The publication of Laurence Kardish’s book “Shirley Clarke: The Passionate Life and Radical Works of an Exceptional Filmmaker” (University Press of Kentucky) is a major event, and one I’ve been impatient for. A seminal modernist, Clarke made startling, original films but completed only four features—three in the nineteen-sixties, one in the eighties—which doesn’t fill much time in a seventy-seven-year life. (She was born in 1919 and died in 1997.) What was she doing the rest of the time?
As it turns out, Clarke’s life was rich in creative activity long before it left cinematic marks, and it continued to be so through the many years when her filmmaking was on hiatus. Kardish, a former senior curator of film at MOMA (he was there forty-four years), knew Clarke and worked with her. His lovingly diligent research uncovers the many remarkable things that she did during those seemingly fallow years—and many other remarkable things that she was prevented from doing. Indeed, his copious narrative fills in the gaps so vividly, with such precise documentation of her activities, that the gaps more or less disappear, and a unified field of constant artistic creation appears, of which the feature films were merely the most conspicuous public traces. Paradoxically and strikingly, these newly revealed continuities of Clarke’s life and work not only put her movies in perspective but also reflect essential concepts of the cinema—and of cinema’s place in her time.
Hitherto, the prime source of information about Clarke has been the memoir “Life Itself!,” from 2001, by her younger sister Elaine Dundy, a novelist. Dundy details the privileged New York Jewish milieu in which they grew up and describes her sister’s special form of cultural engagement: “She genuinely worshipped black genius (as we all did growing up in nightclubs and dance circles in New York). A political activist from her teens, the injustices suffered by American blacks had always been a cause close to her.” Kardish, too, makes clear the vital role that race and class played in Clarke’s life and art.
Shirley’s four features are a tetralogy of Black men: her début, “The Connection,” from 1961, is centered on a group of Black jazz musicians. She followed it with “The Cool World” (1963), about a teen gang in Harlem. Her 1967 film, “Portrait of Jason,” documents the life and outlook of a friend of hers, a gay aspiring night-club performer and a self-described hustler. In 1968, Clarke began to make a portrait-film about the great jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, but it wasn’t completed until 1985, as “Ornette: Made in America.” All four films are as aesthetically original as they are thematically confrontational; all are modern classics. How Clarke reached this rarefied realm of cinematic creation—and then largely left it behind—is an exemplary story of artistic psychology, film history, and social politics. Kardish brings it out with diligence, insight, admiration, and wonder. In so doing, he also brings to light an entire hidden body of work—and a conceptual grid that goes with it, one that’s as great and as original as the movies that made her name.
Shirley Clarke was born Shirley Brimberg, into a wealthy New York family. Her father was a clothing manufacturer and her mother a Hunter College graduate who founded and ran a nursery school. Shirley was the eldest of three sisters (Elaine, born in 1921, was the middle child; their younger sister, Betty, was born in 1924), who, Kardish writes, “grew up not only with governesses, nurses, servants, cooks, and laundresses but with a chauffeur as well.” Privilege is no guarantee of emotional well-being. Their father was highly critical and verbally, sometimes physically, abusive, and their mother didn’t defend them. According to Dundy, rebellion against their father defined much of the future filmmaker’s life, which unfolded as a struggle for freedom characterized by bold actions and boldface names.
Even as a teen-ager, Shirley was already well on the way to artistic self-definition. Taking note of her classmates’ accomplishments at the private school she attended, she sought a field in which she could shine and picked modern dance, then a burgeoning new art. Her first teacher was Michel Fokine, and while she was still in high school she was taught by Martha Graham. She attended Bennington’s summer dance school, where she encountered Merce Cunningham and José Limón. In 1940, while enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she joined Hanya Holm’s troupe and went on tour. Kardish unfolds an elaborate side story about a fellow-member, Kip Kiernan, who became Shirley’s boyfriend and through whom she met—and was in a romantic rivalry with—Tennessee Williams. (At eighteen, she had arranged to lose her virginity, backstage at Carnegie Hall, to Uday Shankar, then nearly forty and on tour with his Hindu Ballet company.)
Shirley, outwardly a dutiful daughter, knew that her best chance of breaking away from her family was to get married—and so she did, in 1942, to Bert Clarke, a friend’s uncle, from a Jewish family in Baltimore. “What excited me was that he told me he was a Communist which I thought was great because he was rich and good looking and from a good family,” she wrote in a diary entry. One of the wedding presents proved to be momentous: a high-quality Bolex home-movie camera. The couple’s daughter, Wendy, was born in 1944. “To commemorate Wendy’s first birthday, Shirley remembered a wedding gift—the movie camera,” Kardish writes. “Shirley began to use it to chronicle the milestones in Wendy’s life.”
The family of three moved to Westchester. In 1947, Shirley Clarke formed a dance troupe. She schlepped into the city, with baby Wendy in tow, to dance, until a therapist persuaded her to find another career in the dance world beside dancing. In 1948, the family moved back to Manhattan, to a town house on the Upper East Side. When a dancer friend, Daniel Nagrin, wanted to see himself on film, Clarke volunteered; she came up with the idea of cutting between Nagrin dancing on a stage and him dancing on a beach, in such a way as to make his movement look continuous even as the setting changed. As a dancer, Clarke did work that vanished as it was created; as a filmmaker, she didn’t just record dance but, rather, enfolded it into an art work that had an identity and a form of its own. If she wasn’t to be a dancer, she’d be no mere handmaiden to that art—she’d be an artist nonetheless. For her, the editing effect that she devised in the film with Nagin wasn’t just deft or striking. She found it metaphysical, as she recalled in 1975: “It just strikes me as a wonderful leap of not only magic but concept, as a way of encompassing the universe.”
That’s an apt definition of the cinema, and Clarke flung herself into the task. Her film was shown at MOMA; she became friends with Maya Deren; she joined a group to promote independent filmmaking which included Jonas Mekas (later, a co-founder of Anthology Film Archives) and Judith Malina and Julian Beck (the founders of the Living Theatre). In 1954, she accompanied Bert on a trip to Paris and made a short film there; it received theatrical distribution. She took filmmaking classes at City College; she made two more dance films. In 1957, the documentary filmmaker Willard Van Dyke hired Clarke to make visually intricate short “film loops” for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair; her collaborators included the documentary cinematographers and directors Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker, and the four of them set up a joint studio that she recalled as “a major New York headquarters” for “experimental filmmakers.” She was commissioned to make a short film about the construction of a skyscraper; it won an award at the Venice Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar.
Clarke’s ambition had been stoked. Now she wanted to work with actors on a fiction film. She applied for a grant to make a partly autobiographical work about “the inner life of an adolescent girl,” and her plans were audacious: “The story will be told in dimensional time, not sequential time—past, present and future being brought into the film at the instant they are right for the girl’s emotional development, not necessarily as they realistically occur in time.” She didn’t get the money, but she got another idea. Her sister Elaine, who was married to the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan (then of The New Yorker), took her to see the Living Theatre’s production of Jack Gelber’s play “The Connection,” set in a loft where a quartet of Black jazz musicians and their white hangers-on wait for a drug dealer who’s bringing their fix. Clarke decided to adapt it as her first feature.
It helped that Clarke, between her family’s money and Bert’s, didn’t need to make a living. She was politically active, performing at rallies for the progressive Henry Wallace and the Communist Party leader Earl Browder; she and Bert took part in demonstrations, including one held in 1955 to protest the murder of Emmett Till. Clarke’s involvement in filmmaking also involved political and sexual liberation, a personal kind of social revolt. Unhappy in her marriage, she’d been having affairs since 1948. Meanwhile, low-budget, artistically ambitious independent filmmaking was gaining energy in New York; John Cassavetes’s first feature, “Shadows”—about a young light-skinned Black woman who passes as white—was among its avatars, and he borrowed Clarke’s Bolex to shoot it.
Clarke’s film of “The Connection” was financed with small private investments (including one from a Boston law professor named Frederick Wiseman) and filmed in the studio where “12 Angry Men” had been made. It’s freely crafted yet ingeniously planned, taking the form of a faux documentary by a fictitious filmmaker who’s on hand for the drug-centered events. The real-life jazz quartet from Gelber’s play—headlined by the saxophonist Jackie McLean and the pianist Freddie Redd—performed at length on camera. Clarke also cast several actors who had been in the stage version, including Carl Lee, a Black actor who played the drug dealer. The two became lovers and remained together, on and off, for most of the next two decades. According to Dundy’s memoir, Lee was also, in real life, “a drug dealer who was himself on hard drugs” and a pimp. Dundy thought that he “satisfied her need to rebel against bourgeois morality,” giving her access to “the lower depths and outer limits of a world she longed to explore.” In order to share Lee’s realm of experience, Clarke began to use heroin—inhaling, not injecting—and quickly became dependent on it.
“The Connection” played out of competition at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival, where it attracted crowds and won acclaim from American and local critics. (It was also a social triumph at the festival, in part thanks to Clarke’s friendship with Allen Ginsberg and other Beat writers in attendance.) But in New York it faced censorship, because it used the word “shit”; when a distributor screened it, the police closed the theatre and arrested the projectionist. Connections eventually helped. Clarke had been commissioned by the Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall, to make a film about the country’s Poet Laureate, Robert Frost. Udall helped get her around the censorship, but by the time “The Connection” was released, in 1963, it was already old news and did poorly. The Robert Frost film she worked on went on to win the 1964 Oscar for Best Feature-Length Documentary, but she left the project midway through, in order to make another dramatic feature, “The Cool World.”
Adapted from a novel by Warren Miller, a white writer, “The Cool World” follows a teen-age Black gang member who pesters an adult gangster (played by Lee) for a gun, in the hope of becoming the leader of his gang. Clarke, shooting on location in Harlem as a white filmmaker, knew herself to be an unwelcome outsider. She relied on a Black crew member, the documentary filmmaker Madeline Anderson, to smooth relations in the community, and Lee helped her find nonprofessional actors in the city. Though the story is fictional, Clarke’s intentions were documentary and analytical; years later, she explained the plan in making the film: “These ghettoes were tinder boxes that were soon to explode in riot and we wanted to warn the white world this was about to happen and what those reasons were.” Clarke pursued authenticity ingeniously, using tiny, hidden radio microphones that transmitted to tape recorder from afar, in order to capture dialogue with maximal spontaneity.
Clarke’s movie—ferocious, romantic, sharply textured—won wide acclaim when it premièred at the Venice Film Festival. But when it came out in the U.S., in 1964, in a scant release without an actual distribution deal, it did little business, despite enthusiastic reviews. It has also had a difficult afterlife. The film was produced entirely by Wiseman, but Clarke’s relationship with her early supporter turned acrimonious. (To complete the film, she lent the production fifty thousand dollars, which, supposedly, she never got back.) According to Kardish, “Her messages to him became increasingly impolite and impolitic.” As a result, Wiseman, the rights holder of the film, never allowed it to be released on home video. He died earlier this year, and it remains unavailable to this day. When I first met Wiseman, about fifteen years ago, I asked him how he felt about “The Cool World”; he said it taught him that he had to direct films himself.
