Remembering Shirley Clarke - actress

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 1998 by DeeDee Halleck

Shirley Clarke was my mentor. I learned more from her than anyone else I ever knew - mostly about how to be a mentor, how to energize people, how to push them to do good work, how not to give up when the technology was failing, the people lethargic or the situation impossible. Shirley pushed things and people to the edge. She never gave up. Alzheimer's claimed her about 10 years ago, but she held on, tenderly nursed by two of her beloved disciples, Piper and David Cort, who bathed her and tucked her in and smoothed her forehead. Her daughter Wendy and many of her colleagues were with her during her last days in a Boston hospital. She died September 23, 1997, in a sweet sleep surrounded by Felix the Cat and Betty Boop, toys of her youth held tight for all these years.

Shirley was somewhere between Betty Boop and Felix the Cat herself, with a bit of Charlie Chaplin's tramp thrown in. She often wore a bowler hat and tight smart little suits, looking like something out of a 1930s chorus line. All she needed were spats to complete the costume. She had style. A small woman with the body of a dancer, she had piercing beady black eyes, like a little mouse. She was witty and bright, and endlessly energetic.

Shirley started as a dancer. Her first films were dance films: Dance in the Sun (1953) and In Paris Parks (1954), a lyrical look at gesture and movement in a public landscape. I saw this early work and Brussels "Loops" (1958), a piece made of little loop movies that she did for the Brussels World Fair, at the Hunter Art Museum in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1959. It changed my life. Seeing her name on the credits and the joy and energy of the images made me realize that women could and should make films. I decided to try to study film in college, but Antioch did not offer film classes at the time, so I dropped out.

Her work in the early '60s, The Connection (1960) and The Cool World (1963) are landmarks of the American New Wave movement. The Cool World is a New York version of Italian neo-realism, every bit as powerful and poignant. It remains (with Robert Frank's 1959 Pull My Daisy) the best expression of marginal life in that era. Her film Portrait of Jason (1967) was one of the first with a gay protagonist in an open and sympathetic (and completely unromantic) manner. Shirley and Viva shared the screen as "talent" in Agnes Varda's Lion's Love (1969), my favorite Varda film. Somehow Shirley (and Viva) added a New York edge to Varda, who could wax cloyingly sentimental.

In the early '70s I somehow found my way up to Shirley's workshop space in the penthouse of the Chelsea Hotel. She lived and worked there making live and taped video performance, installation and documentation with a collaborating group of artists. I was lucky to have been a part of that work. We formed a troupe, those of us who worked with Shirley. She called us the TeePee Video Space Troupe. The idea was to experiment with performance that integrated video and other technologies. It was in the days before video cassettes and each tape had to be hand threaded into the portapak decks. Not that it was really about recording per se, because most of what we did was never on tape; the tape was only one of the elements of the constructions, the happenings, the events. It was electronic performance in an interactive mode. The troupe included myself, Andy Gurian, Shirley's daughter Wendy, Bruce Ferguson, Vicki Polon, David Cort, Bob Harris, Parry Teasdale, Shalom Gorewitz, Susan Milano, Shridir Bapat and others. There were regular drop-ins like Agnes Varda, Shigeko Kaboda, Beryl Korot, Nam June Paik, Skip Blumberg, Barbara Haspiel, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Jori Schwartzman and neighbors at the Chelsea such as Carl Lee, Viva (toting one of her kids), photographer Peter Simon, Doris Chase, Andre Vosnevshenski, George Kleinsinger, Virgil Thompson, Harry Smith and Arthur C. Clarke (no relation). At any given time there also always seemed to be one or two Japanese dancers around. Sometimes even Andy Warhol climbed the flight of stairs after the last elevator stop, looking for Viva. Louis Malle came by, as did Susan Sontag, Joris Ivens, Peter Brooks, Jean Rouche and Shelly Winters. The Chelsea had a certain cachet for visitors from Europe, Hollywood and Japan, and Shirley was queen of the Chelsea.

Around Shirley swirled miles of video cables, cameras, monitors and telephones. She was wired. Shirley had a new project every night. We were needed to help make it happen. It was sometimes frustrating, often exhausting, but it was hard not to trot over there, because you never knew what you might miss if you stayed away.

At some point Arthur Clarke got hold of a laser. He unwrapped a long rectangular box with a fat cable, borrowed from a Columbia lab by a fan of his 2001 Space Odyssey. This was years before those red needles of light sparkled on every cashier's counter. The laser was exotic and thrilling and Shirley and Arthur giggled like kids phoning in bogus pizza orders as they plugged it in and aimed the beam off the edge of the roof. Passers-by on 23rd St. stooped to pick up the tiny red jewel. Both Clarkes roared with laughter as they made it jump five feet out of reach. When we tried using the laser in our performances, the intense light etched intricate patterns on several of our cameras.