Medium Cool

Medium Cool has one of the most powerful and well-timed opening scenes I can think of in any movie. There is no doubt that you are in a movie that's going to be about the media and responsibility the very moment that the cameracrew shoots the car wreck on the highway. The degree of calculation and methodology with which the crew circle the car and take close-ups of the injured woman is immediately suspicious; when they drive away without helping her, complete unmoved by what they have just seen, calling an ambulance as a cold-hearted afterthought (which is it - they could have called for help first) it leaves no doubt to the viewer what the primary theme of the movie will be - and the scene is truly memorable, and telling.
Jump then, to the end of the movie, where you have the two main characters wandering through the actual 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention riots. It is rather unbelievable that these actors and crew were really there, carrying out the script of a movie that so perfectly, poignantly and intentionally co-incides with a riot; history is in the making and fact and fiction collide. But it's a scene in the middle of the film that I keep thinking about. When Cassellis and his friend enter the apartmant of the cab driver who turned in 10,000 left in his cab to the police (who then questioned him as if he was criminal and not a hero) - the racial, political, and class tension in the room is brilliantly illuminated in all it's complication and I feel it really captured the times perfectly. I wish I had a script because so many of the things that the black militants (this is how they appear in the credits) say to Cassellis regarding his white priviledge, his disrespectful language, his racism, and his assumption that he can just show up to someone's apartment and gain access to their lives and thoughts are so powerful and so perfectly show how racism plays out in the media, and also how that racism was resisted and articulated by those whom it impacted. Brilliant scene. That aside, I thought a good amount of the plot was a bit weak, or at least too unbelievable. Cassellis is so incredibly selfish and self-absorbed I can't see him having a change of heart as easily as he does in the film, it seems unlikely he would really grow so found of Eileen and her son - or that in the end he would put down his camera at a riot and help look for a little boy. It makes for a happier ending (he's able to extract himself from "loving to shoot film" and engage with the real world in a somewhat personal crisis) just before a tragic ending - one which does sent a bit of a mixed message...he puts down the camera and meets his untimely death just as he grows compassionate? Puzzling. Too little too late, perhaps - or maybe that's the wrong decision for a media maker. I found this quite from Haskell Wexler which I found interesting; reading Cassellis as autobiographical made me have more empathy for him.

"When I was in Vietnam with Jane Fonda" says Wexler, "I was filming a farmer walking through a field when all of a sudden he stepped on a land mine. Two Vietnamese guys ran out there to help him and I ran after them to shoot the scene of them bringing this guy in, his legs all bloody. The whole time I had two overwhelming feelings. One was 'I got a great shot!', the other was to put my camera down and help the farmer. In the end I carried on filming even though I couldn't even see what I was shooting because I was crying so hard. I have thought about that moment many times, about the question of when you have to put the camera down, when to stop observing and get involved."