Rebel Citizen

Haskell Wexler died in December 2015 at the age of 93. In 2003, he was crowned by colleagues as one of the ten most influential cameramen in film history. In this portrait by his friend and colleague Pamela Yates, Wexler’s contribution to cinematography is not the main issue; referring to his first Oscar for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), he cites the visibility it gave him. That recognition helped him realise his own feature and documentary projects, which provide evidence of his affinity with the civil-rights struggle and anti-war movement.
Wexler is still just as inspired and committed in this last lengthy interview larded with film excerpts, in which he looks back on a broad oeuvre firmly rooted in critical protest: from ‘road documentary’ The Bus (1965), about the famous march to Washington in 1963, via his pioneering feature Medium Cool (1969) up to a report on the recent Occupy protests in his birthplace Chicago.