RebeldeMule

Medium Cool
Haskell Wexler (EE.UU. de América, 1969) [Color, 111 min]



(wikipedia | filmaffinity)

[fuente] Un reportero de televisión se involucra personalmente en los episodios violentos que irrumpen en la Convención Demócrata de 1968. El film presenta una reflexión sobre la política norteamericana de finales de los '60 y el rol de los medios de comunicación.

AMG SYNOPSIS: "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, considering himself a mere recorder of circumstances, his only responsibility to get his film in on time. Even his girlfriend, Ruth (Marianna Hill), cannot understand or penetrate John's complacency. Encounters with signs of the late '60s times, however, raise John's consciousness about the implications of his job, as he films a verbal attack by black militants on the media's racism, gets fired after he objects to having that footage turned over to the FBI, and meets Vietnam War widow Eileen (Verna Bloom). John witnesses the violence of the state firsthand as he and Eileen search for her son amidst the real-life demonstrations and riots at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. Even though he realizes the political power of pointing a camera at anything, John finally cannot extricate himself or his loved ones from a culture obsessed with recording any sensational, gory incident. Scripted (from a novel by Jack Couffer), directed, and shot by Oscar-winning cinematographer and political activist Wexler, Medium Cool systematically questions the ideological power of images by combining documentary techniques such as "talking heads" and cinéma vérité with staged scenes between the actors. By the time Wexler and his crew start filming Forster and Bloom among the actual events at the convention, all barriers between fiction and fact are broken down, as Wexler's assistant can be heard warning, "Watch out, Haskell, it's real," when tear gas is thrown. The footage of cops clubbing people in the crowd is real, but Wexler's presence also turns it into part of a fictional story, revealing filmed "reality" to be as artificially constructed as any other fiction, subject to the interpretation of whoever holds the camera and, perhaps, to larger institutions of power. Funding Medium Cool partly out of his own resources, Wexler had free reign during production, but when the execs at Paramount saw the result, they were not pleased. Despite the timely subject matter, Paramount delayed and then curtailed the film's release, tempering its impact on critics and audiences. Regardless of that record, Medium Cool stands as a vital late-'60s film for its incisive narrative and formal dissection of the visual politics of "truth," and its awareness of how coolly seductive televised violence might be as entertainment, especially in a historical moment marked by incendiary images of political assassinations, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and counterculture protests. -- Lucia Bozzola

AMG REVIEW: 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 narrative about John (Robert Forster), a TV news cameraman whose ability to observe impartially the events around him is challenged by the violence of the riots, as well as by his relationship with Eileen (Verna Bloom), a young widow whose husband died in Vietnam. While it's no surprise that Wexler's footage of actual events bears the ring of truth, his staged sequences have a rough, improvised quality that meshes perfectly with the real-life sequences, and the result is a work that blurs the lines between fact and fiction. Wexler's mix of visual polemics, on-the-spot documentary, human drama, Brechtian disorientation, media-savvy analysis of television, and fashionable sex, drugs, and rock & roll made Medium Cool as intelligent and challenging as anything Jean-Luc Godard produced in Europe at the time, and Wexler's film has for the most part better withstood the test of time. It's a shame that Wexler directed so few features after Medium Cool, but, as both a work of art and a document of a central moment in American history, it remains an essential and invaluable film. -- Mark Deming

Otras referencias
- MEDIUM COOL (1969, Haxkell Wexler). Cinema de Perra Gorda.
- Medium Cool. Mario Alegre Femenías, Primera hora. (reseña de la edición Criterion)

Otros títulos: The Concrete Wilderness (working title) / America, America, dove vai?
Guión: Haskell Wexler.
Fotografía: Haskell Wexler (Technicolor).
Música: Mike Bloomfield.
Producción: Tully Friedman, Haskell Wexler, Jerrold Wexler, Michael Philip Butler, Steven North.
Productora: H & J (H&J Pictures).

• Robert Forster (John Cassellis).
• Verna Bloom (Eileen).
• Peter Bonerz (Gus).
• Marianna Hill (Ruth).
• Harold Blankenship (Harold).
• Charles Geary (Buddy, Harold's Father).
• Sid McCoy (Frank Baker).
• Christine Bergstrom (Dede).
• William Sickinger (News Director).
• Robert McAndrew (Pennybaker).
• Marrian Walters (Social Worker).
• Beverly Younger (Rich Lady).
• Edward Croke (Plainclothesman).
• Doug Kimball (Newscaster).
• Peter Boyle (Gun Clinic Manager).
• Sandra Ann Roberts (Blonde in Car).
• Janet Langhart (Maid).
• Jeff Donaldson (Black Militant).
• Bill Sharp (Black Militant).
• Robert Paige (Black Militant).
• Richard Abrams (Black Militant).
• Walter Bradford (Black Militant).
• Russell Davis (Black Militant).
• Felton Perry (Black Militant).
• Val Grey (Black Militant).
• Livingston Lewis (Black Militant).
• John Jackson (Black Militant).
• Linda Handelman (Gun Clinic Lady).
• Maria Friedman (Gun Clinic Lady).
• Kathryn Schubert (Gun Clinic Lady).
• Barbara Brydenthal (Gun Clinic Lady).
• Elizabeth Moisant (Gun Clinic Lady).
• Rose Bormacher (Gun-Clinic Ladies).
• Barbara Jones (Black militant).
• China Lee, George Bouillet (Media person).
• Haskell Wexler (Cameraman on Scaffold).
• James H. Jacobs (Kennedy student).
• Mary Smith (Kennedy student).
• Nancy Lee Noble (Kennedy Student).
• Studs Terkel (Our Man in Chicago).

- Best Director (nom) - Haskell Wexler - 1969 - Directors Guild of America.

Drama político / Conflictos sociales, Periodismo, Cine independiente USA.

 Medium Cool 1969.mkv  [4.37 Gb]
Tiene el mismo tamaño que el torrent, pero no puedo asegurar que se trate del mismo archivo (y. además, está tieso de fuentes).

Medium.Cool.1969.720p.BluRay.x264-GECKOS [PublicHD]

Enlace torrent magnético

NOTA: También disponible en versión 1080p.

Subtítulos: castellano europeo (subdivx) (sincronizados por Ryoma) / incluidos en inglés para sordos