Leading up to and throughout this year’s Democratic National Convention (DNC), the legacy of the 1968 DNC in Chicago has been evoked by several outlets, cultural curators, protestors, organizers, and city officials. The comparisons drawn numerous, both inside and outside of the massive convention centers—then, the International Amphitheater with Grant Park at the center of protests, and now, the United Center and mostly Union Park.
Some narrative comparisons centered the drama surrounding the convention itself. Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the presidential nomination for the Democratic Party at the last minute just as Vice President Hubert Humphrey stepped in when incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson, falling behind in the polls, announced his withdrawal from the race, notably in the same speech he said the U.S. would begin negotiation talks with North Vietnam.
One of the more common anticipated similarities focused on the anti-war protests and police response. The summer of 1968 had brought the Holy Week Uprisings across the country following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and increased demonstrations against the Vietnam War, which the U.S. had been funding and waging for over a decade by then. With protests against the longstanding apartheid and U.S.-funded genocide of Palestinians by Israel ramping up since late last year, and organizers planning actions around the DNC, a similar level of protest was expected.
Haskell Wexler’s 1969 film Medium Cool is among the prescient relics of 1968 that resurfaced as people prepared for the protests at this year’s convention. The film was screened at the Music Box Theatre in Lakeview a few weeks before the DNC. The American New Wave classic could be called both documentary and narrative film, but the movie itself would argue that those are actually indistinguishable.
Released in 1969, the film’s loose narrative structure follows cameraman John Cassellis (Robert Forster) as he covers the 1968 DNC and the preceding months. Early on he is fired from his job—then presumably rehired offscreen—after discovering that the news station he works for has been offering up their footage to the police and FBI.
During his reporting, he meets and begins a romance with an Uptown woman, who recently arrived from Appalachia, Eileen (Verna Bloom), and her young pigeon-obsessed son, Harold (Harold Blankenship). The film intermingles narrative and reality in every sense, down to the casting; Harold, for example, was a boy from Uptown who the crew first met while filming there. Later in the movie, Eileen searches for her missing (fictional) son in Grant Park, amid the (very real) Youth International Party, or Yippie, protests and police violence.
Unlike most movies that could fit into different decades, Medium Cool is embedded in this time period from the spring and summer of 1968. In fact, the film shows the political moment and violence of that year’s DNC to the point of facing censorship; two members of Paramount board of directors were top donors of the DNC and pushed for the film to not be distributed by Paramount.
The film transports viewers into the feelings of that moment in history. By late August of 1968, people were traumatized from the assassinations of Dr. King followed by Robert F. Kennedy, and the underlying decades-long Counterintelligence Program carried out by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI that monitored and killed radical and Black liberation leaders like Black Panther Chairman Fred Hampton.
The ongoing war in Vietnam—that killed over two million civilians by the time the U.S. fully left in 1973—seemed to have no end in sight. Anticipating the public’s response during the DNC, former Mayor Richard J. Daley brought in a massive police presence and called in the Illinois National Guard. In what was later called a “police riot,” hundreds of protesters were beaten and arrested by the police.
Though the National Guard wasn’t called in this year, the city brought in as many as 500 police officers, mostly from Illinois agencies, in response to anticipated pro-Palestine protests. Various leftist and anti-war groups called for an arms embargo—and many for the repatriation of land to the Palestinian people—while the most the convention halls heard was the vague discussion of ceasefire talks.
The DNC denied the Uncommitted movement their request for a Palestinian-American speaker to have even two minutes to address the convention, and protestors’ concerns were confirmed with Harris stating in her acceptance speech that as commander-in-chief, she would “always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.”
The frequent comparisons to the 1968 DNC didn’t just permeate news narratives, but the actual protest calls and slogans of organizers. For example, Behind Enemy Lines, the self-described militant group who led the Tuesday demonstration in front of the Israeli consulate in the Loop, called for people to “make it great like ’68.” Not turning nearly as violent as the 1968 DNC, at least seventy people were still arrested during the four days of this year’s DNC, most during this Israeli consulate demonstration.
What makes the comparison between 1968 and 2024 particularly stark is the role of media and the way it has not only captured, but itself informed these wars and responsive movements. The Vietnam War is often referred to as the first television war or the “living room war” since it was the first war with robust media coverage just years after televisions became a fixture in most U.S. homes. It was often said that battles were being brought straight to U.S. televisions, but much of the coverage was filmed after battles rather than during them, and as brief reports that followed traditional news formats.
The anti-Vietnam War movement originated the phrase, “The whole world is watching,” which we hear echoing at the end of Wexler’s film, as people protested and were beaten and arrested. In the documentary Look Out, Haskell, It’s Real (2001), Wexler discusses the way the movement began to operate within media narrative structures: “The whole idea of presenting ideas in dramatic, theatrical ways was something the anti-war movement knew very well […] to get the attention of the media. […] Everyone’s putting on a show for somebody. In our culture, if you’re not on television, you don’t exist.”
In the film, Casselis engages with the world through the camera, and we’re reminded repeatedly of the disconnect and the inherent violence it creates. At one point, we watch Casselis and Eileen listen to Dr. King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech; as Eileen looks in awe, Casselis says: “Jesus, I love to shoot film.” As they continue talking, Eileen ponders, “Seems like no man’s life’s worth anything anymore.” Then Casselis explains that the media has a script, a “national drain-off” that quells the masses during times of tragedy or civil unrest. This script shows the timeline of events and national response in a packaged way, then “experts [say] how sick our society is, how sick we all are,” and, when the script is over and the week ends, “everybody goes pretty much back to normal. […] You know, ‘normal.’”
This has become particularly stark as social media has become the primary mode for viewing violence and genocide, accessing information, and interacting with movements. TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and Instagram seemingly narrowed space between people, moving people away from packaged news narratives to stories straight from the people seeing or experiencing a situation. While this has allowed people to hear from others directly, some have argued that these changes have further desensitized people to images of violence.
At another point in the movie, Casselis follows the story of Frank Baker (Sid McCoy, famous Soul Train announcer) a Black cab driver who, in an earlier scene, turns in $10,000 he found in his car to the police, who proceed to question and berate him. When they go to interview Frank, the newsmen are met with a house full of people, credited as “Black militants,” played by figures such as Jeff Donaldson and Barbara Jones-Hogu, two of the founders of AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), a Chicago-based collective of Black revolutionary artists; Kuumba Theatre founder Val Grey Ward; and musicians Muhal Richard Abrams and John Shenoy Jackson of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
Like all of Medium Cool, this scene is partially scripted but mostly improvised; in an interview with Roger Ebert, Wexler said the people in the scene only agreed to be in it if they could speak honestly about the ways the media treats Black people. “When you come in here, and you say you come to do something of human interest, it makes a person wonder whether you’re going to do something of interest to other humans, or whether you consider the person human in whom you’re interested,” says one man, directly to the camera.
In the only non-improvised quote in the scene, another man says, “Why don’t you find out what really is? Why do you always got to wait for somebody to get killed, man? Because someone is gonna get killed!”
The film begins and ends with two fictional car crashes and, while the whole film resonates, these bookends feel eerily aware of the shift in media we’ve now experienced: we’re all the detached Casselis, not only watching tragedy on our screens but capturing it ourselves. The first scene shows Casselis and his soundman filming a severe car crash off a highway exit. The horn is blaring (which the soundman turns off for his audio) and a woman’s body lays out of the side of the car. The only indication she may be alive is a small, indistinct groan. As the men leave the scene to drive away, they consider calling an ambulance as an afterthought.
At the end of the film, you hear a news voiceover of Casellis and Eileen crashing their car before you witness it yourself. Moments later, a young boy takes a picture of the smoking car while the car he’s in continues past the crash. It’s no longer just designated cameramen capturing these images, we dissociate ourselves from the violence and our accountability in it.
Savannah is the director of fact-checking and writer with the Weekly.