Film Forum

We celebrate the centennial of pioneering filmmaker Shirley Clarke (1919-1997) with selected screenings beginning October 2, the 100th anniversary of her birth. Clarke’s best-known work, including The Cool World, The Connection, and Portrait of Jason, will be shown throughout October and November.

Reviews

“Dancer, bride, runaway wife, radical filmmaker and pioneer — Shirley Clarke is one of the great undertold stories of American independent cinema. A woman working in a predominantly male world, a white director who turned her camera on black subjects, she was a Park Avenue rich girl who willed herself to become a dancer and a filmmaker, ran away to bohemia, hung out with the Beats and held to her own vision in triumph and defeat. She helped inspire a new film movement and made urgently vibrant work that blurs fiction and nonfiction, only to be marginalized, written out of histories and dismissed as a dilettante. She died in 1997 at 77 and is long overdue for a reappraisal.”
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
Read the full article here.

Films in this Series

Links