Word: wexler
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Jean-Luc Godard would certainly resent the comparison, but he makes movies the way some manufacturers make washing machines-with planned obsolescence. Only a few years after their release, Godard films become museum pieces. His innovations are adopted by other film makers, who (like Haskell Wexler in the kinetic Medium Cool) either put his techniques to better dramatic use or (like Agnes Varda in the festival's ludicrous Lions Love) sink beneath the weight of aimless stylistic decoration. Le Go/ Savoir features Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto sitting around a TV studio engaging...
MEDIUM COOL is the most impassioned and impressive film released so far this year.Writer-Director-Cinematographer Haskell Wexler's loose narrative about a TV cameraman during last summer's Chicago convention fuses documentary and narrative techniques into a vivid portrait of a nation in conflict...
...characters seem to wander through the scenes to allow Wexler to use them nearly as the agents that tie together everything that he really wants to say. And he gets all the big news in there like a true news photographer creep. Kennedy's assassination, King's assassination, Tent City, the Black revolutionaries, the Appalachian ghetto, and finally the police riots in Chicago at the convention. Wexler wants his message to be not just a theortical fiction, but a fiction for a specific reality that we all know about and recognize. And his own documentary footage of Chicago Police brutality...
Ultimately the film is weak because of the very faults of the cool medium that Wexler wants to criticize. Film is supposed to be a hot medium. McLuhan tells us; that is it's a total experience. Medium Cool is less than a total experience: we can really feel the editing, the presence of the director, and the techniques he's using. It's full of dialogue hanging over from a just finished scene or anticipating one to come, and overly arty shots of the boots in the mud of Tent City-all used without much purpose. And, like...
...main trouble is that Wexler expects the events to tell us that media lie rather than expressing it through the humanity of his characters. To have a boy love pigeons and dream of the old golden fields of West Virginia is a filmmaker's cliche of true human value. Wexler is clearly less at home with people than with the news events, himself. With this in mind, it's easy to understand why he arbitrarily ended the story of his characters with violence, and then turned the camera on his own movie crew before...