Haskell Wexler is primarily a cinematographer. His film credits run from 1953 to the present, but his most important work was in the 60s. He began his career doing documentaries and what these days we would really call industrials. The first thing he got paid to do was a "documentary" about a cotton mill in Alabama. It was a friend of his father's and he was very frustrated by how much the mill owner wanted a say in what the story was. As he developed what he became most known for was using the emerging style of Cinema Verite. There's different nuanced definitions of cinema verite but as Wexler tells it {show clip in class} basically they would point the camera at what was going on and if something happened it happened and it would tell its own story.
What's great about the clip of Wexler though is that it comes from a documentary that his son made about him. Haskell is giving his son a really hard time because in his mind Mark is doing it wrong in asking him to talk about the room they're in and what's about to happen there. What's perfect though is that Mark isn't trying to tell the story of an ageing cinematographer about to sell all his gear. He's telling the story of what a difficult person Haskell Wexler is and how hard it was to grow up in his shadow. And so in fact he was completely following the conventions of cinema verite.
That approach was really different from the traditional style of documentary filmmaking. Though like most stylistic and technological advancements we've discussed to date it was part of a continuum. So far in class we have watched two documentaries. The Plow that Broke the Plains (Pare Lorentz, 1936) was fairly standard for its time, making it kind of hard for us to watch now. It had some beautiful photography of the plains, most of it clearly staged, and it had a voice of god narrator telling us what we needed to know and what we needed to think. That's what documentary filmmaking was at the time. Compare that to The Battle of San Pietro (John Huston, 1944). It also had an authoritarian narrator telling us what we needed to know. However, with the exception of the sequences with the maps telling us where things were, the footage was not staged. It was real stuff from the real battles being fought there. It prompted such a powerful reaction in people that they held the distribution of the film until after the war. Even with the inherent separation that the authoritarian narrator provides in a way the film was too real.
We can see that Cinema Verite didn't come out of nowhere. What Wexler and others like him did was take that very real image and include the very real sound that went with it. In a way he let people tell their own stories. His best early example of that is The Bus from 1965. {show clip}. I want to back up for a minute though and say that it's a little bit disingenuous to say that in verite documentaries people tell their own stories. It would be better to say that the filmmaker uses things that people really said to craft the story that he wants to tell. Still, it was quite a breakthrough. But think about the last few current documentaries you've seen. Even when there is a narrator it was probably still full of verite style footage. It is the fact that Wexler's style has become so common that makes The Plow that Broke the Plains feel like straight propaganda to us.
That is all Wexler's background. Now we get to the part that is what I think makes him worth learning about. He took his work in documentaries and brought it into his work on fiction films. This too doesn't entirely come out of nowhere, it's where Wexler went with it that is impressive.
Do you recall the start of The Naked City (Jules Dassin, 1947)? There were all these documentary shots of New York City - people on the sidewalks, people coming out of the subway, people going to work - that were intercut with the staged scenes of the actors getting ready in the morning and going to work. It worked very well. I don't mind admitting that at first I didn't realize that they were throwing actor sequences in the mix. So in some ways you might say that Naked City predates Wexler's use of verite in fiction by 20 years. But really it only hints at the possibilities.
On Tuesday we are watching Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf. That was described by Ernest Callenbach in his review in Film Quarterly in the fall of 1966 as having a camera that "tracks the characters like a cinema-verite hound" I would argue that he only thinks so because it was still 1966 and he hadn't seen what verite in fiction could really become.
It's two years later when Wexler does The Thomas Crown Affair with Norman Jewison (with whom he had also done In the Heat of the Night in 1967) that we really see verite in fiction. The famous example surrounds the bank heist at the start of the film. Several robbers converge on the bank, rob it, and then make their escape. There were no extras, there was no blocking off roads and taking control. All the the street scenes were filled with real people going about their real business. For a lot of it they used hidden cameras. At one point when they couldn't hide the camera Wexler stood around on the sidewalk with a hand held camera waiting for people to stop paying attention to him. When it felt right he nodded to the actor and off they went. {show clip}
What they got from that is that perfect moment when the last robber exits the bank and bumps into someone. They do that little dance around each other like you do when you bump into someone on the sidewalk. It looks real because it is real. That worked so well for him that as soon as it was done he started thinking about what he could do next to really bring features and verite together in one film.
Now we arrive at the film that anyone who knew the name Haskell Wexler has probably been waiting for me to mention: Medium Cool (1969). However I think it's impossible to talk about what that film did without talking about how he got to the point of making it. If you haven't seen it yet it's a film about a TV news cameraman in Chicago in 1968. To be honest, the plot is just a loose excuse to look at the medium of television and the choices that get made when you're behind the camera.
In an interview in Film Quarterly in the spring of 1968 Wexler said, "I would like to make features...and I would like to find some wedding between features and cinema-verite. I have very strong opinions about the world and I don't know how in hell to put them all in one basket." And it's interesting how well he mixed a lot of things. The sequence near the beginning with the National Guard training camp is pretty much straight documentary. To be honest I'm shocked that he got permission to shoot it and I sort of wonder what he told them he was planning to do with it. Then there are vast portions of the film that are staged fiction, though even those tend to be shot with a verite style camera technique. Then there is the rather famous sequence near the end where he took the lead actress and went out into the demonstrations outside the Democratic National Convention. The actress - the woman in the yellow dress - is looking for her son who has wandered off. {show clip}
Wexler knew there were going to be demonstrations. Everyone knew there were going to be demonstrations, that's what the National Guard was training for. So where a film like The Naked City and many films that followed it used real locations as the backdrop for their films, Wexler went one better and used a real event as the backdrop for his actors. So it becomes this really interesting mix. At one point Wexler had the actress go up to one of the guardsmen and say that she was looking for her son just to see what would happen. They were kind of disappointed because the guard just let her go through and nothing really happened. Of course that gets made up for when the tear gas started flying and Wexler himself got dosed. Personally I have mixed feelings about his inclusion of the line "Look out Haskell, it's real." To me it feels a bit on the nose, we know it's real. But to be fair, his audience was so unused to seeing things like this that I can see where he would want to make sure the point got across.
In the reviews following this film it was described as "a harbinger of a revolution in the commercial American cinema. ... and as an indication of the force with which the changing face of America - hairier, angrier, less pretty and more real - is being reflected in our films." (Richard Corliss, MoMA Members Newsletter Winter 69-70)
With the advantage of hindsight though in our textbook David Cook disagrees. He says, "With so many important films like...Medium Cool clustered around the years 1967-1969 it had seemed for a time that America was headed for a major cinematic (and social) renaissance. But neither came to pass." (p855)
Primarily though Wexler was not a director or writer but a cinematographer. To date he has 73 credits as a cinematographer on IMDB, but if you read them all there is only a handful of directors who worked with him more than a couple of times. It bring us back to the opening of his son's documentary where he shows us how difficult Wexler is to work with. In fact the people who describe him as difficult include Michael Duglass, Milos Forman, Francis Ford Coppola, Lee Tamahori, John Sayles, Elia Kazan and Norman Jewison.
For all of that though in 1993 he received a lifetime achievement award from the American Cinematographers. In 2003 the members of the International Cinematographers Guild voted him one of the 10 most influential cinematographers of all time. At the 2009 Tiburon International Film Festival George Lucas described Wexler as the heart and soul of the 70s renaissance.
So was he influential or not? In some ways I think the very fact that he was difficult to work with is part of what made him so influential. Absolutely everyone agreed he was a good shooter and so he would get hired. He just apparently wouldn't get rehired. As a result he's worked with a vast number of people who learned from him, who were inspired by him and who then took that and moved on.
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