Word: cameraman
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MEDIUM COOL is dynamite. A loose narrative about a TV cameraman during last summer's Chicago convention, Cool is the most impassioned and impressive film released so far this year. Cinematographer Haskell Wexler makes a dazzling directorial debut by fusing dramatic and documentary footage into a vivid portrait of a nation in conflict with itself...
Parks' meticulous photographic direction (executed by an excellent cameraman, Burnett Guffey, who shot Bonnie and Clyde) only seems to underscore all these melodramatics, lending every character and scene an extra edge of unreality. His shimmering imagery creates a world of benign memory but imperfect drama, in which black is just too beautiful...
...cinema, truth depends on juxtaposition. A single moment is true or false, strong or weak, according to what has preceded it and what is to follow. Medium Cool proves the point. It places a fictional plot within an authentic framework by focusing on the moral agonies of a television cameraman during last summer's Chicago Convention. So strongly does it challenge the usual commercial film techniques and themes that Hollywood, ever wary both of stylistic innovation and contemporary politics, may never recover. Socially and cinematically, Medium Cool is dynamite...
...pent-up blacks and displaced Appalachian whites, as a symbolic seat of the conflict and began shooting last summer in a loose, almost documentary fashion-just as the convention confrontation was reaching a peak of frenzy. The uncomplicated plot turns on the developing love affair between a TV cameraman (Robert Forster) and an Appalachian widow (Verna Bloom), but gains meaning and resonance from the documentary footage surrounding it. The results of this apparently free-form exercise may puzzle some moviegoers and its political sympathies will outrage many more. But the basis of Medium Cool is more than solid enough...
Whenever a situation threatens to involve the TV cameraman, be it an auto accident, an angry group of black militants, or the lingering hopelessness of ghetto life, he retreats behind the shopworn shield of journalistic objectivity, insisting that his only concern is to get the story. The progress of his love affair with the widow parallels the gradual weakening of his own prejudices and defenses, until both are finally trapped in the ultimate cataclysm of the convention's madness...