You Ain't Seen Me, Right? - Medium Cool (1969)

Wipe the cereal from your chin and listen up, gang: here's another fact lesson of knowledge bombs ready to drop through your internets, like a veritable URL Harbour.

You Ain't Seen Me, Right? is brought to you by Daniel Palmer, of Part-Time Infidel web fame. While we're all laughing and pointing at people, he's busy talking about, like, cinematography and stuff.

Medium Cool (1969)

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Haskell Wexler is regarded as one of the great cinematographers; nominated five times for an Academy Award - with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) and Bound for Glory (1976) earning him the Little Gold Man - he is also infamous for his truculent disposition. He was fired from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) after clashing with its producer, Michael Douglas, who accused him of trying to 'undermining the authority' of director Milos Forman. The 2004 documentary Tell Them Who You Are is a fantastic portrait of Wexler's life and work and is well worth seeking out.

Wexler's directorial debut is a daring, ground-breaking work that blends dramatic and documentary content with seamless ease. Happenstance found Wexler and his crew in the middle of the student demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago that ended in rioting - one cameraman is heard to exclaim, 'God, Haskell; it's real' as the police use tear gas on the protestors.

John Cassellis (Robert Forster) is a news cameraman whose only concern is capturing footage - we first see him shooting a car crash; he is the first on the scene, but he never considers helping the victims. Cassellis is initially removed from the social upheavals that are happening around him, but he soon discovers that he is not immune to this heated political environment. His relationship with Eileen (Verna Bloom), a single mother from West Virginia who lives in one of Chicago's many slums, forces him to confront the growing racial, economic and generational divides that are tearing the city apart.

That Medium Cool is the work of someone with extensive experience behind the camera in a number of disciplines is immediately apparent. Wexler's meticulous eye for detail is brought to bear on the film's striking realism, lending a hypnotic quality to the most squalid of locale. It is often difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction. The use of Vox Pops and impromptu set-ups serve to blur the line further, grabbing shots on the hoof in the manner of a news crew.

Set to a backdrop of growing unrest, Medium Cool is the definitive document of the late '60s Zeitgeist, chiefly because it is radical without affecting the 'hippy' posture that has served to date films like The Strawberry Statement (1970) - it was given an 'X' certificate on its release, leading some to surmise that it was a 'political X'. Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention provided a wonderfully vituperative attack on hippy poseurs, which accompanies satirical scenes of a psychedelic 'happening'.

At a time when America was shaken by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, growing anger over Vietnam and the civil rights movement, Medium Cool asked whether cameramen are professionally bound to dispassionately record, or have a responsibility to intervene in injustice. The film is an essay on the line between objective reportage and moral culpability. To his credit, Wexler doesn't exempt himself; he is subjected to the camera's scrutiny in the closing shot.
There we have it. Hopefully, you've all taken something away from this feature, and we still get to claim that we're a credible film site - everyone's a winner. More from You Ain't Seen Me, Right? next week.