Wexler: Medium Cool (1969)

Shot primarily on televisual cameras, Medium Cool takes its title from Marshall McLuhan’s concept of hot and cool media. According to McLuhan, television is a cool medium because it demands a high degree of participation from its audience to separate fact from fiction. It’s appropriate, then, that this portrait of Chicago in 1968 converges unstaged footage with a series of miniature narratives revolving around the media industry, until it’s impossible to distinguish one from the other. At one level, that places the onus on the audience to separate fact from fiction, but it also gestures towards a more radical McLuhanite principle – namely, that the content of a medium is completely irrelevant in terms of its impact upon its audience. From that perspective, it doesn’t really matter whether or not we regard the film as fictional, just as it doesn’t really matter whether or not we become involved in its narrative or politics. Instead, it’s the sheer fact of watching the film that’s most significant, as Wexler doesn’t dramatise or document so much as simply demonstrate the televisual camera’s mediating power. And it takes a cinematographer’s feel for all the places a camera can be situated to truly envisage the sheer proliferation of portable televisual cameras that flood Chicago in this buildup to the 1968 Democratic Convention, as Wexler revives the city symphony films of the 1920s for a televisual age, and televisual citizen. Yet where the camera-citizens of city symphonies were rare and unusual beings,  the most striking thing about Wexler’s vision of Chicago is that televisual cameras seem to equal televisions in number, or even outnumber them. Representation quickly exceeds its object, until there’s no real distinction between spectators and participators – by merely watching the final riots, we’re a critical part of them. And it’s in that odd moment that the film’s most memorable and radical affirmation lies. To simply watch television, Wexler suggests, is to demonstrate to ourselves that we are part of history, even or especially when its narratives fail to hold our attention or sustain our interest.