By Ann Hornaday
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 2, 2008

Filmmaker Brett Morgen plunges viewers headlong into the most tumultuous years of the '60s in "Chicago 10," a documentary about the 1968 Democratic National Convention. He unleashes an audacious mash-up of animation, anachronism and archival footage to breathe bold new life into a year when America was exploding -- politically, culturally and existentially -- and, to quote one of the chants heard on the streets of Chicago that August, the whole world was watching.

Using documentary footage of the street demonstrations that escalated into riots over four days during the convention, Morgen chose to depict the resulting trial through animation, using actual court transcripts as a script. (Eight activists were charged with conspiracy during the demonstrations; the title of the film includes their two attorneys.) With a contemporary soundtrack featuring the likes of Eminem and the Beastie Boys, "Chicago 10" becomes a surprisingly immersive experience that literally reanimates an era too often mired in myth and nostalgia.

But Morgen's film owes a debt to another ambitious cinematic experiment: "Medium Cool," Haskell Wexler's weird and riveting 1969 directorial debut, also used the backdrop of the 1968 convention to explore larger historical currents, and it hovers like a benevolent elder spirit throughout "Chicago 10." Indeed, Morgen's film, which opened Friday, would not exist without its forebear, and with luck "Chicago 10" will inspire filmgoers to seek out "Medium Cool" not only as another take on the events it records, but as an exhilarating example of American cinema at its most unfettered and deeply urgent.

Like "Chicago 10," Wexler's "Medium Cool" is something of a collage. The difference is that Wexler melds fiction and documentary, and in ways that even today look startlingly fresh. Robert Forster plays John Cassellis, a cynical, shallow television cameraman plying his if-it-bleeds-it-leads trade in Chicago (contemporary audiences know Forster as the world-weary bail bondsman in "Jackie Brown"). As the movie opens, Cassellis and his soundman Gus (Peter Bonerz, who would soon make his name as a sitcom staple) are dispassionately documenting the aftermath of a car accident, getting it on film before one of them calls an ambulance as an afterthought rather than a moral duty.

Cassellis is a loner, a womanizer, a practiced misanthrope, moving through the world without being moved by it, until he meets Eileen (Verna Bloom), a single mother from West Virginia who lives with her 13-year-old son (the extraordinary Harold Blankenship) in one of the city's decrepit slums. As the Chicago summer heats up, culminating in four days of anarchy and violence in August, Cassellis has his own political conversion: After discovering the TV station he works for has been sharing footage with the Chicago police and the FBI, he quits.

Wexler is a legendary cinematographer. By 1968 he had already made a name for himself shooting "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," "In the Heat of the Night" and "The Thomas Crown Affair." He shot "Medium Cool" entirely on location in Chicago (with a foray to Washington after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated -- viewers get a quick glimpse of Jesse Jackson speaking at a rally there), having sensed that events would erupt during the Democratic convention. Amazingly, he was able to film Illinois Army National Guard troops as they rehearsed battling demonstrators during "war games," with half of them donning clown costumes and wigs to impersonate antiwar activists. (Morgen used some of this material in "Chicago 10," as well as some scenes from the actual demonstrations that followed.)

Taking his camera into Chicago's working-class black neighborhoods and the International Amphitheater, where the convention was held, Wexler finally ends up in the parks and streets where police and Guardsmen so notoriously bludgeoned and tear-gassed the demonstrators who had come to disrupt the convention. It's against this edgy backdrop that Eileen -- dressed in a prim yellow shirtwaist dress that makes her easily discernible against the drab olive fatigues that seem to engulf her -- frantically makes her way through an increasingly hellish tableau in search of her missing son. (At one point viewers can hear someone say, "Look out, Haskell, it's real!" when the tear gas begins.)

In many ways, "Medium Cool" is the ultimate cinematic curio, featuring such delicious details as Peter Boyle playing a shooting-range manager, as well as a gorgeous Gretsch guitar soundtrack by Mike Bloomfield and some tasty cuts from Frank Zappa. Drawing on the laconic antiheroes of film noir, the jump cuts of the French new wave and the spontaneity of Italian neorealism, "Medium Cool" creates something utterly new, a distinctly American brand of neorealism that would see its next high point in Charles Burnett's "Killer of Sheep" (1977).

Admittedly the film, which is available on DVD with commentary by the director and several cast members, has its awkward moments. Forster's Cassellis often resembles a billboard more than a full-blooded character, and Wexler relies too heavily on contrivance to make his polemical points. But formally and philosophically it's way ahead of its time, not only pushing the cinematic medium in a new direction but also putting the events of 1968 in the much larger context of American racism, sexism and chronic addiction to violent spectacle. Forty years later, that perspective is still damningly relevant: "Medium Cool," it turns out, is still very hot.