| Show 1 Chicago 10 1 0 and the revolution of Medium Cool 1 Ann Hornaday The Washington Post Filmmaker Brett Morgen plunges viewers headlong into the most tumultuous tumultuous tumultuous' years of the in Chicago 10 a documentary about the 1968 Democratic National Convention He unleashes an audacious up mash-up of animation anachronism and archival footage to breathe bold new life into a year when America was exploding politically culturally and existentially and to quote one of the chants heard on the streets of Chicago that August the whole world was watching Using documentary footage of the street demonstrations that escalated into riots over four days during the convention Morgen chose to depict the resulting trial through animation using actual court transcripts as a script Eight activists were charged with conspiracy during the demonstrations the title of the film includes u. u u. u attorneys their two With a contemporary soundtrack featuring the thc likes of and the Boys Chicago 10 becomes a surprisingly experience that reanimates an era too often mired in myth and nostalgia But Morgens Morgen's film owes owesa a debt to another ambitious cinematic experiment Medium Cool Haskell weird and riveting 1969 directorial debut also used the backdrop of the 1968 convention to explore larger historical currents and it hovers like a benevolent elder spirit throughout Chicago 10 Morgens Morgen's film which opened Friday would not noti i exist without its forebear and with luck Chicago 10 will inspire filmgoers Medium Cool to seek seck out t not only as another take on the events it records but butas butas butas as an exhilarating example of American cinema at its most unfettered and deeply urgent Like Chicago 10 Medium Cool Coolis is something of a collage The difference is that melds documentary and in ways that even today look startlingly fresh Robert Forster plays John a a cynical shallow television cameraman plying his it if-it-bleeds- leads it-leads trade in Chicago contemporary audiences know Forster as the world- world weary bail bondsman in Jackie Brown As the movie opens and his Gus Peter Bonerz who would soon make his name as a sitcom staple are dispassionately documenting the aftermath of a car accident getting it iton iton iton on film before one of them calls an ambulance as an afterthought rather than a amoral amoral amoral moral duty is a loner a womanizer a practiced misanthrope moving through the world without being moved by it until he meets Eileen Bloom a single mother from West Virginia who lives with her year old son the extraordinary Harold Blankenship in jn one of the city's decrepit slums As the Chicago summer heats up culminating in four days of anarchy and violence in August has his own political conversion After discovering the TV station he works for has been sharing footage with the Chicago police and the FBI he quits is a legendary cinematographer By 1968 he had already made a name for himself shooting Afraid of Virginia Woolf In the Heat of the Night and The Thomas Crown Affair He shot Medium Cool entirely on location in Chicago with a foray to Washington after Robert F. F Kennedy was assassinated viewers get geta a quick glimpse of Jesse Jackson speaking at a rally there having sensed that events would erupt during the Democratic convention Amazingly he was able to film Illinois Army National Guard troops as they rehearsed battling demonstrators during war games with half of them donning clown costumes and wigs to impersonate antiwar activists Morgen used some of this material in Chicago 10 as well as some scenes from the actual demonstrations that followed Taking his camera into ino Chicago's working-class working black neighborhoods and the International Amphitheater where the convention was held finally ends up in the parks and streets where police and Guardsmen so notoriously bludgeoned and tear-gassed tear the demonstrators who had come to disrupt the convention Its It's against this edgy backdrop that Eileen dressed in a prim yellow shirtwaist dress that makes her easily discernible against the drab olive fatigues that seem to engulf her her her- frantically makes her herway herway herway way through an increasingly hellish tableau in search of her missing son At Atone Atone Atone one point viewers can hear someone sa say Look out Haskell its it's rea real when the tear gas begins In many ways Medium Cool is the ultimate cinematic curio featuring such delicious details as Peter Boyle playing a shooting-range shooting manager as aswell aswell aswell well as a gorgeous Gretsch guitar soundtrack by Mike Bloomfield Bloomfield and some tasty i cuts from Frank Zappa Drawing on the laconic antiheroes of film noir the jump cuts of the French new wave i and land the spontaneity of Italian Medium Cool creates something utterly new a distinctly American brand of that would see its next high point in Charles Burnetts Burnett's K Killer ller of Sheep 1977 Admittedly the film which is available ble on DVD with commentary by the director and ana several cast members has its awkward moments Forster's often resembles a billboard more than a full-blooded full character and relies too heavily on contrivance to make his polemical points But formally and philosophically its it's way ahead of its time not only pushing the cinematic medium in a new direction but also putting the events of 1968 in inthe the much larger context of American racism sexism and chronic addiction to violent spectacle Forty years l later ter that perspective is still damningly relevant Medium Cool it it turns I out is still very hot I |
