Sight&Sound - 11.2019

16 | Sight&Sound | November 2019

By Sophia Satchell Baeza

A major figure of the American avant garde,

Shirley Brimberg Clarke (1919-1997) was

born into privilege as the daughter of Polish-

Jewish immigrants who made their fortune in

manufacturing. Rebelling against a repressive

bourgeois upbringing, Clarke turned first to

dance, and later film and video, to express her

distinctive vision of the world. Moving freely

across genres and media throughout her career

(and often within a single work), Clarke’s

cinema explores the porous boundaries between

narrative and documentary filmmaking, and

film and other media, such as painting, dance,

performance and video. Her 1960s features

The Connection (1961), The Cool World (1963)

and Portrait of Jason (1967), for which she is

arguably best remembered, address issues of

urban alienation, poverty, addiction and racism,

focusing on lives lived at the margins of American

society. Fearless in both her personal and creative

life, Clarke produced a body of work that is as

formally innovative as it is rooted in social protest.

Clarke initially trained as a dancer, immersing

herself in New York’s vibrant post-war avant-

garde dance scene. Although her dance career

never quite earned her the critical acclaim

she’d hoped for, it had a lasting impact on

her subsequent filmmaking and video work,

informing an interest in how movement is

recorded formally, while introducing her to

key avant-garde dancers and choreographers.

Dance in the Sun (1953), Clarke’s first short film,

captures the sinuous choreography of professional

dancer Daniel Nagrin. Bounding off the stage

and out of the cinematic frame, it quickly cuts to

him dancing on the sand. By fluidly switching

between the two locations, Clarke extends

Nagrin’s choreography into a new – potentially

fantasy – space. Much like her then more

established contemporary, dancer and filmmaker

Maya Deren, Clarke uses editing to conjure up an

individual’s interior life: a memory, perhaps, of

a long-ago dance under the sun. Bullfight (1955)

similarly cuts between different environments,

editing on shared gestures to create a sense of

continual motion and high drama. Flitting back

and forth between Anna Sokolow’s bullfight-

inspired choreography and actual footage of a

fight in an arena, Clarke’s montage mirrors the

elegant and precise movements of the dancer with

those of the matador, creating a dramatic stand-off.

Other short films evoke a dance without

dancers, using the rhythms of the edit and

movement within the frame to capture the

dynamism of urban life. Bridges-Go-Round

(1958), a colourful experimental short on New

York’s suspension bridges, uses overlapping

footage (often moving in opposing directions)

and pulsing zooms to animate otherwise static

structures, creating moments of cinematic

abstraction and a visual affinity with jazz.

Jazz is the pulsing vein snaking through

much of Clarke’s work, right up to her final

feature Ornette: Made in America (1985), a portrait

of free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman. Her first

feature, The Connection, includes a group of real

jazz musicians among the cast, adding a sense of

spontaneous authenticity to the subterranean

underworld being depicted. Jazz in this context

connotes a mood and a milieu, a hip stance by

then inscribed into the Beat Generation mythos

that Clarke’s film was consciously tapping into.

A love of avant-garde dance and

jazz inform Shirley Clarke’s complex,

kinetic portraits of lives lived at the

margins of American society

Birth of the cool: Shirley Clarke’s work emphasises improvisation, changes in dramatic intensity, syncopated editing and the apparent absence of a script

Clarke frequently spoke of how

her identification with outcasts

was informed by a feeling of not

belonging in a man’s world

PROFILE: SHIRLEY CLARKE

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