Word: cooled
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...MEDIUM COOL is the most impassioned and impressive film released so far this year.Writer-Director-Cinematographer Haskell Wexler's loose narrative about a TV cameraman during last summer's Chicago convention fuses documentary and narrative techniques into a vivid portrait of a nation in conflict...
That is what kind of a man the cameraman in Medium Cool is supposed to be. A man whose mind is completely in the hands of the film he shoots-a man who lives the values of the medium. If anything, the cameraman, Robert Forster, isn't an entirely believable character. He's not enough of a creep and too much of an existential hero. His truthful search to break free from the illusions of his medium don't seem natural to him, and he's also an unbelievable stud. Your real-life cameraman is an amazing turkey...
...movie's title refers to McLuhan's theory that television is a cool medium. or one in which the viewer participates with the picture and fills in, on his own, much of what he experiences. This kind of filling-in is supposed to give the viewer a false sense of what really happened at the so-called news event. Therefore television reporting is largely a lie. But because Wexler never goes into the viewer end of media (McLuhan's work). his point isn't particularly profound. We all know that TV newsmen fudge reality to the point where every night...
Ultimately the film is weak because of the very faults of the cool medium that Wexler wants to criticize. Film is supposed to be a hot medium. McLuhan tells us; that is it's a total experience. Medium Cool is less than a total experience: we can really feel the editing, the presence of the director, and the techniques he's using. It's full of dialogue hanging over from a just finished scene or anticipating one to come, and overly arty shots of the boots in the mud of Tent City-all used without much purpose. And, like...
...building this doomsday machinery, but he failed. And this is only a clue to the true vastness of the futility in trying to avoid the end of the world. For while perhaps Esquire's doctor is wrong and maybe the winds of the uper atmosphere will keep the earth cool and the ice caps frozen, there still remains the threat of thousands of unforescen catastrophes that we are only now becoming capable...