Medium Cool. Haskell Wexler, 1969.
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Edition screened: Criterion Blu-ray #658, released 2013. English language. Runtime approximately 110 minutes.
Summary: No particular depictions of violence toward animals.
The Criterion Blu-ray of Medium Cool includes numerous bonus features (all animal violence free) that greatly enhance one’s understanding of this important film, including:
Look Out Haskell, It’s Real: The Making of ‘Medium Cool’ (Paul Cronin, 2001) - Cronin’s excellent film explains the content, methodology, and social context of Medium Cool, and is a crash course in documentary film making, in film theory, and in late 1960s American history. It manages to both magnify and expand Wexler’s original film, and in the process becomes a more enjoyable viewing experience than Medium Cool itself. Unfortunately, Criterion gives us only 53 minutes of the original 60 minutes, probably reflecting a contractual impasse over using a particular image or piece of music.
‘Medium Cool’ Revisited (Haskell Wexler, 2013) - Wexler’s 33-minute film about the Occupy Movement’s protest of the 2013 NATO conference in Chicago provides a saddening edification about the topics that Occupy tried to address, the occasional eloquence with which those concerns were expressed, and the media blackout of that reality. It is such a short time after the event, and already, all we know is Glenn Beck’s revisionist account of “those filthy America-hating scum”. As usual, there is, there was, no “liberal media” that might have, or could have, shown us the truth. We missed a lot through our Walmart-serving media’s enforced misunderstanding of this event. We missed the opportunity to align with people who actually wished to help us and instead cashed in that chip to hear advertisements for Food Insurance and gold bullion hucksters.
Sooner or Later (Paul Cronin, 2007) - There is much to be learned in the combined viewing of Wexler’s original film and Cronin’s 2001 Look Out Haskell … making-of documentary. One wake-up is Chicago’s late 60s’ ghetto of recently emigrated Appalachian mountain folk … Tenement blocks identical to those housing impoverished blacks, instead filled with illiterate white families from coal mining country. Sooner or Later locates Harold Blankenship, “hillbilly slum” resident and child participant in the original 1969 film, as he lives in 2007 having returned to impoverished rural life in West Virginia.
