Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Medium Cool
1969 · Haskell Wexler · Medium Cool on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch for the shift between composed color shots and shaky handheld footage. (camera)
Wexler shoots the fictional scenes in a controlled, sometimes coolly beautiful style, then switches to raw, reactive camerawork for documentary passages, letting the two registers bleed into each other.
Payoff: You start to lose track of which scenes were planned and which ones just happened in front of the camera.
Notice the television monitors and viewfinders visible in nearly every scene. (camera)
Wexler keeps framing screens inside the screen, monitors, camera viewfinders, reflective surfaces, so the apparatus of looking is always somewhere in the shot.
Payoff: The film never lets you forget that a camera is present and always choosing what you see. In the reading: dicisign. Deleuze calls this a dicisign: an image where you sense the camera itself perceiving a character who is perceiving.
Listen for the difference between studio dialogue and street noise. (sound)
Fictional scenes carry clean, conventionally recorded dialogue, while documentary passages are full of raw crowd sound, sirens, and chants recorded live on location.
Payoff: The soundtrack keeps signaling, scene by scene, whether you are inside the story or inside the record of an actual event.
Track the documentary detours, a roller derby, a National Guard drill. (cutting)
Verna Fields cuts these interludes against Cassellis's story so the film builds a montage portrait of 1968 America rather than following one tidy plot.
Payoff: The detours matter as much as the plot. They are the country the plot is happening inside of.
Watch how rarely Cassellis reacts to what his camera records. (performance)
Robert Forster plays him hard and competent, always moving toward trouble while staying emotionally still, his face giving away almost nothing about what he feels.
Payoff: His calm reads as professionalism at first and as something closer to paralysis the longer you watch him. In the reading: crisis of the action-image. Deleuze calls this the crisis of the action-image: a character who perceives clearly but can no longer act on what he sees.
Once you have seen it
Watch Eileen's yellow dress moving through the convention crowd. (setting)
Verna Bloom, a scripted character, walks unprotected through the real Grant Park riot, her bright yellow dress the one clearly fictional element inside documentary chaos.
Payoff: A costume becomes the clearest marker left of where the story ends and the historical record begins. In the reading: fabulation / legending. The reading calls this fabulation: a fictional figure caught legending herself into a real, larger event.
Listen for the shouted warning during the tear gas scene. (sound)
A voice on the soundtrack cries out that the danger is real, acknowledging the camera and the event at once. The line was recorded later and dubbed in.
Payoff: The film's most convincing proof of reality turns out to be staged after the fact.
Notice the final shot pan toward the person holding the camera. (structure)
The film closes on another car crash, echoing its opening image, then lets the camera turn to reveal the filmmaker himself standing behind it.
Payoff: The structure closes the loop. The man who profits from recording finally has to stand inside his own frame.
Carry this in: Watch the frames within frames, monitors, viewfinders, screens. The camera recording this story is never innocent.