Category Archive for: ‘Issue 45 – Medium Cool Dossier’

In the introduction to the anthology May ’68 and Its Afterlives, Kristin Ross clarifies that her use of the term ‘afterlife’ should not be taken to refer to the cascade of remembrances, regrets, and ruminations on mistakes made and opportunities seized in the wake of the famous student-worker uprisings in Paris. For Ross, the essential point is that the historical …

Around three-quarters of the way through Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969), Eileen (Verna Bloom) searches for her missing son, Harold (Harold Blankenship), in their Chicago apartment.[1] The scene is filmed in a single long take, a smooth handheld tracking shot that follows Eileen’s movement from one room to the next. The length, fluidity, and complexity of the shot noticeably break …

Chicago’s Uptown neighbourhood has no lack of film history. In the first decades of the 20th century, silent film pioneers Essanay Studios called Uptown home, with stages that hosted the likes of their young star Charlie Chaplin. The Uptown Theatre, a grand 46,000 square-foot Balaban and Katz movie palace, opened in 1925. Along the lakefront in the northeastern corner of …

Among the many innovative films of the Hollywood Renaissance, Medium Cool is widely remembered for its radical politics and its documentary footage of the calamitous 1968 Democratic Convention and police riots. Yet Medium Cool is also a Hollywood narrative film made by Haskell Wexler, Oscar-winning cinematographer of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Mike Nichols, 1966), who also, a couple of …

In an early scene from Medium Cool (1969) a television cameraman, John (Robert Forster), and his sound recordist, Gus (Peter Bonerz), visit Resurrection City, a temporary shantytown erected on the Washington Mall in May of 1968. The soundtrack for this sequence features the protestors’ performance of the gospel song, “This May Be the Last Time,” and it synchronises well with …