medium cool - The Screengrab

The Spirit of '68 Lives on in "Medium Cool"

In this election year, Ann Hornaday remembers Medium Cool, the great cinematographer ""Haskell Wexler's weird and riveting 1969 directorial debut", which he filmed during the summer of 1968, with the climax shot against scenes of actual political protest and street violence at that year's Democratic Chicago Convention. The movie stars Robert Forster (thirty years away from Max Cherry, the bail bondsman he played in Quentin Tarantinio's Jackie Brown) as a TV news cameraman, and Verna Bloom as a single mother from the South who's struggling to keep her nose above water. The movie's "story" is little more than a peg for the set pieces that Wexler and his cast improvised in documentary locations, and the characters have only as much life as the actors could breathe into them on the fly, but the film retains considerable interest for the history it captured and for its then-radical mixture of staged drama and nonfiction backdrop. Its most famous line was delivered, impromptu, by a member of the crew to the director as the tear gas was released and the cops unholstered their billy clubs: "Look out, Haskell, it's real!"

Take Five: 1968

Brett Morgen's highly praised documentary Chicago 10, about the fallout of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago forty years ago opens in limited release this weekend. Morgen has claimed since it first debuted last year at Sundance that the film isn't really about 1968, but about 2008, and indeed, it seems to have fresh, albeit grim, resonance today, with the recent death of arch-conservative William F. Buckley, who had a memorable confrontation on the air while covering the convention. Steven Spielberg is himself crafting a fictionalized version of the same events for The Trial of the Chicago 7, and America gears up for one of the most electrifying presidential races in recent memory as an unpopular war rages overseas and tumult grips some of our closest allies. But as relevant as it might seem from a moviemaking perspective, in other ways, 1968 couldn't be further away; the revolutionary consciousness of that bloody year and the infinite possibilites that came with the Paris revolts seem like they happened on another planet. Still, in many ways, it was a magical year that casts a very long shadow over the lives of a number of people, many of whom are filmmakers. Here's a look at some of the better films about or influenced by that impossible year.

MEDIUM COOL (1969)

In many ways, the definitive film about the events of 1968, at least from an American perspective, will always be Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool. The first nondocumentary feature film directed by the legendary cinematographer was meant to be a highly fictionalized treatment of chaos and mayhem breaking out at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; but it quickly transmogrified into something altogether stranger, blurring the line between truth and fiction, as reality quickly began to outstrip Wexler's fictionalized vision. Eventually, while filming, he found himself caught up in the (unstaged) action of the riots and police brutality that wracked the city and altered the political landscape of America, and one of his crew uttered the immortal warning: "Look out, Haskell! It's real!" (This later became the title of a very worthwhile 2001 documentary about the movie.)