Soviet tanks roll into Czechoslovakia to prevent the liberal reforms taking root there from spreading – one of many instances of authoritarianism clashing with activism in 1968
JOSEF KOUDELKA/MAGNUM PHOTOS
The high-resolution colour footage intercuts two marches: one of protestors, bearing slogans like “Bring the GIs home now” and chanting “Hell no, we won’t go”; the other of serried Chicago police ranks. Blank uniforms against a rag-tag army. They are bound to collide, and they meet on South Michigan Avenue, just to the west of Grant Park, where the police have been attempting to clear a demonstration by extreme force. The National Guard appears, followed by a Jeep. As national TV cameras rush past, the crowd chants, “The whole world is watching.”
It’s a bright summer day and the United States is igniting. Film director Haskell Wexler is shooting a feature – to be released the following year as Medium Cool – as a parable about the nature of mass media and its voyeurism. As an experienced cameraman, his nose for a story has brought him into the heart of the madness of this traumatic year. Inside the Democratic National Convention at Chicago’s International Amphitheatre, the mood is hot and raucous; on the streets, about a mile away, tensions are boiling over into random, vicious state violence. A police riot, no less.