Medium Cool (1969) banned in Canada

Medium Cool (1969, Haskell Wexler)

4/9/23

Film shot on the streets of Chicago during the Democratic Convention 1968 - Medium Cool.

Film is available on youtube.

Happy Birthday in the afterlife to Robert Forster!

Wow, kids. Cinema verité indeed. Tune on into this one -- you might learn something.

I don't know if there's a term for écriture verité, but I tend to do some of that these days. It doesn't quite capture what I'm doing, because I'm also throwing in postmodernist irreverence and screwing on a Mommie Dearest cable-suspended camera system, but you get the idea right...

The idea being that it's a great big white world, and if you step away from Tom, Dick & Jane books, as well as passive consumption and attempted reproduction of successful frameworks, you'd find some new angles to approach existence from.

Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969) X “The Wheel” (Idles, 2022)

A visually stunning film about the media exploitation of the working class & revolutionary movements set to a heavy song by Idles about the cyclical nature of how the exploited cope with substance abuse. Both film and song reflect the writer’s left-wing politics and are compassionately told from the perspective of people caught in the middle, seeking to find meaning & support only to be met with either distraction, gaslighting or silence. The film is legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler’s debut feature and a more vérité and Godardian precursor to films like Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, 2014) & Wag The Dog (Barry Levinson, 1997).

Zorella, the centaur pop queen ✨

Thank you to everyone who helped me by voting on her final design in the poll from last week! I'm so so so happy with how she turned out 🥰

My sister, who does not have a tumblr account and instead leeches off of mine, drew something on my iPad and wanted to share with the other good omens fans

She said if this hits a certain amount of notes they’ll make a tumblr account

Edit: it hit the certain amount, she’s @cultconstel

New Hollywood versus Old Hollywood

Robert Forster in Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969) Cast: Robert Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz, Marianna Hill, Harold Blankenship, Charles Geary. Screenplay: Haskell Wexler. Cinematography: Haskell Wexler. Art direction: Leon Ericksen. Film editing: Verna Fields. Music: Mike Bloomfield. I first saw Medium Cool in the year of its release, and remember walking from the theater to the parking lot, still stunned by the movie's blend of fiction and actuality. We passed a high-end restaurant whose plate glass windows gave passersby a good view of wealthy patrons enjoying themselves. It felt like an ironic comment on the political passions the movie had documented. Seeing Medium Cool many years later, I can realize how cooked-up Haskell Wexler's film is, with its heavy-handed ending, so obviously recapitulating what now seems like a similarly contrived opening. I can watch Verna Bloom striding through the mobs of actual Chicago protesters, easily spotted in her bright yellow dress, and recognize how smart, if blatant, a bit of staging that is. I have learned that the film's most celebrated line, "Watch out, Haskell, it's real," was dubbed into the soundtrack later: It may have been spoken by the cameraman to the director in the heat of the moment, when he was being teargassed along with the protesters, but Wexler wasn't recording sound at the time, so it's a bit of a con. And yet, Medium Cool remains for me a potent demonstration of art imitating life, and doing it so well that I can't call it fakery. Wexler shrewdly knew this: Just look at the picture of Robert Forster above, cigarette dangling like Jean-Paul Belmondo's in the poster, and remember that truth is rarely pure and never simple. It's still some kind of great film.

baby's first gouache

Davy Crockett by Stewart H. Holbrook

Medium Cool