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Medium Cool

Director: Haskell Wexler Run Time: 111 min. Format: Digital Rating: R Release Year: 1969

Starring: Marianna Hill, Peter Bonerz, Robert Forster, Verna Bloom

VICE News and Nitehawk’s Journalists in Film series launches with Haskell Wexler’s MEDIUM COOL, a film about a television news reporter who becomes involved with the political power of imagery during the violence of the late 1960s.

Special recorded introduction by Robert Forster and in-person introduction by Jason Mojica, Editor in Chief of VICE News.

It’s 1968, and the whole world is watching. With the U.S. in social upheaval, famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler decided to make a film about what the hell was going on. Medium Cool, his debut feature, plunges us into the moment. With its mix of fictional storytelling and documentary technique, this depiction of the working world and romantic life of a television cameraman (Robert Forster) is a visceral cinematic snapshot of the era, climaxing with an extended sequence shot right in the middle of the riots surrounding the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. An inventive commentary on the pleasures and dangers of wielding a camera, Medium Cool is as prescient a political film as Hollywood has ever produced. – Criterion

Part of the Journalists in Film series by VICE News and Nitehawk Cinema.

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