Cinematographer Haskell Wexler (1922–2015) comes in for a close-up in a centennial retrospective at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
By Andrew Peart
A woman in a yellow dress moves through Grant Park and the streets of downtown Chicago in search of her young son. It’s August 1968. The camera follows this incongruous figure, a recent transplant from West Virginia, as she glides deeper into the unrest gripping the city. As the Democratic National Convention unfolds and party leaders hole up in the nearby Conrad Hilton hotel, the camera captures the outbreak of real riots even as it tracks the storyline of its fictive heroine. Suddenly tear gas plumes up. “Look out, Haskell, it’s real!” yells an unknown voice to the man in charge of the camera.
The film is Medium Cool (1969). The story of how the man who made it came to be shooting it this way is the stuff of legend. By 1968, Haskell Wexler was a leading Hollywood cinematographer. He had already won an Oscar for his photography on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) He had a reputation for working closely and hands-on with his directors—whether they liked it or not. A studio executive at Paramount Pictures gave him an assignment to direct a film of his own: an adaption of the 1967 novel Concrete Wilderness, the story of a country boy in the big city by zoologist and cameraman Jack Couffer. Wexler went back to his native Chicago for the production in 1968 and found a city on the brink of boiling over: Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had both been assassinated, and national elections loomed. As writer, director, and cinematographer on the project, Wexler kept Concrete Wilderness as a loose framework but set out with a new purpose: in his words, to see what was going on in Chicago, in the style of cinema verité. The film Wexler put together would become famous for getting entangled in the politics of the moment it sought to represent. “The result is a film of tremendous visual impact,” said critic Vincent Canby in 1969, “a kind of cinematic Guernica, a picture of America in the process of exploding into fragmented bits of hostility, suspicion, fear and violence.”
For all its national implications, Medium Cool is still a distinctly Chicago film, and Wexler himself deserves to be as much of a household name in his hometown as contemporaneous local stars like Studs Terkel, the Staples Singers, and Mike Royko. With a centennial film series honoring the late cinematographer this May, the city’s Gene Siskel Film Center did its part to elevate Wexler’s status in the cultural record. Like those other stars, Wexler honed supreme artistic craft and a unique style to speak truth to power.
The month-long series screened eight films spanning a 20-year period in Wexler’s career (1967–1987), putting the focus on his achievements as a leading director of photography on feature films. During Medium Cool, the only directorial effort of Wexler’s included in the series, audience members laughed during a scene in which the Illinois National Guard drills a riot-defense squad under the bullhorn-booming supervision of a Mayor Richard J. Daley soundalike. More than 50 years later, Wexler’s major outing as an auteur still had satiric bite for the local crowd.
Beyond his Chicago bona fides, Wexler also deserves to be remembered as a cameraman who successfully managed a double career as Hollywood journeyman and indie legend. Before and after the release of Medium Cool, Wexler was in high demand as a cinematographer who could take a camera crew into the streets and give the drama an authentic look and feel. Wexler famously moonlighted as a visual consultant on his onetime protégé George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973). He was brought in as the master craftsman who could ensure the film’s daring in-the-streets color photography came out right. If you wanted a stylish flick with more than a touch of the guerrilla filmmaking of the 1960s, Wexler was your man.
By the time he was shooting One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), the film that kicked off the Siskel Center series, Wexler’s political bent was just as well known in Hollywood as his realistic shooting style. He was monitored by FBI agents on the set of this Miloš Forman film. It would become the second Hollywood picture in a row, following Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), from which he was fired. In both instances, the reasons likely involved turf battles between powerful directors and their equally headstrong cameraman, but it’s not hard to imagine how the aura of political controversy could have worked against Wexler’s standing in Tinseltown.
It wasn’t always that way. The Siskel Center series featured two films on which Wexler worked with Norman Jewison, a big-studio director interested in making socially conscious films. In the Heat of the Night (1967) stars Sidney Poitier as Virgil Tibbs, a Philadelphia homicide detective wrongfully implicated in a murder case as he’s passing through a small Mississippi town. In the Heat of the Night would go on to win a handful of Academy Awards, including the best picture prize. Wexler’s most celebrated contribution was in how he shot Poitier as Tibbs. The photographer went to great lengths not to wash out the nuances of Poitier’s skin tones with either too much light or too much darkness—no small feat in a film whose color palette makes a motif of the eponymous “night.” For the police station scenes, Wexler borrowed a technique from silent cinema, filtering his light sources through silk draped over the top of the set, which softened the glow on the actors. Wexler’s sensitivity carried political force. When Tibbs examines the murder victim’s body, Wexler uses closeups to underscore the gravity of a Black detective’s hands laid upon a white man’s in a room full of southern whites. We understand later, when Tibbs examines the hands of a jailed white suspect, just how incendiary that kind of touch can be in the 1960s Deep South.
At other moments in the film, Wexler proves how far his resourcefulness could go in sharpening the story’s dark and menacing edge. During the scene in which we first meet Tibbs, Wexler lights the establishing shot with just the police car headlights and the train station’s overhead lamps. Indeed, many of the film’s exterior shots are lit only by the headlights and taillights of automobiles. Combined with an occasional shaky handheld camera, this technique makes palpable the underlying terror of police patrol and vigilante pursuit in an unfamiliar state. That effect didn’t come easy: to make the practical lighting show up on film, Wexler swapped out the cars’ lights with airplane landing lights. His efforts paid off. During the film’s violent climax, Tibbs faces off against a vigilante gang that pulls up to him in a car with a pronounced Confederate plate. Wexler’s camera positioning puts us in Tibbs’s spot; caught in the headlights, we can feel the converging threats of this southern night closing in.
Wexler’s follow-up collaboration with Jewison, 1968’s The Thomas Crown Affair, largely replaces social commentary with sex. The sumptuously photographed heist picture pairs the titular Boston banker (Steve McQueen) with Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway), the insurance fraud investigator assigned to crack open the case of his would-be perfect crime. As the affair turns romantic, Crown and Anderson sit down for a fireside game of chess that’s a little bit more than intellectual sport. In fact, Wexler shoots the scene as though two games are happening: one on the board and another in the couple’s looks. Progressing into tighter and tighter frames, the sequence intercuts chess moves with Anderson’s innuendo-rich gestures and Crown’s hard-swallowing reaction shots, until Wexler tops off the moment with a kaleidoscopic 360-degree camera rotation on the couple’s kiss. The scene demonstrates why Wexler could be so bankable for directors and producers looking for a hip aesthetic: wordless for much of its seven minutes, the erotic game of chess relies on Wexler’s camerawork to do the talking. In the beautiful 35-mm. print shown at the Siskel Center, the scene’s vibrant colors and deeply saturated darks practically oozed off the screen.
The Thomas Crown Affair, though, is not all long stares and luscious lips. Wexler also lent his adroit photography to the film’s innovative multiscreen heist sequence, which follows several disparate robbers as an aloof intelligence coordinates their movements. Wexler’s mobile camera comes in for great effect here, taking the viewer into the streets as Crown’s hired criminals work against the clock and the rhythms of city life. Wexler pushes this documentary device into new territory for Crown’s second big heist, the film’s finale. When the pickup car arrives for the loot, Wexler’s shots work like security camera footage, with multiple angles allowing a forensic piecing together of evidence. For Wexler, crime and suspense seem to have been just another occasion to stretch his imagination for involving viewers in the perception of film as reality.
In the Heat of the Night and The Thomas Crown Affair were high points in Wexler’s Hollywood career, yet it’s no surprise that the Siskel Center led with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the most canonical piece in Wexler’s filmography. Box-office considerations aside, the Siskel Center programmers made a smart curatorial decision. Cuckoo’s Nest solidified Wexler’s reputation, already confirmed on American Graffiti, for bringing an authentic look to period pieces. For much of the film, Wexler achieves this effect by bouncing what viewers take for ambient light off the interior of the psychiatric hospital where R. P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), on transfer from confinement at a nearby Oregon prison farm, battles the tyrannical Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). Wexler’s naturalistic lighting gives the aged institution and the slightly dated dress of its inmates and workers a stark but warm appearance. Yet Wexler goes further, taking a playful approach to the film’s barely historical 1963 setting. When Nurse Ratched refuses to let the patients watch that year’s World Series on television, McMurphy stages an act of defiance. Sitting in front of the pictureless television set as the other men cheer him on, he starts giving a make-believe play-by-play of the contest between the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers. “Koufax looks down. He’s looking at the great Mickey Mantle now. Here comes the pitch. Mantle swings. It’s a fucking home run!” Wexler shoots the fictive ball game as a reflection of the men’s faces in the television screen. His distancing effect for this scene within a scene casts history as not just the events that happened but also the aura surrounding them.
In effect, Wexler was branching out from a realism rooted in documentary style to one based on atmosphere, a direction he continued to take in the two other period pieces screened at the Siskel Center. As the cinematographer on Bound for Glory (1976), director Hal Ashby’s adaptation of folksinger Woody Guthrie’s autobiography, Wexler would earn himself a second Oscar win by accurately capturing the look and feel of a time and place. The film begins in the Texas panhandle, where Guthrie (David Carradine) paints signs and works other odd jobs during the Great Depression to support his wife (Melinda Dillon) and their kids. Joining the desperate Dust Bowl migration to California and landing in a fruit pickers’ camp, Guthrie teams up with fellow songster Ozark Bule (Ronny Cox), who gets him involved in two occupations that prove not to mix well—performing live on Los Angeles radio and organizing farm workers. Wexler’s photography of the film’s southwestern locations is at once realistic and dreamlike: his technical choices give the world of the film a distressed look, as though we’re viewing the hardscrabble 1930s in an aged photograph album.
To recreate Dust Bowl–era Texas, Wexler got creative with lighting. “I tried to keep as much garbage in the air as possible,” he said. By putting layers of smoke and dust around the actors and sets, Wexler could diffuse the light in front of the camera, which helped give the film its gauzy look. So too did sunlight-softening silks—a strategy adapted from In the Heat of the Night—and beadboard reflectors. Wexler also used camera lens filters and a process known as flashing, which lightly exposes the film stock, to augment the ethereal depth of his images. Wexler described the overall effect as “translucency,” and the visual experience was a deeply moving one thanks to the Siskel Center’s resplendent 35-mm. print. As Guthrie sits painting outside his shack and tells his children a fairy tale, viewers can feel both the warmth of family and the tired desperation of unemployment in the scene’s muted sunlight.
Wexler got hired for the independent film Matewan (1987) because director John Sayles liked the cinematographer’s work on Bound for Glory. There was one caveat: Sayles said he wanted a less “nostalgic” look from Wexler for this film about a 1920 battle in the West Virginia mine wars. Wexler delivered. The film follows labor organizer Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper) into the town of Matewan, where he hopes to convince the local coal miners to form a union and maintain the picket line when they strike. Kenehan, a firm idealist and a former Wobbly who also comes up against the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency’s efforts to thwart a peaceful strike, a conflict that leads to the film’s climactic shootout. Sayles has said that he wanted to combine the labor film with the western in Matewan. Wexler, for his part, helped him attain a gritty texture and epic scope appropriate to that fusion.
For Matewan, Wexler used fewer lens filters than he had for Bound for Glory, but he did repeat the trick of filming through smoke and dust to diffuse image sharpness. Wexler made the most of what was around him to achieve the director’s intended look of a world in which everything seems “used.” To adequately light the film’s opening scene, shot inside Beckley, WV’s Exhibition Coal Mine, Wexler spread aluminum on the interior walls of coal so that “highlights,” as he called them, would reflect into the camera lens. The scene, lit only by unnoticed supplements to dynamite fuses and miners’ headlamps, has the visual intensity of chiaroscuro painting. Wexler had a great canvas in Matewan for expressing his penchant for such practical lighting, for letting the world of the film supply the bright spots on screen—if only in the viewer’s imagination.
For the Siskel Center’s Wexler centennial, Sayles prerecorded a video introduction to Matewan. According to Sayles, Wexler was extremely sensitive to the resources of light around him on location. He’d say of a particular composition, “This isn’t going to look good until four o’clock in the afternoon,” advising the crew about the perfect time to shoot a scene. Wexler brought that same sensitivity to interior shots, making them seem just as naturalistic as location shots. When Kenehan sits down for his first dinner with the family who run his boarding house, Wexler shoots the scene with low lighting, keeping the center of the table illuminated but the surrounding walls in shadow. This lighting profile, Wexler once noted, simulates what an Appalachian dining room scene would have looked like in 1920, with electric lamps scarce and gas lighting much more common. It’s a look that, as so often happens in Wexler’s shots, draws the viewer into the perceived immediacy of what’s unfolding on screen: our eyes can’t leave that table, where a communal drama is unfolding, and everything else for the moment falls outside our attention. Matewan, as much as any Wexler-shot film, brings the audience into the center of its world and holds them there until it ends. At the Siskel Center screening, audience members gasped as the final frames faded and the credits started to roll. They had just been released from the film’s spell.
In addition to spotlighting his artistry, the Siskel Center series highlighted a curious feature of Wexler’s career. The illustrious lineup had a bittersweet undertone, as Wexler didn’t always receive the credit he was due for the films he helped make successful. Wexler said he shot all but a couple of minutes of Cuckoo’s Nest. Still, he had to share an Oscar nomination for the film’s cinematography with the cameraman who replaced him. The Siskel Center series also featured two films for which Wexler received no credit at all—a pointed curatorial decision. As an uncredited contributor to the John Cassavetes indie classic Faces (1968), Wexler loaned the director equipment to properly light a difficult nightclub scene and actually worked as one of the camera operators shooting a complex sequence on location at the famous Whiskey a Go Go. As the original cinematographer for Coppola’s The Conversation, Wexler successfully pulled off the film’s stunning opening surveillance sequence, which involved nine cameras covering San Francisco’s Union Square in the manner of a professional spy operation. Though the nine-minute scene’s mock-surveillance style is pure Wexler, his name is glaringly absent from the credit roll over his own opening shot.
Credited or not, Wexler’s contributions to Faces and The Conversation reflect two equally important parts of his legacy. One of film history’s greatest cinematographers, he should be remembered as a consummate professional charitable enough to lend his services to indie filmmakers he judged to have serious vision. At the same time, Wexler was uncompromising in his own vision, and when hired by directors to help realize the elaborate movie magic they knew he could deliver, he took a point of view and was not quick to be moved from it. As a result, his fortunes in the industry could swing high and low. The Siskel Center’s programmers, in their decision to include Wexler’s uncredited camerawork, helped restore the balance. By showcasing work for which Wexler hasn’t gotten his due, they signaled it’s time his whole body of work got a reevaluation. When the score is settled, the master lenser should come out looking like the jobber who’d roll up his sleeves and the virtuoso who could shoot film like no other.