Medium Cool

"I love to shoot film" is the sanguine motto of TV lensman John Cassellis (Robert Forster) in Haskell Wexler's 1969 Medium Cool, a semi-documentary investigation of image-making and politics. With his soundman, Gus (Peter Bonerz), John films such events as gruesome car wrecks with frosty detachment, ...more

Few documents in any medium captured the political unrest of the late '60s with greater clarity than Medium Cool, a remarkably accomplished directorial effort from award-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler. Wexler took to the streets of Chicago with a film crew to record how the city prepared for the 1968 Democratic Convention, and he put himself in the middle of the violent clashes between police and protestors that went on to define that event. Wexler then wove this material into a ...more