FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Medium Cool 

Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool is a direct, highly informative film - for which a review - subjective, slightly chaotic - is basically inappropriate. This film needs answers instead! What is so new and extraordinary about Medium Cool? The subject matter was familiar to contemporaries during the late 60s anyway: a cameraman who films traffic accidents and similar events and lives completely emotionless. But then he meets a single mother and her son and begins to build a relationship with them. how did Wexler make Medium Cool? How was it conceived and realised? How was it shot and edited? Please consider; until recently, Hollywood had spoken disdainfully of art films. Such films were incomprehensible to the audience. And then a radical experimental film like Medium Cool gets such attention!?!! I think it had been part of the so-called New Hollywood movement to realise that cinema-goers are thinking people too. Not idiots. The age-old Hollywood principle had always been to show the audience the way from A to B to C. Everything was explained! This changed with the indie films of the 60s. Since "The Graduate" (DVD106), such art films were box office hits! And the audience could follow the fast cuts of these films - also because of the viewing habits through the commercials on TV. Even more, the audience of the 60s was ready to accept stories that could not be understood after 30 seconds of film. The conventional Hollywood formulas give themselves away. We put the building blocks together again and again. Medium Cool is different. It relies on images and is told through PICTURES - not dialogue. In the process, Wexler jumps back and forth between several levels. There is documentary material (the Democratic Party convention) plus a fictional story (such as the romance of the cameraman). Fictional characters act in real situations and real posed situations that pretend to be fictional (the TV crew confronting black activists). Last but not least, we also find real people in fictional situations (the boy and the pigeons). But the real things are not to be separated from the fictional ones at all! They all carry the same meaning and that is through the way they are connected. But Wexler goes further and evokes memories of older films we know. He hints but never elaborates. In general, he likes to hint without sketching out the path from A to C. That's why Medium Cool is so important and compelling and extraordinary: simply by HOW everything is tied together here. This is especially true of the finale, which is entirely due to chance. And in the end, isn't everything coincidental and not so dramatic?