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Spine 658: Medium Cool

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Manage episode 497799245 series 1113290
Content provided by Lost in Criterion. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Lost in Criterion or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://podcastplayer.com/legal.

Haskell Wexler was hired to make a film adaptation of Jack Couffer's The Concrete Wilderness, a 1967 novel that seems a lot like an American version of Barry Hines A Kestral for a Knave which came out the next year. Like some of our other favorite films in the Criterion Collection, Wexler nearly completely rejected the brief and took his adaptation far from the source material to make Medium Cool, a film that retains certain story elements from the book but focuses less on the child protagonist and more on the political education of his mother and the news cameraman job of her new boyfriend. If it were just that, it might be interesting, but what Wexler turns in is a film that mixes that narrative fiction with Cinema Verite documentary on the political powderkeg that is Chicago (and the whole US) in 1968, with fictional characters interacting with real-world events as they actually unfold, culminating in a breathtaking Direct Cinema-esque sequence of one character attending the Democratic National Convention as another wanders through the police riot outside.

  continue reading

677 episodes

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iconShare
 
Manage episode 497799245 series 1113290
Content provided by Lost in Criterion. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Lost in Criterion or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://podcastplayer.com/legal.

Haskell Wexler was hired to make a film adaptation of Jack Couffer's The Concrete Wilderness, a 1967 novel that seems a lot like an American version of Barry Hines A Kestral for a Knave which came out the next year. Like some of our other favorite films in the Criterion Collection, Wexler nearly completely rejected the brief and took his adaptation far from the source material to make Medium Cool, a film that retains certain story elements from the book but focuses less on the child protagonist and more on the political education of his mother and the news cameraman job of her new boyfriend. If it were just that, it might be interesting, but what Wexler turns in is a film that mixes that narrative fiction with Cinema Verite documentary on the political powderkeg that is Chicago (and the whole US) in 1968, with fictional characters interacting with real-world events as they actually unfold, culminating in a breathtaking Direct Cinema-esque sequence of one character attending the Democratic National Convention as another wanders through the police riot outside.

  continue reading

677 episodes

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