Shirley Clarke's 'Connection': Will It Click At Last?

SC: I identified with black people because I couldn't deal with the woman question and I transposed it. I could understand very easily the black problems, and I somehow equated them to how I felt. When I did The Connection, which was about junkies, I knew nothing about junk and cared less. It was a symbol--people who are on the outside. I always felt alone, and on the outside of the culture that I was in. I grew up in a time when women weren't running things.
They still aren't.



Shirley Clarke, the director of The Connection, had strong ties to New York's independent film scene. She lent John Cassavetes equipment for his first film.

She brought the lives of Harlem teenagers to the screen in The Cool World and captured the voice of an out gay man, in Portrait of Jason, when that was rare.  Project Shirley.

Transcript

Shirley Clarke
SHIRLEY CLARKE: I think that I've gotten to the point that I believe so much that the filmmaker, the audience and the film must all be part of something together, and I don't want them separated behind the screen anymore. But I'm well aware of who my audience is. Most of the time it's the people who already agree with me, which is rather unfortunate. But you know and I would, I think, really like to broaden that.

CLARKE: I was really so determined to do it that I didn't care what anyone thought of me. If they thought I was crazy, it was OK by me. If they thought I was insane, that was fine. If they thought I had a lot of self-will, it was all right. And so as far as I was concerned, as long as I would get done what I wanted, I was willing to go to almost any lengths to do it.

Shirley Clarke is one of the great undertold stories of American independent cinema.”


One Man, Saved From Invisibility
Shirley Clarke’s ‘Portrait of Jason,’ Back in Circulation
ROME IS BURNING (Portrait of Shirley Clarke)


Interview with Shirley Clarkeby DeeDee Halleck

The statistics of the graduates of UCLA in the industry is almost nil. Male and female. That's true of NYU and USC. There are a few real hustlers that you knew from the day they walked in, they didn't need any university. They needed to have access to equipment. 


DDH: You received a grant to work at the Television Lab at WNET, the largest public TV station in the country.

SC: But that was where I experienced the most explicit form of discrimination. The engineer was the worst. He was so obstructive. He just hated the fact that I was a woman: hated it! That was probably the most overt discrimination I ever had.


DDH: The technicians aren't as subtle in their oppression as the big boys at the top. A number of women I know had trouble there. That place was notorious. Nancy Holt had her sound track erased. Those things didn't happen to the men artists who were granted access to work there. The irony is that the engineers were making salaries 500 times what the artists would get for working day and night on a program.

Halleck interviewed Shirley Clark at her home in the Chelsea Hotel in 1985. Ms. Halleck is currently engaged in a book project, the working title of which is: Hand Held Visions: The Uses of Community Media. It will be published by Fordham University Press.