A Girl and a Gun: What's Real, Haskell?

March 12, 2005

What's Real, Haskell?

In 1968, the celebrated cinematographer Haskell Wexler (so far, two Oscars, three other nominations, but more importantly endlessly honored by the critical and professional community) made a film about the contemporary political ferment in this country, Medium Cool (1969). It was the story of a news film cameraman who covered all the critical events of that awful summer. I remember it with affection, not having seen it since its release, but my hunch is that it was so dependent upon the emotions and reference points of 1968 that it wouldn't have the same emotional impact now, even if it is still admired in a somewhat abstract way.

Documentary filmmaker Paul Cronin has made an intelligent, compact documentary I picked up on Sundance called "Watch Out, Haskell: It's Real." The title comes from a line in the film during the (actual) filming of the police attack on the protesters in Grant Park during the Democratic party convention of August. When a National Guardsman lobbed a tear gas grenade directly at Wexler, who was of course toting a film camera, we heard the line yelled out by a colleague. It served to underscore one of the central purposes of this film, which toyed with and turned around and around the then just-developing conventions of cinema verite. But Wexler, a man of great intelligence and now approaching eighty, has the courage in this documentary to tell us that the scene was shot without sound and the line--which occurred at the moment only in his head--was added in the editing room.

Both the film and the documentary roast the old chestnut about fiction and documentary, whether any film is "truth," and so forth. Medium Cool included any number of reminders, not confined to its final shot of Wexler manning a big 35-mm camera and turning it directly on the audience, that what we were watching had all the look of a "reality" film and was also a confection. Wexler has his own take on what this amounts to, but Cronin's film intelligently leaves it open for us to draw conclusions of our own.

Bonuses: some fabulously narcissistic footage of Warren Beatty at the convention actually commisioned by him, and some present-day interview footage of Chicago political activist, radio personality, and oral history author Studs Terkel, my own personal candidate for the world's greatest living human being.

March 12, 2005 at 07:06 PM | Permalink

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A Girl and a Gun

March 12, 2005

What's Real, Haskell?

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