Shirley Clarke was one of the most influential film directors of all time, so why haven't more people heard of her? SUSAN MANSFIELD on a welcome tribute to a remarkable life
THE LADY IN BLACK DIPS HER FIN-gers in her champagne glass and smears bubbly on her slicked-back hair. "They say if you put champagne in your hair it will stay whatever happens, right?" she says to the camera, in a Manhattan drawl. Then she puts her top hat on, angles it jauntily, and proceeds to deliver a blistering critique of misogyny in Hollywood.
This is rare footage of the late film director Shirley Clarke, who has been described as one of the most innovative film-makers in the American New Wave. Her award-winning shorts and ground-breaking feature films prefigure much more modern film-making, though her name is largely absent from the annals of cinematic history.
Now Clarke's work is to get a long overdue revival when the Edinburgh International Film Festival hosts the most comprehensive Shirley Clarke retrospective ever, including rarely seen shorts and hard-to-trace documentary footage of the director herself.
"Rather than just show the highlights of a short but incredibly important career, we want to paint a picture of this amazing person," says the EIFF's Niall Grieg Fulton, who has organised the retrospective. "We hope that people will get engaged by her personality and her ideas, and from that get into the joy that is her films. If you watch them in the context of the time, it's easy to see how she was ahead."
Clarke, the person, was elegant, sartorially smart, fiercely witty. She was a slight woman with a dancer's body, a wearer of top hats with a rock star's sense of style. She held court in a pyramid on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel, the heart of bohemian New York. Yet despite all her seriousness, she maintained a lifelong love of cartoon characters Felix the Cat and Betty Boop. Occasionally, she exchanged her hat for a pair of Minnie Mouse ears.
Independent film-maker DeeDee Halleck, who calls Clarke her mentor, wrote after her death in 1997: "Shirley was somewhere between Betty Boop and Felix the Cat herself, with a bit of Charlie Chaplin's tramp thrown in. She often wore a bowler hat and tight smart little suits, looking like something out of a 1930s chorus line. She had style."
Clarke was born Shirley Brimberg in New York in 1919. She would say she got her ingenuity from her maternal grandfather, a Latvian émigré who made his fortune inventing a self-tapping screw. She grew up in the highest New York society, but her father was a violent bully. Her sister, the novelist Elaine Dundy, who died last month, once said that "coming home from school ... was like returning to a prison".
Her father disapproved of Clarke's desire to be a dancer, and it was partly her need for freedom which took her into marriage, at 24, with Bert Clarke, with whom she had a daughter, Wendy. She once said in an interview: "Daddy was of the school which felt that men didn't talk about important matters to women. I guess I always had an enormous need to show him I wasn't the dope he thought I was."
She was given a Bolex camera as a wedding present and began to make home movies. In 1953 she rented equipment and made her first short film, Dance in the Sun, featuring dancer Daniel Nagrin. The principles of choreography were important to her art, but her horizons were broadening. By the time she made Bridges-Go-Round (1958) – one of a series of shorts for the US pavilion at the Brussels World Fair – she was choreographing her camera, making the bridges of Manhattan seem to dance.
She was becoming increasingly interested in cinéma vérité, the trend coming out of the European avant-garde for putting real life on film. In 1960 she released Skyscraper, a "musical comedy" featuring construction workers. It was nominated for an Oscar and won a prize at the Venice Film Festival.
Her first feature, The Connection (1962), looked like a cinéma vérité take on beat culture – a group of junkies in a New York apartment, philosophising, arguing, listening to jazz. In fact, it was an adaptation of a play, completely scripted, and choreographed, in Clarke's kitchen, with a legendary soundtrack by Freddie Redd and Jackie McLean.
During filming, Clarke met Carl Lee, the black actor who was to become her on-off partner for the rest of the decade, and a key player in her next film project. Lee helped her adapt Warren Miller's novel The Cool World, about youth gangs in Harlem, and film it on streets of the area using a mixed cast of actors and local kids (plus Dizzy Gillespie, who cameos as a busker).
The first commercial movie filmed in Harlem, The Cool World (1964) became a hit. As Clarke and Lee celebrated their success at the Venice Film Festival, Hollywood wondered at the sharpness of its realism. Clarke later said: "When I got (to Hollywood] the movie moguls claimed to be astounded by the reality of my films. How did I do it? I'd say, 'Well, it wasn't hard to make Harlem look like Harlem.'"
The Cool World at last brought Clarke to the movie moguls' attention. Director Otto Preminger invited her for a meeting. She said later: "After talking with me for a little while, he said, 'I don't think Hollywood is what you want. I don't really think that that's the kind of life you want to lead and the kind of work you want to do.' That was the honest-to-God truth."
Clarke considered herself more part of European film-making than American. Ingmar Bergman praised her work. Jean-Luc Godard refused a New York Society Film Critics Lifetime Achievement Award, unless the Society awarded Clarke too.
She chose to forgo the major studios to film in her own apartment, making an intense 12-hour interview with black, alcoholic hustler, Jason Holiday, which was later edited down into a two-hour feature. Portrait of Jason (1967) is a remarkable film in which Holiday presents his story and his view of the world, prompted – sometimes goaded – by Clarke and Lee, who remain off screen. Its style prefigures later films, as well as the modern penchant for "reality" entertainment.
Clarke tried Hollywood again when B-movie king Roger Corman, who had launched the careers of directors such as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, made an abortive attempt to recruit her. She said later: "What Roger wanted was for me to be 22 years old. I realised that he didn't have any idea who the f*** I was... He wanted me to shoot his script, each scene in wide, medium and close-up so that later on he could edit it. For me to make a cheapy film I didn't respect with a script I didn't like, without the right to at least do it the way I want, for God's sakes, that's insane."
It was a difficult time for Clarke and she tackled it in her own way: by playing in a movie about film-making. Agnès Varda's Lions Love stars Clarke as herself but more so – more top-hatted, more articulate, more angry – alongside Andy Warhol protégée Viva, with cameos from Jim Morrison and Eddi Constantine.
Later, she would speak of the "deep discrimination against women artists" in Hollywood. "I happen to have chosen a field where I have to be out there, to constantly connect, to be in charge of vast amounts of money, equipment and people. And that is not particularly a woman's role in our society. There's no question that my career would have been different if I was a man, but if I was a man I would be a different human being."
Clarke felt she had spent all her career fighting – for funding, for artistic freedom, for equality. She once said: "I have an enormous need to find a barricade to die on." She believed she paid the price in her personal life. "My relationship with men and my relationships with other people have been disturbed because I had to be outwardly a lot stronger than I am. I always had to present a front, I always had to be in charge."
Andrew Gurian, a videographer who worked with her in the 1970s, wrote of her: "She was quick, domineering, one step ahead, short-tempered, but with a sense of humour. She could spend several days behind her closed door, sulking and speaking to no-one, or she could behave like a cannonball and flatten everything in her path.
"On more than one occasion, a student who witnessed a Clarke temper tantrum asked me how I could work for such a woman. I simply replied that she was the closest person to a complete artist I had ever met and there was more to learn from her than anyone else in the business. She successfully combined personal vision, logical methodology, political awareness, self-reflection, and an impulse to communicate."
In 1970, Clarke received funding from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to explore working in video. For the next few years, until she was offered a job teaching film at UCLA, her pyramid penthouse on the Hotel Chelsea became headquarters for a band of experimental film-makers and artists who called themselves the TeePee Videospace Troupe.
The Troupe experimented constantly. They filmed themselves and each other. They filmed Clarke's celebrated poodles. They played with new techniques and invented newer ones. You never knew who was going to drop by: Andy Warhol, looking for a new girlfriend; or Louis Malle, Susan Sontag or Arthur C Clarke. Halleck later said: "We were the urban guerrillas of the Chelsea penthouse, plotting an electronic coup that would liberate the imaginations of the world.
"Around Shirley swirled miles of video cables, cameras, monitor and telephones. She was wired. Shirley had a new project every night. We were needed to help make it happen. It was sometimes frustrating, often exhausting, but it was hard not to trot over there because you never knew what you might miss if you stayed away."
One night, before sunrise, the Troupe split up into five groups and went out into different parts of Manhattan to film. Back on the roof at 6:30am with a bank of monitors, they ate bagels and drank champagne and watched "a multi-channel piece of morning in New York City" as the sun rose around them. Like most of the Troupe's activities, the tapes were not retained.
Clarke would make three more films: two shorts, Savage/Love and Tongues, written by Sam Shepard and starring Joseph Chaikin, which combined film and video effects, and a final feature, Ornette: Made in America (1986), a portrait of the composer and saxophonist Ornette Coleman, still regarded as a jazz movie masterpiece.
By the end of the 1980s, Clarke was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's, which would worsen until her death in 1997, aged 77, after a stroke. The day she died, "disciples" gathered in her hospital bedroom – festooned in images of Felix and Betty Boop – to sip champagne and celebrate her life. The next day, Elaine Dundy would say, "It's so like a film Shirley would make."
• For more on the Edinburgh International Film Festival's Shirley Clarke retrospective, visit
www.edfilmfest.org.uk. The festival runs from 18 to 29 June.
In praise of a New Wave pioneer … "A champion of independent film-making and a missionary for video as a force in communications…"
–
Lawrence Van Gelder, New York Times obituary"Shirley Clarke's … work in video is as startling and creative as her work in film, yet she has been repeatedly overlooked…"
–
Andrew Gurian, videographer"The most fascinating film I've ever seen"
–
Ingmar Bergman on Portrait of Jason "The first question I asked when I saw her work is: why don't I know about it already? Why haven't I seen her name in more reference books? Anyone who's interested in cinema should see these films."
–
Niall Grieg Fulton, Edinburgh International Film Festival"I was very lucky to grow up with Shirley Clarke as my mother. A charismatic, larger-than-life pioneer, she was a magnet for film-makers and artists around the world. She gave me my first video equipment. We would hold video marathons, setting up monitors and cameras on her roof garden at the Chelsea Hotel, starting at sunset and ending at sunrise, and artistic visionaries of the time like Peter Brook and Arthur Clarke would come by … It has been my pleasure to make her work known to a new generation."
–
Wendy Clarke, video artist, daughter of Shirley Clarke