In cinema, truth depends on juxtaposition. A single moment is true or false, strong or weak, according to what has preceded it and what is to follow. Medium Cool proves the point. It places a fictional plot within an authentic framework by focusing on the moral agonies of a television cameraman during last summer's Chicago Convention. So strongly does it challenge the usual commercial film techniques and themes that Hollywood, ever wary both of stylistic innovation and contemporary politics, may never recover. Socially and cinematically, Medium Cool is dynamite.
Writer-Director Haskell Wexler, an Oscar winner who has built a reputation for himself as one of Hollywood's best cinematographers (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Loved One), scraped together $600,000 for this low-budget portrait of a country in conflict with itself. He chose Chicago, with its thousands of pent-up blacks and displaced Appalachian whites, as a symbolic seat of the conflict and began shooting last summer in a loose, almost documentary fashion—just as the convention confrontation was reaching a peak of frenzy. The uncomplicated plot turns on the developing love affair between a TV cameraman (Robert Forster) and an Appalachian widow (Verna Bloom), but gains meaning and resonance from the documentary footage surrounding it. The results of this apparently free-form exercise may puzzle some moviegoers and its political sympathies will outrage many more. But the basis of Medium Cool is more than solid enough to support as impassioned and impressive a film as any released so far this year.
Whenever a situation threatens to involve the TV cameraman, be it an auto accident, an angry group of black militants, or the lingering hopelessness of ghetto life, he retreats behind the shopworn shield of journalistic objectivity, insisting that his only concern is to get the story. The progress of his love affair with the widow parallels the gradual weakening of his own prejudices and defenses, until both are finally trapped in the ultimate cataclysm of the convention's madness.
Mechanics of Illusion. Throughout Medium Cool, Wexler makes his presence known behind the camera. In what must stand as one of the most gripping sequences in modern film making, the Illinois National Guard fire tear gas at a group of terrified youngsters while one of Wexler's assistants is heard to scream off-camera: "Watch out, Haskell, it's real!" Still, Wexler's dramatic attempts to reconcile personal and public crises lead him occasionally to overload his film. The romance never quite has the passion and urgency that it should, and the novice director's infatuation with Jean-Luc Godard deceives him into a gratuitous existential denouement (straight out of Contempt) in which the lovers hear about their involvement in a fatal car crash before it actually occurs. Wexler's sympathies are admittedly with the brutalized young, and he sets out to show the police as almost total villains. In that, he had plenty of help from the cops themselves. But it might have made for less propaganda and better art if he had not presented the conflict as totally one-sided; if he had shown in more detail, for instance, how some of the demonstrators deliberately goaded and provoked the police.