A collaboration between VICE News and Nitehawk Cinema, Journalists in Film is a six-month program highlighting the journalist as character — and at times caricature — in 20th century cinema.
While the news seems to arrive each day as a neatly packaged commodity, news gathering can be a messy process, fraught with professional and personal risks. For decades, the stories behind the stories, and the obsessive personalities of the journalists who tell them, have proven fertile ground for filmmakers who have taken tales of a highly specialized trade and turned them into universal human drama. In the process, they reveal the best and worst of human nature, and of the profession itself.
Videos by VICE
Journalists in Film presents six films that feature journalists as noble truth-seekers, catalysts for change, hustlers, and fiends, through rich cinematic storytelling. Their obsession at times serving the public interest, and at others, only serving themselves.
Medium Cool – Tuesday, May 27 9:30pm
Our inaugural film is Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool. Shot against the backdrop of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the film blurs the lines between documentary and narrative film. Robert Forster plays John Cassellis, a cameraman for the local TV news who finds himself caught between two contradictory characteristics of his job: detachment and obsession. When challenged about his role in exploiting the pain of others — in bringing graphic violence to American living rooms — he claims to merely be a professional fulfilling the requirements of his job. But as we watch Cassellis apply his craft in an increasingly violent society, we come to realize that he is anything but a dispassionate observer.
