Shirley Clarke Lived Her Art to the Fullest
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.
In 1964, Clarke and Bert got divorced. In 1965, she had a nervous breakdown and was treated for depression at a luxurious clinic; when she was released, she moved out of the apartment she shared with Lee and, thanks to Elaine’s contacts, got a penthouse suite in the Hotel Chelsea. That’s where she made her next film. Clarke wanted to seek “truth” by filming one person for an extended duration. She’d thought of appearing herself, but instead asked Jason Holliday, a friend whose repertory of anecdotes she knew well, to be interviewed. Clarke brought to light his extraordinary personality; she also had Lee alongside her, behind the scenes, to provoke Holliday and thus crack his façades. What she revealed through Holliday’s personal experience is an agonized emotional panorama of Black life, gay life, and the scuffling artist’s life, and of the modes of performance that, in all three, seep from social interactions to the nature of identity.
Clarke’s first two films, with commercial distribution, flopped. For “Portrait of Jason”—which she personally financed using her fees for editing a multiscreen film spectacle for Montreal’s Expo 67—she took charge. The New American Cinema Group, which she’d helped found, in 1961, had just created the Film-Makers’ Distribution Center; she decided to use it for releasing “Portrait of Jason.” It was at this juncture, Kardish writes, that he first met Clarke, having got a part-time job as an assistant at the Center while pursuing graduate studies at Columbia. She was planning a preview of the film at MOMA, and Kardish, new to the city, suddenly found himself in an invited audience that included Andy Warhol, Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Lowell. The film, which premièred at the New York Film Festival and then played at a new movie theatre founded by the Distribution Center, did better than her others, but it fell far short of covering the Center’s expenses.
All of Clarke’s films of the sixties are conspicuously innovative: “The Connection” is a faux documentary; “The Cool World” has a hectic urgency that serves her monitory purpose; and “Portrait of Jason” ’s form was, in all likelihood, unique in the history of cinema at the time. They are also conspicuously political, in the way that they emphasize the dignity, subjectivity, and vulnerability of those who are marginalized and criminalized in American society. (Clarke’s political activism continued; in 1967, she was arrested at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration at the Manhattan military-induction office.) In pursuing her social vision, she found that change took many forms—including ones that called into question the essence of her art. Before Clarke could get another film off the ground, utopia beckoned, and it turned out to be very time-consuming.
While in Paris in 1968 to present “Portrait of Jason” at the Cinémathèque Française, she was the subject of a remarkable documentary, “Rome Is Burning: A Portrait of Shirley Clarke,” in which she was joined by a small group that included Jacques Rivette and Yoko Ono. Also, in Paris, she happened to meet Ornette Coleman and had the idea of making a film about him and his son, Denardo, who, at the age of just eleven, was already the drummer in his band. She pitched the idea to Public Broadcast Laboratory, an arts show on public television. Along with her plans for showing them in performance, rehearsal, and daily life, she had new artistic ambitions: “I also intend to experiment in the visualization of music through the use of the electronics of videotape.” Kardish emphasizes that this proposal, from 1968, is the first mention he found, in her archives, of video; soon, that medium came to dominate her life.
Public Broadcast Laboratory was displeased with her footage of Coleman and Denardo and cancelled the film. Then, much as the Bolex camera had shown up at just the right moment to transform her life in the nineteen-forties, she now ran into a friend on a New York street and, as Kardish writes, learned that he was carrying “a new piece of technology, a time base corrector, which transformed the information on a half-inch reel-to-reel black-and-white videotape into a broadcast quality television signal.” Clarke immediately wanted one; in 1969, she received a grant for video work and invested it in vast amounts of video equipment. “My place was covered with stuff, and people started to gather around me,” she recalled. “They would come by to see what I was doing, and some of them stayed.”
What Clarke discovered, Kardish explains, was that “video was not film; it was not a record of the past—it was the present, resolutely.” She considered video to be more than videotape; she used it as closed-circuit broadcast, with images that were instantly transmitted, live, near and far, to videographers and their subjects, simultaneously. She understood the medium as a social experiment, a new kind of participatory art that differed from movies by being, as she put it, “much more a direct person to person communication that we will then pass on.” She founded a group called the Tee Pee Video Space Troupe, and she held all-night video happenings in her apartment. As usual, the list of attendees and participants is long and impressive: Susan Sontag, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Brook, Nicholas Ray, Shelley Winters, Peter Bogdanovich, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Louis Malle, Yoko Ono, and so on. Clarke’s daughter, Wendy, also became a video artist and was an integral part of the Troupe.
The pathos of movies is their intermittency. Writers can write every day, but filmmaking, especially feature filmmaking, is a rite that’s practiced only on rare occasions, because it depends on money and people. Movies are also limited in time, by the screening, and in space, by the screen. The liberation that film had represented for Clarke was gradually superseded by the intimacy, spontaneity, connectedness, and unboundedness she found in video. Her utopian vision was as much personal as societal, as she wrote, in a draft for a grant application:
For Clarke, the nineteen-seventies were eventful, sometimes spectacularly so. In 1970, Kardish proposed a retrospective of her work at MOMA, where he was by then working. After some hesitation, Clarke agreed, with the proviso that she could augment it with a “Video Experience.” This involved shipping her video equipment and furniture to the museum and creating teams that shot images, mixed them live, and transmitted them to the audience for immediate, one-time-only, unrecorded viewing. In 1971, she devised a forty-five-foot-high “Video Ferris Wheel” for the city’s Eighth Annual Avant-Garde Festival.
But most of Clarke’s work at the time took place out of the public eye. Her troupe toured colleges throughout the Northeast in the early seventies, until her grant money dried up. She was summoned back to Los Angeles in 1975 by the producer Roger Corman, to direct a woman-centered gangster drama called “Crazy Mama”; she wanted to do it—but her way. She recalled her meeting with Corman: “He says, ‘I hear you don’t plan to do coverage.’ With a very innocent face I said, ‘What’s coverage?’ He says, ‘wide shot, medium shot, close-up.’ I said, ‘Why would I want to do that?’ ” Jonathan Demme got the job instead. Clarke wanted to stay in Los Angeles, as she noted in her diary, for “Carl and drugs” (Lee was then living there), and she pitched a Western with an all-female cast to a Los Angeles community-TV station; it was turned down. She then, coincidentally, got an offer to teach in the film-and-television department of U.C.L.A.; there, she made use of a broadcast-quality studio to offer a course in “experimental television.” (She also checked into a clinic to get off drugs and, around 1978, broke up definitively with Lee.)
Clarke’s freewheeling classes were a hit with students, whose video work she managed to get broadcast on local TV. U.C.L.A. was a hotbed of cinematic energy and creativity—in particular, since the sixties, it had attracted innovative young Black filmmakers, whose loose grouping was later dubbed the L.A. Rebellion. One of its most notable members, Julie Dash, who’d go on to write and direct the classic “Daughters of the Dust” (1991), was one of Clarke’s students and recalls the “wild tribe” that formed around her. Meanwhile, Clarke made four short dance videos and two videos of theatre pieces by Sam Shepard. She also tried and failed to get the rights for a movie version of Joan Didion’s “A Book of Common Prayer.” But, by 1983, Clarke wanted to get back to New York, and chance intervened again. A Fort Worth oil heir commissioned a movie about Ornette Coleman, who told the film’s producer about the footage that Clarke had already shot, and insisted that she be hired to make the new film.
“Ornette: Made in America” is a collage that brings together a wide array of material, including interviews of Ornette Coleman; footage of him and his son, Denardo, from 1968; reënactments of the child Ornette growing up in Fort Worth; adult Ornette presenting and performing an orchestral piece with the Fort Worth Symphony and being given the key to the city; and a 1984 scene presenting a device developed by Wendy Clarke, of video cameras linked by satellite that enabled Ornette, while stationed at the World Trade Center, and Denardo, in Harlem, to play a live duet. It’s a conceptual film that transforms its biographical elements into incarnations of Coleman’s artistic and personal philosophies. The cinematographer for the mid-eighties filming, Ed Lachman—who had previously worked with Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, and Jean-Luc Godard—told Kardish that Clarke “could find the visual metaphor every time that expressed emotion while respecting the moment of improvisation.” “Ornette” was released, scantly, in 1986, to respectful reviews.
The following year, Clarke suddenly began to experience significant memory lapses, even failing to recognize her sister Elaine. Two of her longtime video-art acolytes, David and Piper Cort, became her caregivers, inviting her to live in a trailer on their property in Massachusetts. A diagnosis of Alzheimer’s soon followed, and her mental and physical deterioration continued steadily for the final ten years of her life. Then her slow posthumous eclipse began.
An artist’s legacy depends, to a large extent, on the availability of their work. In 2009, the distributor Milestone Film and Video decided to do something about the fact that Clarke’s films were unavailable on home video, and launched “Project Shirley” to restore and release her work. In the process, Milestone compiled press kits involving deep dives of Clarke research, which Kardish credits as crucial to his biography. Wiseman still refused to allow “The Cool World” to be rereleased, but even without that remarkable work what’s now accessible of Clarke’s films and other projects demonstrates that, in tone and temperament, the works are continuous with the life from which it sprang. With their emphasis on mainstream society’s disdained and excluded people; on the isolation that confronts those who assert their political, artistic, and sexual freedom; and on the creation of new forms to embody these new demands, her films both define and expand modern political cinema.
Clarke’s legacy, of a philosophical cinema that turns form into inquiry, critique, and protest, is also a cinema of paradox. Cassavetes and Michael Roemer, white independent filmmakers who likewise launched their careers with movies about Black characters (“Shadows” and “Nothing But a Man,” respectively), turned the cameras inward—Cassavetes with a series of deeply personal dramas, in many of which he and his wife, Gena Rowlands, acted together; Roemer with the New York Jewish gangster comedy “The Plot Against Harry.” Clarke, by contrast, never made a feature about a woman, never made one set in a milieu like her own. She remained as elusive as the video experiments that she launched into the ether, as the conversations and encounters that filled much of her life and that marked so many who were their beneficiaries.
In Agnès Varda’s film “Lions Love (. . . and Lies),” from 1969, Clarke plays a lightly fictionalized version of herself, as a director trying and failing to get a movie made in Hollywood. The connection with Varda brings to mind a vision foreclosed by Clarke’s tragic illness. Varda, after all, had reached a breaking point in her own movie career and responded by using a consumer-grade digital video camera to put herself and her immediate experiences onscreen, in “The Gleaners and I.” She thus became the emblem of her own work for the rest of her long life, and, more important, of the ubiquitous and infinite possibilities of the cinema itself. Clarke’s self-transformative powers, even in her seventies, were just as strong, but her breaking point, alas, was strictly biological, and it came too soon. ♦