Late last Friday, word began to circulate that social historian and famed lefty Studs Terkel had died at the age of 96; Roger Ebert, Chuck Tryon and filmmaker Steven Bognar are among the many who have offered memories and appreciations. I went on YouTube this morning to find footage of the man, and I stumbled on this clip of Terkel talking about his participation in Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool. The nine minutes of footage were collected by Paul Cronin, ostensibly for his documentary on the making of Medium Cool, Look Out Haskell, It’s Real. Make sure to watch it all the way through to find out what happens when Cronin calls Terkel “The Poet of Chicago.”
Forty years after the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, protesters are looking to repeat history in Denver this week. In fact there’s even a group calling itself “Recreate ‘68″, and if you’re a true internerd, you’ve already seen the popular YouTube clip of the crowd chanting “Fuck Fox News” at a Fox News correspondent (check out the other side here).
After so many attempts at making parallels between ‘68 and ‘08, I’m a little bored of the nostalgia, and I think the retro attitude is past the point of showing its ineffectiveness. Earlier this year, I groaned at the use of a modern (though really, mostly decade-old) soundtrack in the ‘68 DNC-set animated documentary Chicago 10. Yet two years prior to that film’s 2007 premiere at Sundance, I had already seen a failed attempt to callback ‘68 with the Medium Coolhomage This Revolution, the trailer for which is today’s clip of the day.
“I’ve been thinking about Medium Cool a lot lately,” writes Chuck Tryon at Newcritics. “In part because I’m teaching it, but also because the film’s treatment of history and documentary would seem to inform the debates about Brian DePalma’s Redacted and the decision to remove some documentary photographs from the film’s final montage.” Chuck hasn’t seen Redacted yet, but he makes some interesting connections in the full post, which you can read here. I havent’ seen Medium Cool since my first year of college (that’s about nine years, if you’re counting), and Chuck’s post inspired me to try to dig up some clips online. All I could find was the trailer above.
The thing that struck me when watching the trailer is that it looks very “real.” Obviously, I’m too young to have seen Medium Cool at the time of its release, so I don’t know if this is really a legitimate response–I don’t really know what “real” looked like in 1969. But even if it’s just a so-so approximation of 1969 reality, Medium Cool would seem to have something over Redacted, which wants to be a dispatch straight from contemporary popular media but, with its school play version of combat and video blogs kabuki, fails miserably.
Check out the Medium Cool trailer above, and the Redacted trailer below the jump. The almost image-free Redacted trailer is the ultimate teaser, a physical illustration of Brian DePalma’s insistence that the whole movie is comprised of material that an unnamed someone doesn’t want you to see. As Chuck notes, Medium Cool was, literally a movie that was considered too controversial and ground-breaking for release. In contrast, its trailer plays as a perfectly preserved slice of zeitgeist.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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