Shirley Clarke Would Have Been 92 Today
Today is underground filmmaker Shirley Clarke‘s birthday. She was born on Oct. 2, 1919 and passed away on Sept. 23, 1997.
She is mostly well-known for her two jazz-themed narrative feature films The Connection (1960) and The Cool World (1963); as well as the 1967 documentary, Portrait of Jason. However, she also directed numerous short films, such as Bullfight (1955) and Bridges-Go-Round (1958-59).
In the ’70s and early ’80s, she taught filmmaking at UCLA and continued to make short films, but returned to feature filmmaking with the 1985 documentary Ornette: Made in America.
In the below video, Edinburgh International Film Festival programmer Niall Greig Fulton reviews the retrospective the fest held of Clarke’s work in 2008. The video also includes clips from her films:
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Shirley Clarke was also an amazing pioneering video artist, and ran video workshops with collective The Tee Pee Video Space Troupe out of her apartment at the Chelsea Hotel and in other spaces around NYC and upstate between 1969-75. http://www.teepeevideospacetroupe.org
Oh, cool! Thanks for the info and link!