New American Cinema #17 and #18: Shirley Clarke

Two episodes of "The New American Cinema" devoted to interviews with filmmaker Shirley Clarke.

00:06Copy video clip URL Onscreen text: “21 WHA-TV, Madison, Wisc. Series: New American Cinema. Program: Program #17, Shirley Clarke -1. Date: 8 May 1974. Tape: 7616-2. Acct. No.: 7707. Producer: Jim Heddle. Director: Phil Samuels.” Voiceover and onscreen acknowledgments of funders. 

00:45Copy video clip URL Voiceover introduction with theme song and title card. Voiceover: “In this series we share the private visions of eight masters of this emerging art, the New American Cinema.” 

01:49Copy video clip URL A clip from Shirley Clarke’s 1957 short film A Moment in Love.

04:21Copy video clip URL In the studio, Shirley Clarke is lying on the floor, flat on her back. Host Jim Heddle sits cross-legged next to her. Clarke sits up, holding a flower: “Where am I? Jim, darling!” She puts on her hat and says “Oh, back as a filmmaker.” The two of them sit on the floor together as Heddle introduces her. Her work, Heddle says, “kinda represents the whole trajectory of the American cinema, in a funny way.” 

05:00Copy video clip URL Clarke discusses her filmmaking history, beginning in the 1950s when she, along with Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, and others were part of a group that would come to prominence as the underground of the 1960s. The initial venture of Independent Filmmakers of America, Inc. and the formation of a distributor after the failure of another production company. The growth of the avant-garde short film, thanks to universities, the groundwork laid by Maya Deren touring her own films, and to Mekas’s promotion in the Village Voice.

07:08Copy video clip URL Deren as the “beginning of the entire avant-garde movement in the United States.” 

08:14Copy video clip URL Deren’s contributions to the avant-garde film community, including the Creative Film Foundation, which gave money directly to filmmakers. 

08:52Copy video clip URL Clarke transitioning to film from dance because “I realized I was never gonna be the great dancer I wanted to be.” 

09:42Copy video clip URL Making her first films on a camera given to her as a wedding gift before she’d seen any of Deren’s work. Discussion of similarities between Clarke’s A Dance in the Sun and Deren’s A Study in Choreography for Camera. She discusses making that film and trying combine the reality and the abstraction that one can achieve with a camera. 

11:45Copy video clip URL Heddle and Clarke introduce Clarke’s 1958 film Bridges-Go-Round. 

14:58Copy video clip URL The different phases of Clarke’s career. The similarities between Clarke’s aims in an abstract film like Bridges-Go-Round and her later narrative features. Drawing connections between the camera movements in The Connection (1961) and The Cool World (1963) and her dance films. The relationship between cinema and choreography. 

16:13Copy video clip URL Clarke being unaware that she was doing anything unique in being a woman making independent feature films. Needing to expand into features in order to make enough money to fund further films. “We’ve since found out that independent filmmaking is great for everyone except the person that makes it.” 

17:52Copy video clip URL Clarke always working from a prepared script. Never making “documentaries” because they were always scripted. Discussion of Portrait of Jason (1967). 

19:08Copy video clip URL The sub-cultures of The Connection and The Cool World. Making films about alienated minorities with whom she identified and sympathized because she thought no one would be interested in stories about women. “As a woman, I never believed that anything about my life was of sufficient significance to interest anybody at all and so what I did was made what would be a substitution. In other words, I saw my plight as a woman similar to the plight of the Black people. I saw my situation of alienation similar to the alienation of the drug addict. Actually, I have felt, my entire film life, isolated from everyone. I am not really part of the underground film movement. I am not part of the Hollywood filmmaking. I am not part of any scene. I have always been very alone. And there are not yet even enough women. It hasn’t even changed in the ten years since I started making feature films. We still don’t have women being allowed to direct films. We have many, many talented women we’re starting to see. A lot of young women coming along and showing enormous talent. But they’re still not getting the opportunity to make a film.”

20:31Copy video clip URL Clarke being able to make films because she had an independent income to pay for living expenses. Needing to raise money for films, but not needing to work her way up the ladder of the film industry. The need for women to organize and form “the kinds of powerful cliques that men have.” “Women in film are worse than second-class citizens. They’re just not trusted.”

22:35Copy video clip URL Heddle closes the program with a clip from The Cool World, which Clarke introduces. 

23:15Copy video clip URL A clip from The Cool World.

27:54Copy video clip URL End credits and theme song: “Producer-Host: James Heddle. Director: Phil Samuels. Production Assistant: Jody Mead. Music: David Crosby. Graphics: Phil Hamilton. Special Effects: Wayne Weber. Stills: Del Brown. Feedback Effects: Ken McCullough. Produced by the University of Wisconsin-Extension Telecommunications Center.” Voiceover: “Production Coordinator for this series is Ralph Sandler.” 

29:11Copy video clip URL Onscreen text: 21 WHA-TV, Madison, Wisc. Series: New American Cinema. Program: Program #18, Shirley Clarke -2. Date: 1 July 1974. Tape: 3094. Acct. No.: 7707. Producer: Jim Heddle. Director: Phil Samuels.” Voiceover and onscreen special thanks. 

29:59Copy video clip URL Voiceover introduction with theme song and title card. 

30:55Copy video clip URL Heddle and Clarke sit on the floor around a video editing bay. Clarke speaks about the efforts in the 1960s to build a handheld 35mm camera to support the aspirations of cinéma vérité filmmakers. Her intention with Portrait of Jason was to remove the elisions of editing from the process, and to include the camera operator within the film.

33:31 Portrait of Jason was “scripted” in the sense that Clarke knew Jason Holliday well and had seen him say the things she would ask him to say in the film. Trying to transcend the awareness of the film. 

35:48Copy video clip URL A clip from Portrait of Jason.

40:29Copy video clip URL Heddle compares the film to more recent work in video. Clarke talks about thinking that the film was made for television but later realizing that the power came from the size and power of the image in a theater. Holliday returning to life as a hustler after the film premiered. 

42:58Copy video clip URL Giving up the need to “direct” everything in a film. Portrait of Jason as a release from being a filmmaker in control of all elements of a work. Two years of depression following the completion of the film. Being unable to get funding for subsequent films. 

44:46Copy video clip URL Receiving a grant that enabled her to explore video. 

45:40Copy video clip URL Clarke introduces a tape from Mother and Daughter Trapeze, a three-channel video of dancers on a skyscraper. The making of the video being integral to the. action onscreen. 

48:10Copy video clip URL The “mind-boggling” possibilities of video: “What I’ve done is try to limit it to doing things that no other art form that had preceded it does. In other words I work with video unlike film or unlike theater or unlike anything else…. an art form that exists within multiple spaces at the same time, an art form where editing is not the essence of it but just what we do in there today” Likening video collaborations to jazz improvisation. 

49:30Copy video clip URL Multiple cameras in superimposition, Heddle and Clarke joke about touching “in video space” when their hands seem to touch on the monitor. Discussion of “video space” and using multiple monitors in a “mosaic monitor form.” Games that Clarke enables with video. 

52:35Copy video clip URL Footage of Wendy Clarke, Shirley’s daughter, dancing along with other performers dressed as clowns. Clarke discusses working with her daughter, a dancer and videomaker. The number of women working in video, but still often working in isolation. 

54:50Copy video clip URL Making “seed tapes” intended to be circulated and shown with other works. 

55:33Copy video clip URL The need for women to “get together to help each other to solve the distribution and economic problems and very importantly the publicity problems. We must develop our own Jonas Mekases!”

56:31Copy video clip URL Heddle thanks Clarke. End credits and theme song: “Producer-Host: James Heddle. Director: Phil Samuels. Production Assistant: Jody Mead. Music: David Crosby. Graphics: Phil Hamilton. Special Effects: Wayne Weber. Stills: Del Brown. Feedback Effects: Ken McCullough. Produced by the University of Wisconsin-Extension Telecommunications Center.” Voiceover: “Production Coordinator for this series is Ralph Sandler.” Followed by list of funders.