Director Shirley Clarke (1925 - 1997) was known and revered for her approaches to and takes on the ghetto sub-culture. Her impressive feature The Connection, which was released in 1961 is an intriguing film version of Jack Gelber's off-Broadway play that depicted the world of African-American junkies who while waiting for their next fix in a 'white dude's' loft, kill time by improvising jazz and jive-talk as a mockumentary filmmaker directs them.
Clarke fused documentary and fiction once more to exceptionally palatable results with 1963's The Cool World - a worthy melodrama about adolescent crime and survival of contemporaneous day to day Harlem. Her subsequent piece, Portrait of Jason (1967) featured a Warhol-like camera stare at a black homosexual prostitute which documented nothing less than a full-scale 'performance' by its subject (Aaron Payne) who is simultaneously inventing a provocative autobiography for himself.
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| Move over miss thing Dorian Gray, this is the Portrait of Jason, you dig? |
Unable to raise the finance necessary to fund further projects, Clarke exacted her frustration on film when she portrayed herself as a suicidal director in Agnes Varda's direct cinema comedy Lions Love (...And Lies) in 1969. Clarke did a disappearing act for years only to re-emerge, given her background in dance and choreography, on the festival circuit a decade later with a new dance film Four Journeys Into Mystic Time (1979).