and the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965. The pain of seeing leaders, the likes of which we have not seen in this country in generations, murdered almost before our very eyes, was more than it was possible to process in any rational way. What followed was decades during which the gradualism and illusory promise of “social justice” presented by the Liberal Democratic Party orthodoxy lulled “progressive” Americans into a stupor. A daze that enabled The American Empire’s program of almost continuous war, defunding of the social safety net, persecution of the poor and the undocumented, the rise of the carceral state, and the perpetuation of economic disenfranchisement and xenophobia culminating in the 2016 election of Donald Trump.
Medium Cool is a vital record of a moment in American history whose significance is only now becoming clear. And tragically, it is unavailable for streaming online. (The dvd and Blu-ray can be purchased; the dvd can be rented by mail through Netflix.) It is a document that encompasses the rise of a counterculture, a rebellion against authority, a shocking display of raw police and political power, the dissipation of the optimism born of an activism that was rejected by the American electorate, only to be resurrected today in its proper context — that of white supremacy — a theme powerfully explored in the 1969 film.
Haskell Wexler, a native of Chicago (and according to a survey by the International Cinematographers Guild “one of film history’s ten most influential cinematographers”), was there in 1968. He was there to direct and shoot the remarkable, unique hybrid narrative-documentary film Medium Cool, a film that is as fresh and as important, as moving and as politically vital today as it was when it was filmed, and then released 51 years ago.
Wexler’s background was in documentaries. Having won the last Oscar for Best Cinematography (Black & White) in 1966, for his pioneering work on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff?, and then having solved (in 1967, shooting Best Picture Oscar-winner In The Heat of the Night) the technical difficulty other cinematographers had experienced photographing Black actors in low-light situations (in this case, Sidney Poitier), Wexler was given the opportunity in 1968 to direct an adaptation of a book about a child growing up, and his relationship with the animals in the city where he lived.
He had no intention of adapting the book. He knew through the network of political activists with whom he’d associated for decades that something crucial was about to happen in Chicago. He had no idea what exactly would occur during the Democratic National Convention, but elements of his script were amazingly prescient. He understood that the Civil Rights Movement was part of the Anti-War Movement, because, as he said, “War is part of racism.” What occurred during the shooting period — the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy; the carnage of the Democratic National Convention — appear as if scripted, a rare instance of a talented filmmaker, with a coherent political viewpoint, being in the right place at the right time.
Medium Cool is a movie about a cameraman, written and directed by a cameraman. It’s about the detachment required of a professional whose job is to capture newsworthy images, even as he becomes involved in the lives of people caught up in the upheaval of the political and social order brought about by activists and movements in the 1960s. It opens with a Godard-like scene of a fatal car-wreck being filmed with professional detachment by John Cassellis (Robert Forster) and his soundman Gus (Peter Bonerz), who, as an afterthought, decides to call for an ambulance. This detachment is made stunningly clear when Casselis and the Appalachian woman he befriends, Eileen (Verna Bloom) watch MLK’s final speech on television. The speech, which was played repeatedly on television in the days following the assassination, struck me at the time as unbearably tragic. We know of it only because a newsreel cameraman (probably only one; I’ve never seen another camera angle of the speech) was present and had the necessary film stock to capture the moment. Eileen appears moved by the broadcast, and then surprised by the cameraman’s immediate reaction when he says, simply, “Jesus, I love to shoot film.”
Through his relationship with Eileen and her son Harold (who looks much younger than his thirteen years), Casselis begins to connect with people without having the protection and the barrier of a camera’s lens, and his detachment evaporates, eventually drawing him directly into the chaos at the end of the film.
Even as the story depicts current events, Wexler explores the roots of racism and police violence by including a scene where the cameraman is challenged by what were then called “Black Militants,” who ridicule the idea that he, as a representative of “media” is in any way equipped to present the reality of the Black experience to the audiences of corporate news programs. Wexler shot, and had to cut for time, sequences showing Eileen learning about labor and social activism within her own poverty-stricken neighborhood. He shot (and used only a few minutes of) extensive footage with the Rev. Ralph Abernathy at Resurrection City, the renamed encampment along the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., that was the basis for Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign, a movement for social justice that was set back decades by his assassination. Among other footage that could not be included in the film were speeches by the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Studs Terkel, credited in the film as “Our Man In Chicago,” introduced Wexler to members of the Black activist community, the Appalachian community (impoverished migrants from West Virginia, living in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, one of the poorest in the city), and to the city’s poverty, Civil Rights and union activists. Through these new relationships, Wexler reconnected with his native city, and was able to give his script a shape that was adaptable to the changing circumstances surrounding the upcoming convention.
In 1968 newsreel photography was ubiquitous, and part of a corporate network television news establishment that was not known to challenge authority or approach subjects from the viewpoint of the Counterculture.
Wexler was able to represent himself and his actors as a news crew, and they were able to move freely around Chicago, filming the National Guard’s training preparation for the expected protests coming with the Convention.
Through a connection provided by Warren Beatty, Forster and other cast and crew obtained credentials to film on the floor of the convention, including some footage of Mayor Daley at the speaker’s podium. Verna Bloom’s character was able to wander, in character, as a mother looking for her lost child, even as police and the National Guard begin to disrupt the peaceful protest. The scenes of protest, and of police brutality, could have been filmed last week.
The astonishing thing about this film is, it provides a perspective that was almost entirely absent, except in documentaries, in 1968. What Wexler had to capture on film, because electronic news-gathering (ENG) hadn’t been invented yet, is what protesters today capture on their iPhones.
And that is why Medium Cool deserves an audience at this moment. The generational backlash against Black Liberation politics, against youth politics, against anti-war politics, that has distorted our historical understanding of 1968 by making activism seem to many people like a destructive waste of time, may be disappearing before our eyes as the inclusive politics of a new majority of Americans watches today’s demonstrations with approval rather than with revulsion. We may be on the verge of progress for the first time since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, because the new generation of activists may yet accomplish what the Counterculture of the 1960s, the Counterculture of Medium Cool, was not permitted to develop: tactics, strategy, clear goals acceptable to a receptive public.
The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover used a combination of infiltration, sabotage and violence to undermine the planners, the thinkers, the leaders of what should have been an effective movement. Instead, the Counterculture dissipated, and dissolved for a period into less effective groups, a couple of which degenerated (with help from the FBI) into violence of their own. Today’s growing recognition that capitalism has failed us is apparently deeply disturbing to so-called “moderate” Republicans, who are getting on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon in what must be a desperate effort to co-opt it before it can actually cause the structural societal changes that are so obviously overdue. This mustn’t happen. And the threat of Covid-19 must not stop this movement in its tracks.
Haskell Wexler was a lifelong activist, and a champion of worker’s rights, including within his cinematographer’s union, until his death in 2015. He was a co-founder of 12on12off, a group dedicated to promoting movie crew safety by limiting the length of shooting days and guaranteeing rest periods. I was fired from the last film I produced for, among other things, refusing to make the crew drive back and forth from L.A. to canyon country where we were shooting, because it would have resulted in crew members falling asleep at the wheel. I insisted we book unbudgeted motel rooms.
Near the end of a film Wexler made about the 2012 NATO Summit Obama hosted in Chicago (an “extra” in the Criterion Medium Cool Blu-ray), after much reminiscing about the filming of Medium Cool in 1968, Wexler speaks approvingly of the 2012 Summit protests, even as he observes that the protesters are about to return to their normal lives, their “real problems.” Riding in a car with his crew, he remarks that those real problems “can drive a stake into the ground, a stake into their conscience, a stake into their social responsibility.” A crew member in the back seat starts to say “So, that’s kind of a sad…” and Wexler interrupts: “No, that’s not sad.” Brandishing his miniature video camera, he continues, “The challenge — it’s their challenge, it’s our challenge — This is a process. It’s a process. It’s not like either they win or you win at this point. At this point it’s the struggle. And the character of the struggle and the duration of the struggle is what I’m interested in. And part of the struggle — part of it — is what we do: is tell stories and make pictures. Ok? Tell stories and make pictures which may not be out there if we didn’t do it. That’s it.”
That’s what Haskell Wexler was, an activist cameraman, a model for all of us, wherever we are, whatever we do. The struggle never stops, and our embrace of it, our own activism, can and will never stop.
Contact the Criterion Channel (channelhelp@criterion.com) and your favorite streaming service; contact the programmers of your local repertory film theaters; tell them you want to see Medium Cool as soon as possible. If you can afford it, buy the Criterion DVD or the Blu-ray. This is a movie everyone who cares anything about political activism should watch today. NOTE: a friend has rented a DVD version from Netflix by mail!!!
Note: Phil Ochs, quoted at the beginning of this article was, in fact, in Chicago, in Lincoln Park, when the police attacked peaceful protestors outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The experience was deeply disturbing; he claimed to have witnessed the “death of America.” The cover of the album on which the above song appeared, Rehearsals for Retirement, depicts his tombstone showing that he had died in Chicago in 1968. His song was a not-at-all-subtle dig at the “activists” who failed to show up for the most important mass political action of the late 1960s. Watching the chaos on TV, it was the first time I heard the term “Police Riot.” For those who have been avoiding TV lately, a police riot is “a riot that the police are responsible for instigating, escalating or sustaining as a violent confrontation; an event characterized by widespread police brutality; a mass police action that is violently undertaken against civilians for the purpose of political repression.” There have been police riots in America at least since the beginning of the labor union movement, beginning in 1886 with The Haymarket Riot, which took place, appropriately, in Chicago.
You may have to watch this movie on a small laptop computer, ordinarily considered to be disrespectful to cinema. But “The Man” has kept this film away from you, so you get a pass.
Please watch the videos linked below to get a look at what we saw every night on the evening news.
How to watch the movie:
email The Criterion Channel and request the return of Medium Cool to their current roster: channelhelp@criterion.com
or
deepdiscount.com buy the DVD
or
Netflix Rent disc by mail
Find out about Medium Cool:
IMDB
Wikipedia
Find out about Haskell Wexler:
IMDB
Wikipedia
Please watch these videos about the 1968 Democratic Convention:
50 Years Ago: Antiwar Protesters Brutally Attacked in Police Riots at 1968 Democratic Convention, Democracy Now!
The Whole World is Watching: youtube.com
Haskell Wexler on Medium Cool: youtube.com
Find out about The 1968 Democratic Convention:
Wikipedia
Find out about Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign:
Wikipedia
Find out about the Trial of The Chicago 8 (7):
chicagotribune.com
Find out what’s happening today in White Supremacy:
How Can We Win: msn.com
Find out about Police Riots:
Wikipedia
Find out about Phil Ochs:
Wikipedia
Phil Ochs: William Butler Yeats Visits Lincoln Park and Escapes Unscathed:
youtube.com
Phil Ochs: Pretty Smart On My Part:
youtube.com
Find out about Studs Terkel:
Wikipedia
Find out about The Mothers of Invention:
Wikipedia
For What It’s Worth, 2020
Youtube.com
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