Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) - Directed by Michel Gondry

As I sit down to write this essay, I realize that I haven’t written a thing in nearly 2 months. It is due to both a combination of not really being enthused about any films I’ve seen in the last couple months and also from the sheer burden of keeping up with life in all its vast responsibilities and possibilities. On any given day, it’s amazing how many choices we can make and how many different directions we can go in. It’s a wonder that most of us end up each night in roughly the same place as the night before, probably sleeping in the same bed, under the same roof. When you stop and think of the complexities of life, it’s amazing how our brains have a vast ability to keep us, for the most part, grounded. Some of us are faced with more challenges than others. Some of us thrive on change and pressure more than others. But, for the most part, there are routines that each of us follow, day in and day out. Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is many things, but at it's core, it somehow captures a certain quality about how our brains work, and the choices we make (both consciously and unconsciously), while also remarkably capturing a vast humanist element at the same time. This coupling of a structural analysis and a humanistic decomposition of our mind’s process yields one of cinema’s most memorable attempts at capturing our existence. It’s also one of the most beautiful and poignant attempts to show the duality of love relationships….the beauty and tragedy of a life spent trying to preserve ourselves yet also at times risking everything for love and acceptance.

Gondry’s masterful film concerns the current mindstate of Joel, played with a relaxed and almost morose quality by Jim Carrey. At the beginning of the film, we see what looks like the beginning of a relationship between he and a woman named Clementine (Kate Winslet) who happen to meet in Montauk, NY on a day when Joel has decided to ditch work on a random whim…..or maybe not so random. This initial sequence sets up a poignancy after we realize later that this isn’t the first time Joel and Clementine have met. It only FEELS like it to them. In the weeks and months prior, they were both in a relationship together that was filled with lots of beautiful moments and many ugly moments. It got to a point where both of them determined they wanted to erase each other from their memories. Thus, they each hired a firm called Lacuna to conduct such a procedure. Clementine has the erasing done first. When Joel learns of it, he decides to join her in the process. This premise sets up the beautiful second half whereby the Lacuna crew (played by Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, Tom Wilkinson, and Kirsten Dunst), attempt to erase each memory of the relationship from Joel’s mind. Meanwhile in Joel’s subconscious, non-waking state, he attempts to preserve and salvage some memory of Clementine as he realizes it would be far better to retain some of the good memories along with the bad memories, rather than remove all memory of their relationship altogether.

The recently deceased Alain Resnais surely must have seen commonalities between his works and Gondry’s film. Being that the screenplay was written by Charlie Kaufman, the film's look and feel is also as much his as Gondry’s, with Kaufman’s unique perspectives of reality on display, which are in turn leveraging processes and techniques that Resnais built back in the 1950’s and 60’s. Resnais was able to blend past and present into a commonality. He didn’t allow for a separation of past and present. As he once stated, “The present and the past coexist, but the past shouldn’t be in flashback.” It could be argued that Resnais’s singular, distilled essence was to emphasize this point. Gondry and Kaufman build upon this foundation, essentially turning the present and past into a common experience, inseparable from each other, with present and past intermingling to such a degree that there is no distinction. So often during the film, we witness Jim Carrey’s current perspective embedded in a past memory, such that he and Clementine exist in two states at the same time, or more simply put.....just a single state of being. In what might be the best sequence in the film, Joel attempts to find a place in his mind where he can hide the memory of Clementine so far deep in his brain that the Lacuna company can’t find it. He places himself and Clementine into a memory when he was 4 years old, hiding under the kitchen table and witnessing the interaction of Clementine and his mother, with Clementine taking the place of his mom’s friend. Clementine and Joel are privy to the fact that they are attempting to hide from Lacuna at the present time, while concurrently existing in an experience from 30 years prior. Thus, the past and present become one experience for them.

What makes the film so desperately romantic, is in fact the idea of a relationship which has gone off track and the duality of wanting to remember and wanting to forget at the same time. For Joel, what starts out as a desire to forget everything, ends up as a fight to preserve at least some of the good along with the bad. We can all recall relationships that either never got off the ground or crashed and burned over time. This film asks, "would we rather maintain the memories, both the good with the bad, or remove them entirely?" The poignancy of this question is posed in such a way that the film emphasizes the sensitive beauty and tragedy of our memories. Memories can stir such different reactions depending on what they are. But to erase them is a scary proposition, not just because of the loss of recollection, but for the loss of experience and learning. What happens at the end of the film, as Joel and Clementine realize the mistakes they made in the past, they learn to overlook the pursuit of the safe approach and choose the messiness of existence over sanitized love. They choose passion over perfection. This is such a relatable and poignant conclusion, it can’t help but conjure a hopeful, humanistic conveyance. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet provide a grounded presence throughout the film with their beautiful and varied performances. Winslet in particular conveys alternate approaches, particularly as she exists post memory loss, ending up in a temporary relationship with the Elijah Wood character, who is attempting to duplicate Joel’s courtship of Clementine. She has this way of appearing lost in a certain spatial plane that is neither here nor there. Gondry’s willingness to lose the audience for periods of time is brazen in his confidence in that he knows he will recover us later as things come together. I must admit it was 10 years between viewings and it’s amazing how beautifully the film comes together upon repeated viewing. Although there is already a dated, low-tech vibe to the film (no cell phones, primitive computer systems), the film hardly suffers from them, with the warmth of human contact taking center stage. Charlie Kaufman’s script is as loose and free as it is deliciously pragmatic. Once you watch the film, it’s amazing how intricately designed it is. No wonder he won the best Screenplay Oscar that year. What stands out for me, are the beautiful sequences as Joel and Clementine race to hide in Joel’s mind, attempting to preserve small semblances of their love and experience together, learning from these experiences on how to be better people and building a greater love and appreciation for each other. It is one of cinema’s most truly lovely expressions of romantic love.

My Favorite films of 2013

There's no way I've seen all the films I need to in order to do full justice to this list. I still haven't seen Like Someone in Love and am still waiting for Beyond the Hills to get some kind of distribution. But at some point, you just need to put 2013 to bed. I think 2013 was a tremendous year for film. Probably the best year in the last decade. Last year I had a hard time filling out a top 10. This year, my 10 favorite films (actually 11) are all top notch, and there were a several others that I had a hard time leaving off my top 10, including (ahem), Frozen. Anyway, now that we're already 1/4 of the way through 2014, these are my favorite films of 2013. And now I can move on. (ratings are out of 4 stars)

1. 12 Years a Slave (2013) - McQueen ****
- There was no more powerful film last year than this one. It even gained in stature for me after I read Northup's incredible memoir. I will not soon forget this one. McQueen's greatest feat was bringing the stone-cold emotional honesty of the memoir, whilst not selling out to sentiment.

2. Before Midnight (2013) - Linklater ****
- Perhaps the best film of the trilogy, Linklater's labor of love with his stars Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke is another superb entry in what is turning into more of a lifelong relationship examined on film. As Celine and Jesse age, the entire trilogy continues to morph and shift as our perceptions of past and present perceptions of this couple changes.

3. Gravity (2013) - Cuaron ****
- The funnest and most breathtaking experience I've had in a theater in about 8 years. And when I say breathtaking, I really mean it. I felt out of breath at the end of the film. It's a memorable leap forward for technological effects and the advance of cinema as experience. It's also a deeply felt humanistic tale and well acted by Bullock.

4. The Act of Killing (2012) - Oppenheimer ****
- It's hard to completely fathom how this film got made. But Joshua Oppenheimer has made a documentary for the ages. Scorching, brazen, appalling, and unforgettable.

5. Laurence Anyways (2012) - Dolan ****
- Mostly went unnoticed, this Canadian release from 2012 that played in the US last year is an unabashed love story with tinges of Kubrick and Fassbinder. It's loaded with style and although it has a long running time, it also has an epic and tragic leaning that I couldn't get enough of.

6. Prisoners (2013) - Villaneuve ****
- My favorite procedural since Silence of the Lambs (and without sensationalizing the crime). Villaneuve's film is utterly creepy and gets under your skin. I had this film on the brain for weeks. Jackman and Gyllenhaal have never been better.

7. Blue Jasmine (2013) - Allen ****
- Allen's best film since Match Point, nearly a decade a go. True, though the film is a tremendous vehicle for Cate Blanchett, it also contains a great deal of Shakespearean elements and class dynamics. Superbly acted by the ensemble and really an engaging film.

8. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) - Scorsese *** 1/2
- This was the most talked about film for awhile there, but when you boil it down to pure cinema and bravado, nothing could top it. Hard to believe that Scorsese still has this much energy, but his film made American Hustle look boring by comparison. Scorsese is remarkably successful portraying comedy as grand circus, with DiCaprio an excellent ring leader.

9. To the Wonder (2013) - Malick ****
- Malick's darkest and most doubt-laden film was his most poorly received film yet, mainly due to the public's and critic's misreading of it. If The Tree of Life displays spiritual birth, then To the Wonder examines spiritual doubt. Once all is said and done, the film will likely settle nicely into Malick's canon. It just might take awhile. I found it to be gorgeous, romantic, and unsettling.

10. Short Term 12 (2013) - Cretton ****
- At times the film begins to veer into tv movie territory, but reality and honesty are constantly setting things straight. Brie Larson as a social worker taking care of troubled teens is just amazing. It's as moving and honest as any film from last year.

11. Fill the Void (2012) - Burshtein *** 1/2
- I'm making room for this one on my list. This is the one film that took me somewhere I felt I'd never seen before. Rama Burshtein brought me into the Hassidic Jewish world of arranged marriages and makes it feel simultaneously unique and common, building upon the kinds of societal and relational pressures common to the works of Jane Austen, but transporting them to a world rarely filmed.



Honorable Mention:
Afternoon Delight (2013) - Soloway ***
The Attack (2012) - Doueiri *** 1/2
Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) - Kechiche ***
Captain Phillips (2013) - Greengrass ***
Frances Ha (2012) - Baumbach ***
Frozen (2013) - Buck, Lee *** 1/2
The Kings of Summer (2013) - Vogt-Roberts ***
Cutie and the Boxer (2013) - Heinzerling ***
Mud (2013) - Nichols ***


The rest of 2013: In alphabetical order....

Ain't Them Bodies Saints (2013) - Lowrey **
All is Lost (2013) - Chandor ** 1/2
American Hustle (2013) - Russell **
August: Osage County (2013) - Wells ***
A Band Called Death (2012) - Covino ***
Behind the Candelabra (2013) - Soderbergh **
Blackfish (2013) - Cowperwaithe ***
The Bling Ring (2013) - Coppola **
Blue Caprice (2013) - Moors ***
The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012) - Van Groeningen * 1/2
The Butler (2013) - Daniels ***
Computer Chess (2013) - Bujalski **
The Conjuring (2013) - Wan **
Dallas Buyer's Club (2013) - Vallee **
Fruitvale Station (2013) - Coogler ***
The Gatekeepers (2013) - Moreh ** 1/2
Gatsby (2013) - Luhrman **
Gimme the Loot (2012) - Leon ** 1/2
Goodbye First Love (2012) - Hansen-Love **
The Great Beauty (2013) - Sorrentino ***
Hannah Arendt (2012) - Von Trotta ***
Her (2013) - Jonze ***
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) - Lawrence ** 1/2
The Hunt (2013) - Vinterberg **
I'm So Excited (2013) - Almodovar * 1/2
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) - Coen **
Leviathan (2012) - Castaing-Taylor * 1/2
Mama (2013) - Muschietti ***
Nebraska (2013) - Payne ***
Night Across the Street (2012) - Ruiz ** 1/2
No (2013) - Larrain ** 1/2
Only God Forgives (2013) - Refn * 1/2
Oz: The Great and Powerful (2013) - Raimi ***
Pain and Gain (2013) - Bay **
The Place Beyond the Pines (2013) - Cianfrance ***
Post Tenabras Lux (2012) - Reygadas ** 1/2
Prince Avalanche (2013) - Green **
Renoir (2012) - Bourdos ** 1/2
Rush (2013) - Howard * 1/2
Saving Mr. Banks (2013) - Hancock ** 1/2
Side Effects (2013) - Soderberg ** 1/2
Something in the Air (2012) - Assayas **
The Spectacular Now (2013) - Ponsoldt **
Spring Breakers (2013) - Korine ***
Stoker (2013) - Park **
Stories We Tell (2013) - Polley ** 1/2
Therese (2012) - Miller ** 1/2
Touchy Feely (2013) - Shelton **
Trance (2013) - Boyle **
Upstream Color (2013) - Carruth ** 1/2
The Way Way Back (2013) - Faxon/Rash ** 1/2
The We and the I (2013) - Gondry ** 1/2
What Maisie Knew (2013) - McGehee **
The World's End (2013) - Wright ** 1/2
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (2013) - ** 1/2

Waterloo Bridge (1931) - Directed by James Whale

Though remade a couple of times since, the original film adaptation of the play by the same name remains a definitive romantic film from the 1930’s. Made at about the same time as many of Maurice Chevalier’s little escapist romances and musicals, Waterloo Bridge plays as a sort of romantic pre-coder with a more pessimistic core. It captures the same sorts of time-pressured romantic entanglements that have been one of cinema’s greatest romantic interests: That of two lovers or would-be lovers who do not have time on their side. There’s also a fascinating emotional transparency on display and a rather inquisitive nature to observe interaction and dialogue without intent to over-dramatize or over-sensationalize the scenario, especially when considering the era in which it was made. Let’s face it.... falling in love with a prostitute isn’t exactly something we’ve never seen before. But it was never approached with the degree of subtlety and lack of sentimentality than it was here in Waterloo Bridge.

Waterloo Bridge stars Mae Clarke as an American showgirl named Myra, living in London, who is down on her luck and selling herself to soldiers to make ends meet.  One evening, she has a meet-cute with a WWI American Soldier named Roy (Kent Douglass) on Waterloo Bridge during an air raid. She portrays herself to him as a showgirl and not a prostitute. They both return to her apartment where they spend the evening talking and getting to know each other, whereupon Roy decides he wants to help her out by paying her rent. She is insulted and nearly throws him out, but is already smitten and attached to him so she apologizes. They begin a hot and cold relationship that is threatened by Roy’s future return to the battle lines, and by Myra’s refusal to tell him about her past, which keeps her from opening herself up to his marriage proposals. At one point, he goads her into spending some time with his family at their large home where she feels threatened by her own conscience as she still hasn’t confided to Roy. Myra continues to run and Roy continues to pursue despite the challenges, bringing them to a tear-filled departure on Waterloo Bridge as Roy must head to the battle lines. Unbeknownst to them, this moment will be the last time they ever see each other.

James Whale, he of Frankenstein fame, directs this pre-coder with a large degree of restraint. There’s actually very little of the ubiquitous cleavage and lingerie of the era and potential scenes of prostitution are few and far between, with precious few minutes actually devoted to her professional endeavors. So although the film is about a woman who is a prostitute, this never becomes a preachy film about prostitution. Instead, most of the focus is on the face to face interaction between Myra and Roy as they flirt and retreat, plead and yearn, laugh and cry. Both Mae Clark and Kent Douglas give unaffected and emotionally fragile performances. These are both two relatively inexperienced, young actors whose insecurity onscreen translates into fragile portrayals of individuals who are yearning for a connection but afraid of being hurt and of hurting others, relegating their emotional states into something resembling a paralyzed love, a yearning and an intention that lacks the blunt truth to survive. Both Clark and Douglas have terrific chemistry together and both look great onscreen. Each has this way of naturally hanging out and feeling comfortable. They don't have to be speaking to be communicating. There is a strange, beautiful, and poetic infusion of un-rushed sincerity to their scenes.

What on paper feels very much like cliché is realized in such a way that the emphasis is on character development and emotional context.  Pressures of war and hunger drives each to believe they are making decisions that are in the best interest of the other. As the audience understands slightly more than the characters do, there is a hushed and tragic suspense to this romance that really never seems to get off the ground in proper fashion. Denial though, is often more romantic than coupling itself, as examples from Casablanca to Brief Encounter remind us of that old question...... “Is it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?” Are the brief memories of beauty that are coupled with deep pain to be preferred over nothingness and numbness? This is a central question common to many a love story both in real life and in the movies. As far as the romantic movies go, Waterloo Bridge is one of the best. 

The Blogging Doldrums

Maybe it's just me, but blogging this winter has become, oddly, a bit of a chore. I'm not sure whether it's been this horrendously long, cold, and snowy winter, a lack of quality film viewings, or some other random combination of things, but I've seemingly run out of films that I've been interested in writing about. I've still been watching tons of movies, but nothing has really caught my fancy in the last couple of months since most of the new films that I really liked, such as Wolf of Wall Street or 12 Years a Slave are now far in the rearview mirror. 

Don't get me wrong; I still enjoy writing and blogging, but unless there is something I'm passionate about, it's hard to find time to write. I am looking forward to the upcoming Romance countdown at WiTD, and expect to submit several essays to that effort, but in the meantime, I will continue to only write about films that really drive a passion. 

The Bigamist (1953) - Directed by Ida Lupino

Ida Lupino is one of the most fascinating figures in the history of cinema, breaking ground in numerous ways as basically the only female director working in Hollywood in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, she also wrote, produced and starred in numerous films, including her 1953 masterpiece, The Bigamist, in which she gives a brilliant performance. Her films, particularly this one, defy societal conventions, and in fact Hollywood conventions as well, dealing with themes and underlying issues in ways that are uniquely sensitive to feminine/masculine identity and sexuality and in fact the concept of marriage and career for both women and men. It’s hard to watch this film in a complete vacuum and take it in as it would have been seen in 1953. In fact it’s hard to turn off our understanding of the true second wave of feminism in the 1960s. But there are stepping stones created in this film and elements of feminism that are incorporated into the script effectively. True, the film is rather melodramatic, but it’s honest and sincerely told.

Edmund O’Brien gives a career best performance as Harry Graham, husband of Eve (Joan Fontaine), who is unable to conceive children. So they pursue the option of adopting a child after 8 years of marriage to each other. While the adoption agency worker, Mr. Jordan (Edmund Gwynn) looks into the background check process, he finds out many things about Harry…..in fact far more than he wishes to find out. Harry is in fact a traveling salesman for refrigerators in a business that is headed by his wife Eve, who quickly became a leading saleswoman in the business after she pursued a sales career once she realized she couldn’t have children. She in fact is deemed a “career woman” by her husband, and is actually better at her job than Harry is. Though their apartment is in San Francisco, Harry travels often to Los Angeles for work. While alone there and feeling restless, lonely, and depressed, he meets Phyllis (Ida Lupino) on a tour-bus ride. They strike up a friendship. Soon though, Harry begins to crave her attention and affection and begins to feel appreciated through her attentions. His wife Eve is often unresponsive to his feelings and needs. When Eve has to fly to Florida to care for her ailing father, Harry has significant time alone with Phyllis in L.A., where they have sex on his birthday. Phyllis knows nothing of Harry’s personal life, and when Harry learns that Phyllis is pregnant, his guilt and shame overcome him and he determines that he will have to divorce Eve to care for Phyllis and the child, but he doesn’t tell Phyllis this. Through circumstances beyond his control, he is unable to tell Eve, and thus begins a scenario where he becomes married to two women at the same time, leading a double life.

Several key themes come to the fore in this film. One is the against-the-grain characterization of Eve, by Joan Fontaine. Eve is a career woman, better at her job than her husband, and who in fact we suspect makes more money than her husband does. She is satisfied by her work, and in fact pays little attention to her husband's emotional needs, even though she's not really that insensitive by nature....it's just that she is trusting and is rather "un-clingy". Harry is the disenchanted, lovelorn husband, emasculated, flighty, depressed, emotional, and rather unstable. In fact, their roles can be positioned as the opposite stereotypes of male/female roles, particularly in traditional social and cinematic values. When Harry wanders to Phyllis, we listen to his internal monologue as he explains why he does what he does out of need to connect emotionally and spiritually to another human as his needs have become unfulfilled by his wife. His sensitive and emotional needs are quite a stark de-masculinization of male gender values, and particularly enhanced by O’Brien’s effectiveness in the role. Joan Fontaine is fabulously believable as the career woman, shunning her traditional duties of domestication and female subservience. Ida Lupino is equally impressive as Phyllis, seeking companionship but not demanding anything from Harry, pursuing HIM when in fact he wants to break off the relationship and refrain from sex. Yet she's a good woman at heart and really is doing nothing wrong. Their sexual encounter is subtly hinted at when he tells her “I have to return home tomorrow.” She says, “Tomorrow is a long way off.” When her pregnancy is made known, it is of particular interest that she has made no intention of finding Harry to tell him and is ready to care for the child on her own as a single mother.

Lupino’s direction is often raw, and unpolished, but is remarkably honest in its emotional clarity, providing moments for each character to be deeply felt by the audience. Tendencies for melodramatic elements are keyed by circumstances which aren’t just believable, they’re remarkably simple and understandable. When the moment comes when Harry feels the need to confess to Eve, we understand his lack of will when he realizes her father has passed away. The bad timing continues, and he’s never quite able to tell her. It’s not that we sympathize with him…it’s just that we understand HOW such a thing could happen. His manipulation of the situation is enhanced by the circumstances which allow for the deceit to continue. It’s a remarkably balanced script by Collier Young, who was in fact married to Fontaine at the time, and was previously married to Lupino, adding an interesting layer to the background of this film. The love triangle of sorts is also fascinating in that we do believe that Harry loves both women and the film ends on an appropriately ambiguous note. True, though the film asks more questions than it answers (and probably couldn’t go quite as far as a film made in the late 1960’s could go) regarding the elements of gender reversal, the honest approach to female sexuality, career, motherhood, marriage, and the terrific love story at the core of the film make this film a must see and a unique slice of the 1950’s for a pioneering woman in the field of cinema. Whether you like the film or not may depend on your sensitivity to melodrama..... but if Sirk, Fassbinder, and Almodovar can be praised for their melodramas, so can Lupino. If not, then it's a double standard that needs to be corrected.

Alain Resnais

The present and the past co-exist, but the past shouldn't be in flashback.

- Alain Resnais (1922 - 2014)

Medium Cool (1969) - Directed by Haskell Wexler

Many of the time-capsule films of the late 1960’s don’t play nearly as well as they used to. Last time I watched The Graduate I found it slightly more awkward and kitschy than I recall. Also, Easy Rider was a little bit too in love with itself last time I saw it a couple years ago. Same goes for Midnight Cowboy, which although wonderfully acted, is a bit self-conscious despite the fantastic acting. Each of these films I really like for the most part and consider them to be fine American films from their era, but none of which I would consider to have much of an impact upon me and my understanding of cinema today outside of their historical perspective. I think their scope goes little beyond their time-capsule quality as a window into the late 60’s. Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool is an exception to this rule, however. For some reason, Medium Cool was not canonized the way that it should have been. There are small circles, especially among critics, who have sung it’s praises, but I’m hoping the recent Criterion release will shine more light on it.

Wexler wrote, directed, and photographed this masterful piece of 60’s filmmaking that just might be the best American film of that decade to my eyes. In the film, there are a few converging plots lines that are at first loosely framed and then slowly begin to coalesce around the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where the riots took place between the Chicago Police and demonstrators protesting the Vietnam War among other things. We follow a news photographer named John (Robert Forster) and his sound man, Gus (Peter Bonerz) through Chicago on various outings as they film a car accident, and cover various stories. We also follow the exploits of a young boy, named Harold (Harold Blankenship) and his single mother Eileen (Verna Bloom), who are living in a small apartment. These stories cross when John catches Harold near his car and chases him, thinking he’s trying to damage his car. In the chase, Harold leaves behind a pet pigeon in a box with his home address on it. John arrives at the home to return the pigeon, where he meets the boy and his mother, with whom an initial attraction is made. They tentatively begin a relationship, and just when things start heating up, Harold runs off into Chicago on his own, and Eileen goes searching for him through the crowds and rioters protesting in Chicago, while John is filming the coverage at the convention.

Unique in its presentation, Medium Cool is an influential film with lots going on. It is one of the most effective, and one of the first, to portray the weaving of fiction and non-fiction within the same film. We have fictional characters winding their way through actual events (The Convention, The Riots etc.), with the lines between the film’s sense of fiction and reality continually blurred by the context within which it was shot. This blurring effect occurs even more so, by the fact that Wexler photographs the film with a cinema verite style, making the film feel like a documentary, even as he weaves pastorally beautiful sequences together, particularly the flashback memories of Harold and his father, making the film feel life-like and also cinematic at the same time. This approach can also be seen over twenty years later in a film like Kiarostami’s magnificent Close-Up, where he continually blurs the lines between reality and truth and our perception of them. With most of the Wexler's film made in Chicago, it’s also very much a slice-of-life in big city Chicago 1968, with lots of outdoor sequences of the El Trains, the projects and ghettos, and also Grant Park etc. Most of the film is particularly un-shy about topics of media distortion and ethics, racism, women’s liberation, sexual liberation, war and violence, political upheaval…..it all makes me feel like I understand what it was like back in 1968, far more than those other films I mentioned above. Medium Cool captures a tenseness and angst present in those times, with the memories of assassinations and social/political unrest fresh in people’s hearts and minds.  I find there are element’s of Wexler’s film that can also be seen in something like Lee’s Do the Right Thing, where angst and tension is on high alert. It’s also a film that speaks to us today, with the topic of media manipulation and the way we cover national tragedies on our news stations that continue to be divisive. There’s a particular sequence where John and Eileen are watching a news presentation on the television, and John has a monologue reflecting how the nation has begun to get used to national tragedy and we have a procedure for how the media covers these events and how the nation reacts with almost premeditation and desensitization. These statements feel just as relevant today as they would have back then. The particular instances might differ….rather than assassinations we have terrorism…..but the underlying commonalities are there.

Few photographers of his era were better than Wexler. This film is one huge example of his talent, using a variety of camera techniques and framing devices to capture the spirit that he was intending. In the film's final centerpiece, the riot sequence is amazingly well captured, with Verna Bloom wearing her bright yellow dress, standing out amidst the police and demonstrators….the hand-held camera roving about capturing the chaos. It’s almost hard to believe Wexler was able to pull this off as it’s so shockingly spontaneous. His sense of humor is also rather amusing, throwing in sly jokes just to keep the film from getting too high-minded, like the overlapping sound technique of using crowd noise during a sex scene among other visual and aural gags throughout. Although it’s not really a film of memorable characters, the ideas therein and the conceptual design really are the major assets. This is often the focus of European films from the 1960’s, like those of Godard….where the politics and ideas relegate the human element to the background. Stylistically, the film also belongs to a certain sense of the American New Wave, along with works by Cassevetes, which to me are also playing extremely well these days. As a lasting work of cinematic innovation, there are few American films that are as striking and memorable as Medium Cool.