Medium cool
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Medium cool |
| Original title | Medium cool |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1969 |
| length | 111 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 18 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Haskell Wexler |
| script | Haskell Wexler |
| production |
Tully Friedman Michael Philip Butler Steven North |
| music | Mike Bloomfield |
| camera | Haskell Wexler |
| cut | Verna Fields |
| occupation | |
| |
Medium Cool is an American film directed by Haskell Wexler in 1969 . It combines elements of feature film and documentary film .
action
John Cassellis works as a cameraman for the Chicago television station WHJP. He films traffic accidents, human interest stories or political events, but remains just as emotionally unaffected by his work as in his relationship with the nurse Ruth. When he meets the single parent Eileen and her son Harold, he begins to develop an emotional bond with them. Because of his loud outrage that his employer let the FBI sift through the raw material of his recordings, John is fired. Eileen's son disappears during the riots that mark the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In desperation, she calls John, who agrees to help her. John loses control of his car while driving; Eileen dies at the scene of the accident, John is critically injured. Your accident is watched by passers-by and television crews, who photograph and film what is happening without rushing to the aid of the injured.
background
The title of the film goes back to the communication theorist Marshall McLuhan , who differentiated between “hot media” and “cool media” that require greater or lesser participation from the viewer. Among the “cool media” that, according to McLuhan, require greater participation but also allow greater distance from what is shown, he counted among others. a. the TV.
Haskell Wexler filmed the footage of Eileen looking for her son in the midst of the current protests that were taking place around the Democratic Party conference . At the beginning of the film, documentary recordings can also be seen in which members of the National Guard practice dealing with demonstrators.
Songs by The Mothers of Invention can be heard at certain points in the film, including during a concert that John and Eileen attend. The band playing on stage, however, is different.
Medium Cool premiered on August 27, 1969 in New York and on September 24, 1969 in Los Angeles . It opened in German cinemas on October 23, 1970 .
Reviews
“An angry, technically brilliant film that uses some of the events of the past year as a backdrop [...] as extensions of the fictional characters. [...] The result is a film of great visual power, a kind of cinematic Guernica , a portrait of an exploding America that shatters in fragments of hostility, distrust, fear and violence. However, the film is far less complex than it appears. The story of the gradual emotional and political awakening of John Cassellis is minimized by the emotional and political scope of what actually happened, which we, the audience, experience directly rather than through the protagonist. This is a fundamental problem of the kind of films that try to bring fact and fiction together. "
“The drama and document, the hero's biography and the public events that he witnesses and falls victim to are linked in a fairly mechanical and conventional manner. [...] Even with the recordings of demonstrations and police brutality at the Chicago Democratic Party Conference, [the camera work] remains committed to the Hollywood School. […] After all, this saves the film from the traps of cinema direct : one learns more about America from the clumsy fiction of this film than from the blind documentarism of most television reports. "
“For Wexler [it] goes without saying that John's reports circulate in the CIA and FBI, that his main character first loses his television job, then his nerve and finally he loses control of the steering wheel. But it is precisely this basically private fate that discredits (in addition to interspersed bed stories) the well-intentioned attempt by the director to contribute to a great change in the consciousness of TV professionals with a small budget (600,000 dollars ): The political quotes of reality, as has always been customary in Hollywood, only serve the hero's moral awakening. Why this is necessary, however, is hardly discussed. "
"In terms of camera technology, masterfully mounted documentary recordings of the riots that shook Chicago in 1968 are not quite convincingly intertwined with the story of a television reporter."
"A more impressionistic than analytical film that is superbly photographed, but also has numerous lengths."
Awards
Medium Cool won the Grand Prix of the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival in 1969 . In 2003 the film was listed as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress .
Web links
- Medium Cool at the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Vincent Canby: Real Events of '68 Seen in 'Medium Cool': Haskell Wexler Wrote and Directed Movie . In: The New York Times . August 28, 1969, ISSN 0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed October 23, 2019]).
- ^ Bill Kovarik: Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age, Continuum, New York 2011, ISBN 978-1-4411-1460-0 , p. 10.
- ↑ Medium Cool ( Memento of March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) in the directory of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , accessed on June 21, 2012.
- ↑ Medium Cool on Turner Classic Movies, accessed June 21, 2012.
- ↑ a b https://www.filmdienst.de/film/details/30507/medium-cool
- ↑ "[...] an angry, technically brilliant movie that uses some of the real events of last year [...] as backgrounds that are extensions of the fictional characters. [...] The result is a film of tremendous visual impact, a kind of cinematic "Guernica," a picture of America in the process of exploding into fragmented bits of hostility, suspicion, fear and violence. The movie, however, is much less complex than it looks. The story of the gradual emotional and political awakening of John Cassellis is somehow dwarfed by the emotional and political meaning of the events themselves, which we, in the audience, experience first hand, rather than through the movie protagonist. This is a fundamental problem in the kind of movie-making that attempts to homogenize fact and fiction […] ”- Review in the New York Times on August 28, 1969, accessed on June 21, 2012.
- ^ Review in Die Zeit of October 16, 1970, accessed on June 21, 2012.
- ↑ Review in Der Spiegel from October 19, 1970, accessed June 21, 2012.
- ↑ Evangelischer Presseverband München, Review No. 521/1969