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Haskell Wexler
Haskell Wexler has been called "the greatest director of all cinematographers..."
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| Wexler (right): Even his lesser films are well worth watching. |
WHEN HASKELL WEXLER WON the 1966 Best Cinematography Oscar for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, he said his acceptance speech, "I hope we can use our art for love and peace." Two years later, he did just that. On a self-financed budget of $600,000, Wexler wrote, shot, and directed Medium Cool. Set during the days leading up to and during Chicago's 1968 Democratic National Convention, the film is a pastiche of everything contemporary: Martin Luther KinG, RFK, Norman Mailer, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Breathless; Vietnam, Tiny Tim, black power, the sexual revolution, even roller derby. Violence is everywhere and no one is held accountable. The fictional framework of Wexlers feature incorporated the actual antiwar demonstrations along with the riots in the streets - outside the convention. The resulting movie is a gripping and truthful document of a remarkable time in our history. Yet Paramount refused to release it unless Wexler agreed to an 'X' rating, crippling the film's chance to gain the youthful audience for which it was intended. The government did not want the American public to know that people were protesting the war, and that the protests were working.
Wexler had, however, struck a nerve. In the name of love and peace, he had used his art to make one of the most courageous films ever.
Even though Vilmos Zsigmond (Deliverance, McCabe and Mrs. Miller) once called him "the greatest director of all cinematographers," Medium Cool is one of only two fictional features Wexler directed. Instead, he has directed, produced, or been involved in more than 40 documentaries, photographed hundreds of TV commercials, and shot more than 35 feature films. He was the first active cinematographer to win the American Society of Cinematographers' Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 1996 he became only the fourth director of photography in history to be honored with a star on Hollywood Boulevard's Walk of Fame. He won Oscars for Woolf and Bound For Glory, and was nominated for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Matewan, and Blaze.
To pare down Wexlers career of more than 50 years to a few essential must-sees is like trying to recommend Hemingway's most austere paragraphs or the Beatles' snappiest melodies. He has so much electricity in his style, so much sight in his eye, that even Wexlers lesser films include something worth watching.
He began shooting documentaries in the '40s, and made the transition to features in the late '50s, after Rebel Without a Cause (1955) paved the way for a new starkness in Hollywood cinema. It was now possible to make movies with the type of blunt subject matter that Wexler wanted to explore. In 1958, he and Roger Corman ponied up $15,000 each to make the raw docudrama, Stakeout on Dope Street, directed by Irvin Kershner. He and Kerchner then collaborated on two more films, The Hoodlum Priest and A Face in The Rain. All were shot in a black-and-white, semi-documentary style, with handheld cameras and practical lighting.
"Jesus, I love to shoot film." |
Wexler is credited with inventing the much-emulated hand-held running shot, which he introduced in A Face in the Rain in 1962, by running with an actor down a narrow alley. His first big-budget feature was Elia Kazan's America, America. But it was Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf that cemented his reputation as both a consummate pro and a risk-taker.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
When he brought out his old hand-held camera on the set of Mike Nichol's debut picture, Wexler said, "All the old timers would walk away and there would be a lot of snickering." But Nichols trusted Wexler's gritty, intimate approach to the Edward Albee play.
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| Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) |
His camera prowled the faces of the four protagonists in Albee's classic portrayal of an acid-boiled marriage. At times, Wexler's low light levels caused a loss of focus, but it only added texture and authenticity to what was already a shocking display of on-screen vulgarity for mid-'60s audiences. Richard Burton was afraid Wexler would light his pockmarked face unflatteringly, but the director of photography came up with the idea of using dimmers and umbrellas on single-source lights to soften the intensity. The actors moved through interiors that were evenly lit and relentlessly bright, with no dark corners in which to retreat.
His exteriors were deep and black, broken by washes of light that were nested over, glowing from an unseen source. The vast yard surrounding the central house offered no escape from the vitriolic bickering of Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. In one stunning scene, in which Burton and Taylor declare war on each other, they stand outside a roadside restaurant. Spotlights glare into the lens; the neon broils in the background. There is not a single angle where we can rest. Wexler's achievement here is to suggest actual motivating sources for all that light, yet we know that nothing could be that hot, that unforgiving. It's a beautifully lit moment of psychological ugliness.
The Thomas Crown Affair
This movie is a pop quiz on has-beens and flame-outs. Who was the editor? Hal Ashby (dead). The second unit director? Walter Hill (irrelevant). The stars? McQueen (dead) and Dunaway (forgotten). The director? Norman Jewison (dried up). The only survivor is Wexler, who took Jewison's gimmicky, design-school vision and managed to have fun with it.
Wexler used four hidden cameras during the heist scene, shooting the robbers exiting the bank with bags of money as if it were really happening. He shot through windows with long lenses, stacked elements in the foreground, and smashed visual information into a compressed frame. In a thrilling shot of a flare scooting down a hallway floor, Wexler's camera rocketed along with it through the red smoke.
Although Jewison took a lot of heat for the arty multiple screen sequences, the result is a breathless re-working of montage. Concurrent events are quilted into one screen rather than cut to and from. We get a feel for the precision of the heist: the faces of the robbers, the timing, the spaces, the puzzle-like perfection. Wexler masters the edges of each frame. Each shot is a compelling image in itself. The sequence-all avant-garde gloss-is accomplished with verve and wit.
The movie is a whiffle ball, but Wexler's pictures knock it out of the park.
Bound for Glory
Wexler met Woody Guthrie in the Merchant Marine and was later invited to direct a film based on Guthrie's life. But he held out for a better script and a couple of years later his friend, Hal Ashby, had one. Bound For Glory was just the kind of movie the cinematographer loved. "It celebrates something that is marvelous about America," Wexler said in an interview in American Cinematographer. "Woody is anti-establishment, and much of his life was a struggle, but he really tested the vigor of the democratic process."
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| James Earl Jones in Matwewan (1987) |
Wexler won his second Oscar for the film, a moving and vivid account of Dust Bowl drifters, union organizers and the battle for artistic freedom. The cinematographer used a simple but rigorous visual scheme to maintain the muted palette of the film. He diffused his shots with silk, dust, and smoke. He flashed nearly the whole film, which means briefly pre-exposing the emulsion to light to desaturate the colors. He had a painter standing by to tone down any reds or greens in the set design. The finished movie has the faded, pastel look of old jeans and weather-beaten antiques.
Bound For Glory includes the now-legendary shot in which Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown descends from a cherrypicker, picks up Guthrie (David Carradine) in a migrant camp, and walks with him through the crowd. It was one of the first times the new device was used in a major feature, and it spawned all the imitators.
There is an odd moment in the film when Guthrie performs at a prison. During a sequence set to his music, the camera cuts to a shot where not only convicts, but grips, gaffers, and movie equipment are seen in the frame.
It's one of Wexler’s "grab shots," similar to the scenes in America, America, when the immigrants are waiting to be processed at Ellis Island. The issues/35/images were captured between real takes, when the extras were just milling about. To him (and obviously to his directors as well), the spirit of the films was expressed in these casual down moments as much as in the actual filming.
It's difficult to imagine a major Hollywood film looking the way Bound For Glory did 23 years ago, with its degraded, scruffy issues/35/images. Fast, fine-grained films and sharper lenses have contributed to the glossier, crisper look of today's movies.
Colors
Wexler's latest film, John Sayles' Limbo, suffers from this problem. Set in Alaska, the bright, deep-focus exteriors are so spiffy they look like pictures in a travel brochure, sparkling like "Kodak moments."
Haskell Wexler's love of slanting sunlight was evident in this overlooked 1988 film. Directed by Dennis Hopper with an efficiency he had not demonstrated since Easy Rider, Colors is a movie thick with the portent of violence, with a difficult partnership between two cops at the center of the story.
It's set during a perpetual Los Angeles summer, where the Bloods and Crips are at war with each other and the cops are just trying to keep them separated. Robert Duvall plays the veteran who tries to reason with the gangsters; Sean Penn is the new partner who wants to beat them into submission. Even though their clash is predictable, an unspoken loyalty develops between the two men who are caught up in the ritualized hatred of a sub-culture they'll never comprehend. Wexler was no doubt drawn to the social issues of the film. "Most interpersonal disputes in film and TV are settled by violence," he once said. "That's a political statement."
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| Sam Shepard in Days of Heaven (1978) |
The sunlight is as omnipresent as the violence in this movie. It glares into the lens and burnishes the chrome of the guns and cars. It's that beautiful yet eroded Los Angeles sun, tainted with smog and threat. Wexler captures a daylight unprettied by technique, which makes the senseless deaths more real and nauseatingly stupid.
Medium Cool
Medium Cool is a brilliant fusion of political activism, documentary, and fictional narrative. In examining the moral aesthetics o£ photojournalism in the face of political commitment, Wexler crafted an aggressively controversial, wonderfully naturalistic film. Robert Forster plays a TV cameraman who maintains a cold objectivity toward the subjects he shoots; who resists becoming politicized to the events of the day. When he falls in love with a poor Appalachian woman who has migrated to Chicago with her son, he finally begins to question a life beyond the end of his lens.
The film is composed of several memorable set pieces, in which Wexler's camera tracks, pans and runs through streets, apartments, and tenement back alleys. There is the opening shot through a cracked windshield set to the annoying blare of a car horn. There is the long lens montage in a crowded parking lot, with Wexler's telephoto tracking a foot chase. And there is the famous romp of Forster and his girlfriend (Marianna Hill), running nude through his spacious apartment. Forster wouldn't do the scene unless Wexler stripped as well. So the director cleared the set, took off his clothes, and he, Forster, and Hill dashed around in naked, wide-angle glory. The scene is one of the last of its kind, a free-spirited appreciation of hedonism, cleaned of guilt or coyness-a brazen, ecstatic few minutes of film.
There are moments in the movie when Wexler deflates the pace with cocktail party conversations and awkward love scenes. His political motivations are obvious and bleeding-heart, which made sense at the time but now give the film a dated feel. Forster tends to shout his way through the movie, and the ending, an homage-(or possibly a rip-off)-to Godard's Contempt, is more obtuse than it should be. But on the whole, it's an exhilarating work, free of pretension, raw and impressionistic. The movie should be included in any time capsule, not only as an example of political filmmaking, but as evidence of what a man with a camera could accomplish.
Nearly all of Haskell Wexler's features are on video,
except for a few early films. Other titles worth noting are Matewan for
director John Sayles, Ashby's Coming Home, One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest, Blaze, and Days of Heaven,
on which Wexler worked the last 19 days of the shoot, taking over
for Nestor Almendros. His documentary work is harder to find. He
shot parts of Gimme Shelter, worked with Emil DeAntonio
on Underground, and won an Oscar for Interview With My
Lai Veterans. What's great is this: he's still shooting. Seek
out his work. MM
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This story was published in the September/October 1999 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Man with a Camera... and a Conscience / Haskell Wexler has been called "the greatest director of all cinematographers..."
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