Shirley Clarke Lived Her Art to the Fullest

“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.