But just by making these defenses, I'm engaging "Medium Cool's" detractors on their own ground - and I'd rather move over to mine, if you don't mind. "Medium Cool" strikes me as an overground attempt to obtain effects by juxtaposition. In conventional movies, points are made by plots and speeches. If you want to say something about the Indians, for example, you give John Wayne a speech about the Indians and he reads it.
But the new experimental films, and several of the unconventional, recent feature films ("Easy Rider," "Alice's Restaurant") don't always make their points this simply. Instead, they draw the audience into a series of seemingly unrelated events and make their point by the way these events butt up against one another.
Bob Dylan explains this technique in "Don't Look Back," when he suggests to the Time reporter that his magazine should juxtapose pictures: "Like Gov. Rockefeller next to a drunk vomiting." I can't quite figure out what point these two particular images would make next to each other, but I do see a point of view emerging from Wexler's deeply evocative images in "Medium Cool."
Consider these scenes in "Medium Cool" that have little or nothing to do, overtly, with the plot:
-The National Guard troops in training at Camp Ripley; half the guardsmen are dressed up ridiculously as "hippies," and their job is to "demonstrate" against the regulars. The whole training exercise is carried out unseriously, half as a joke.
-The 360-degree shot, supposedly in the Los Angeles hotel kitchen where Kennedy was murdered. Bobby's voice is heard through the door. In the kitchen, work continues.
-The dramatic confrontation between the TV crew and the black militants.
-The Uptown boy's strange, quiet fascination with his pigeons.
-The cocktail party near the film's opening, where media people talk about their involvement with events. Their concern seems largely professional, like that of the film's central character (later, watching a film of the Kennedy funeral, his only response is: "Jesus, I like to shoot film").
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq6eXmr9uscGeqa1nnZqxqsHMZpqop5xivK95zK6jraGgobJuuMSvnKWr