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Retrospective

Medium Cool

FromHaskell Wexler

WithRobert Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz, Doug Kimball, Peter Boyle

Year1969

Duration110min.

LanguageEnglish

Robert Forster plays a young cameraman who tries to maintain his professional distance when he becomes embroiled in the events surrounding the chaotic Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in 1968. In his daring directorial debut, camera virtuoso Haskell Wexler is less interested in the story than in the fragile dividing line between ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ – two categories that he allows to collapse into one another here. Medium Cool develops staged and improvised scenes amid the escalating events: when the police use tear gas against the demonstrators at the party convention, a crew member can be heard shouting ‘Look out, Haskell, it's real!’ from off-screen amid the commotion. A fascinating, McLuhanesque essay on media ethics, a film about the production of ‘reality’ in a highly improbable form: it is abruptly torn from the womb of its creative process. (C.H.)

Introduction Christoph Huber

Courtesy Academy Film Archive