Shirley Clark’s “The Cool World” is a worthwhile addition to the Directed by Women global screening party.
This documentary-style feature film was directed by American filmmaker Shirley Clarke in 1964. Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman served as the film’s producer.
The film was based on a novel by Warren Miller and tells the story of Harlem street gangs.
The Harvard Film Archive said:
Clarke’s marginalized position as a female filmmaker afforded her an authentic, deeply felt outsider/insider view; thus, her subject matter of her films also spotlit the alienated, the oppressed, the othered. Unable to even conform to a “standard” format, Clarke instead inhabited the spaces in between art forms, in between dance and film, documentary and fiction, performance and experience.and later film and video.
Clarke died in 1997.
The Cool World screens September 1 at Fabrica in Brighton in connection with the Bijou Electric Empire Forever.
Hinges of History 