Shirley Clarke and Unfinished Business

I wanted to highlight my latest lecture video about Shirley Clarke because she's a film-maker who represents a lot of what I feel is my unfinished business in film studies. I had so wanted to research her in depth and some day visit the UCLA archives of her work. Never say never, I guess, but I'm sure there are people working on her and doing a fine job of progressing what scholars such as Lauren Rabinovitz initiated in redressing the shameful marginalising of Clarke's work in film histories. I use plural histories here because she crossed the too-oft gate-kept boundaries of documentary, social realism, experimental, independent and avant-garde cinemas. I find her work utterly fascinating, and I've only been able to see a little of it first-hand.

It has galled me since I learned of Clarke (after my own formal film education I might add, and from my mentor Dr Des O'Rawe who was doing his own 'decolonising' of his knowledge and teaching, which he passed onto me), that Clarke is still often set aside or not even heard of in film courses which laud the likes of Richard Linklater and Stan Brakhage when her work was - to my mind - much more innovative, impactful and not at all navel-gazing. (I don't like to be negative, but I really am not a fan of those dudes, and Clarke's work to me is so much better and watchable and cleverer). And although she was a white woman from wealth often making films about African-Americans (possibly even the first example of blaxploitation in cinema) before and as the civil rights movement gained traction, films like The Cool World (1961) and Portrait of Jason (1967) unflinchingly get into issues around drug use, hustling and homosexuality in underprivileged, ghettoised communities that are important conversations we still need to have with the fuller, more nuanced picture these films present in mind. 

They are films that are quite difficult (read expensive) to get hold of, so that's one barrier to studying work that is already inaccessible because there is so little acknowledgement in canons and 'definitive' histories that leave out at least half of the story. You can, however, see the jazz version of Bridges-go-round (1958) courtesy of the National Film Preservation Foundation.  

I have such fond memories of showing Bridges-go-round with both soundtracks (the other is an electronic score by Bebe and Louis Barron of Forbidden Planet fame) and Portrait of Jason to students, particularly when I worked at University of Aberdeen. The Cinema and the American Avant-garde honours module I taught is what the lecture below is from, and I used designing it to start redressing the gaps in my own knowledge and understanding of the history of films that get cordoned off as experimental, and the hidden histories of women's film-making.

Looking at Clarke's work from the 1950s and 60s and putting it in the context of time and place, while she made pioneering films that progressed and expanded on the techniques Maya Deren had experimented with before her, the truth is that she couldn't have had the freedom to do so without the support of her husband Bert (who became more of a friend with whom she shared a legal agreement and had a child, namely Wendy Clarke who is an accomplished video artist). Times have changed since men/husbands were required to be present for contract signings and funding deals, but this issue as a whole is a sticking point for me. It is something I have struggled with for four years now since leaving my barely begun academic career due to ill-health brought on by workplace bullying at University of Salford. I've only been able to function at all and crawl my way back to some semblance of being human because of my partner, Andrew. I struggle to reconcile with my ongoing lack of independence and self-sufficiency that the younger me believed I would have attained by now (otherwise, why bother knocking your pan in to get all those qualifications people said would make you more employable?).

I suppose the lesson I am trying to learn, and I've seen this from people I follow on social media as well (usually from people who have a lot more to justifiably feel discontentment about than me), is that even the most strong-willed and independently minded of us need to admit that we do not exist in a vacuum. We all need help sometimes. Our survival as a species, never mind as individuals, hinges on community. And what is any film but a community effort to even get made?

I'm seeing a lot of people thinking through the idea of enough rather than success. Notions of success only set us up to fail. They need to be recalibrated. I am not sure how I sit with trying to be content with enough. Perhaps it is another word for the same idea; is it enough to survive rather than thrive? Not if you are in any way ambitious and keen to improve. I don't want to be content with enough in my working life because I always want to learn more and get better at the things I do. Clarke was a bit like that. She didn't feel her camerawork was very good, so she worked hard on her editing skills and storytelling in collaboration with the performers/subjects, and achieved striking results that had more impact on the New American Independent Cinema than is often acknowledged.

Clarke grafted, she lived her life (and boy did she live it) until she died of a stroke at the age of 78 in 1997 after living with Alzheimer's. We have so little time. And, as comes up in Audiovisual Cultures in July, the memories of that life and those achievements can be taken away before that time is up. It is the traces of ourselves and the legacies we leave behind that may be the measure of a life lived. In the words of one of my July podcast guests, Pam Munter: 'we don't know how long we have, and why not take advantage of what you do have and make the most of it?' I don't find it easy to maintain that mindset, but I'm making a more conscious effort to because Pam is absolutely right.

For the moment I have the privilege of enough time and energy to put out into the world my past work that was previously exclusive to small sets of students. As I noted in a prior post, I keep going and trying to develop because I don't know what else to do. I am working on feeling that this is okay and is indeed enough, at least for now.