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essenceoffilm · 8 years ago

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“It’s All Yours Now”: Clarke’s Cinematic Thesis on Cinematic Realism

Right now, I’m revolting against the conventions of movies. Who says a film has to cost a million dollars and be safe and innocuous enough to satisfy every 12-year-old in America? We’re creating a movie equivalent of Off Broadway, fresh and experimental and personal. The lovely thing is that I’m alive at just the time when I can do this. - Shirley Clarke, 1962

Shirley Clarke’s feature debut The Connection (1961) is one of the most fascinating films of experimental New York cinema. In terms of cinema, the city of New York is most often associated with the likes of Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, but before they stepped forward, the city was the cradle for the budding movement of national independent cinema, which is most often called New American Cinema. Bronx-born Stanley Kubrick started his career by making documentaries and fiction films there in the early 1950′s, and the decade reached its climax in John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1958), the guiding light of the so-called New York New Wave [1]. The films of the period are low-budget black-and-white films which emphasize cinematic realism in terms of both style and content. They often have an atmosphere which makes them feel improvised, but in reality most of them have been carefully scripted. It is difficult to grasp the era entirely because few films are easily available, but as time goes by in the life of a cinephile, one’s viewing data slowly accumulates. The Connection is one such film, a film which was not particularly easy to see for a long time but is a true gem to see when the opportunity comes along. Having recently been released on DVD in 2012, it also hit the screen of my local cinématheque in glorious 35 mm in March 2017. Despite being buried under a rock for half a century, The Connection still feels fresh rather than dated, and despite its theatrical source material (in Jack Gelber’s play of the same name) and having a possibly burdensome chamber drama feel to it, Clarke’s feature feels anything but theatrical. On the contrary, it comes across as a cinematic exploration of cinema and its curse of realism. It is a free film about film and as such it is very much at the core of what the new wave in Europe was about.

The Connection begins as an apparent documentary about heroin-addicted jazz musicians in a New York apartment waiting for their drug connection to bring them heroin. One of them, Leach, a sarcastic middle-aged man who addresses the camera or the audience directly, acts as a boss of some kind for the group. This is only the beginning, however. Soon the film turns out to be really a story about a two-men film crew making the documentary about the heroin-addicted musicians: Dunn, an arrogant director, and Burden, an almost completely unseen cinematographer. Finally the musicians’ wait for Godot is fulfilled as their connection, Cowboy arrives with Sister Salvation. Cowboy takes the musicians one by one to the bathroom to give them their heroin fix. While Leach complains that his fix is not working, the others convince Dunn to try some heroin to acquire a better understanding of the subjects of his documentary. Convinced or fooled, Dunn vomits and passes out after trying, whereas Leach gets another fix and overdoses. In the end, Dunn wakes up and tells Burden to keep the footage they have shot.

As a peculiar film, The Connection requires contextualization both in terms of history and aesthetics. In what follows, I shall try to outline the film’s as well as Clarke’s position. This calls for an exploration of Shirley Clarke and central concepts in documentary cinema.

New American Cinema and Shirley Clarke’s Cinematic Position

Born to a well-off New York family in 1919, Shirley Clarke (born Brimberg) did not do well in school but found compensatory passion in dance and choreography. In the 1950′s she combined her passion for dance with another passion of hers, cinema, in her first short film Dance in the Sun (1953). In the mid-50′s, Clarke was part of a group of New York filmmakers to found Filmmakers Inc. (including D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles, Willard van Dyke), an organization which provided support and equipment for new independent filmmakers. For one, they gave the equipment to Cassavetes for him to make Shadows. Soon the New American Cinema began to take shape around this group with names like Cassavetes, Frederick Wiseman, and Charlotte Zwerin in the lead. Although not all of the films of the movement are documentaries (Wiseman is a celebrated documentarian, whereas Cassavetes is known for his fiction), most of them embraced the philosophy of cinéma vérité from France where filmmaker Jean Rouch innovated a new way of making documentary cinema “truthfully”. Clarke took the notion of cinéma vérité close to heart as well, but her cinema has also been seen as a counter-reaction to cinéma vérité’s alleged failures to attain objectivity. She found her opportunities to tackle these philosophical or meta-cinematic issues about realism and objectivity in Gelber’s unsuccessful yet more or less phenomenal play The Connection which performed at The Living Theater in 1959.

Clarke’s film adaptation of the play, The Connection was a success at Cannes, winning the jury prize of the festival, but flopped in the United States partially because of a ban issued to the film due to its shocking nature and frequent use of the word “shit”. While Clarke gained a notable reputation in Europe, she never quite hit it off on a larger scale. She never fell for the temptations of Hollywood on the other coast, though some of her films acquired prominent attention there: her short film Skyscraper (1959) was nominated for an Oscar, her documentary on Robert Frost, Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World (1963) won one, and her cinéma vérité interview film Portrait of Jason (1967) has received noteworthy attention from the gay community. The autumn years of Clarke’s life were shadowed by Alzheimer’s disease which was to consume her in 1997.

As this brief introduction suggests, one needs to grasp the essential concepts of cinéma vérité, direct cinema, and cinematic realism in order to properly discuss The Connection. Some reviewers and writers identify Clarke’s film as an attack on the ideals of cinéma vérité, its alleged objectivity and “truthfulness” [2], which, to my mind, is due to a common misunderstanding which identifies cinéma vérité and direct cinema as synonymous. To define the two terms as identical is, of course, fine, but if one then tries to attribute the terms interchangeably to Rouch, the founder of cinéma vérité, one ends up talking nonsense about Rouch’s cinema. This is so because Rouch’s films are not direct cinema. Let us now elaborate the distinction.

According to film theorist Bill Nichols (2001), there are six modes of documentary cinema. For our purposes, it suffices to distinguish two of them. First, Nichols talks about observational and expository modes, which can be seen at least as overlapping in the present context, where the filmmaker does not interact with the subjects of the film but rather just observes them, exposing them to the spectator. This is exactly what Robert J. Flaherty does in Nanook of the North (1922), which is usually celebrated as the very first documentary film. The mode went through a renaissance, if you will, at the turn of the 50′s and the 60′s in the so-called direct cinema movement.

The tendency of direct cinema was conceived especially in the documentary films of Robert Drew whose Primary (1960) and Crisis (1963) are prime examples of objective “fly in the wall” type of cinematic narrative. Smaller and lighter camera as well as sound equipment allowed a new intimacy between the filmmaker and the subject. The absence of a screenplay, interviews, a voice-over commentary, and non-diegetic music as well as the presence of immediate sound (recorded and mixed simultaneously) soon became the standard stylistic features of direct cinema. Many direct films also preferred the long take in contrast to the tendency of mainstream cinema to cut moments into montage. There is often an impression of random development of material without a clearly delineated purpose in dramatic structure: for example, one could think about Gimme Shelter (1970), the famous direct cinema documentary by the Maysles brothers and Zwerin, focusing on the-end-of-the-60′s tragedy at one concert of the rock band The Rolling Stones without any real explanation, just a freely proceeding stream of images (in reality carefully structured to give this impression, of course).

Second, Nichols talks about a participatory or an interactive mode of documentary cinema where the filmmaker does interact with the subjects of the film rather than just observing them. The films of the participatory mode make the meanings explicit, which are born from the interaction between the filmmaker and the subjects, whereas the films of the observational mode try to avoid such meaning-making in general, leaving them at least implicit. As a matter of fact, cinéma vérité, or “truth cinema”, could be described as inter-subjective documentary. In contrast to direct cinema, one could claim, paradoxically perhaps, that cinéma vérité gains a closer access to “the objective” precisely by breaking all traditional notions of it.

Jean Rouch is considered the pioneer of cinéma vérité and already his first films exemplify this interactive tendency of the participatory mode as they enhance immersion over observation. One intriguing aspect of this immersion, which is as philosophical as it is psychological, is that the mythological beliefs of Rouch’s subjects in his ethnographic documentaries are as true to him (at least in his films) as his own. Thus his cinema embraces the world view of its subjects. A wonderful example is Rouch’s early short documentary Les magiciens de Wanzerbé (1948) which is a film about a small village in Niger. The film begins with a low-angle shot of an eagle flying in the sky. A voice-over narrator (Rouch himself) says that the eagles are listening to the secrets of the gods and telling those secrets to the witches of the village. This voice -- omniscient narrative as a cliché of documentary -- does not perform its conventional function because Rouch refuses to contextualize or to evaluate it. The narrator never talks about beliefs. He never says that the people of this village believe so and so; he rather states them as factual. He does so because he is a part of the environment. What is more, the narrator’s voice is never challenged by an alternative, external voice, though the audience is still free to make their own conclusions of the material of the film.

In Rouch’s later and historically more important films he elaborated this dialectics into an intriguing jumble of reality, fiction, and fantasy. One such film is Moi, un noir (1958) which lacks interviews and dialogue completely. In the film, the subjects are young men living in the Ivory Coast and the material of their lives is organized by nothing but Rouch’s voice-over commentary and even more so by the young men’s own dubbed voice-over dialogue, which they have created after the shooting. The fictional stories conceived by the men in this post-dialogue are juxtaposed with the filmed “real” material. The form of the film is completely dictated by montage: the reality viewed consists of the fascinating fabric of all the subjects experience, see, read, and imagine. Thus Moi, un noir presents the integral peculiarity of cinéma vérité: how it tries to attain truth by going against the conventional idea of truth as correspondence between belief and fact.

Rouch’s most famous film is Chronique d’un été (Paris 1960) (1961), which he made in collaboration with the sociologist Edgar Morin, where they interview ordinary Frenchmen in the streets of Paris by asking them such questions as “are you happy”. As such, the film appears as a clear exposition of the differences between direct cinema and cinéma vérité: the filmmakers participate in the situations of the subjects not only by interviewing them but by provoking them and even changing their reality, so to speak. This is apparent in the end of the film where Rouch and Morin actually show the material they have so far gathered to the main subjects of their film and discuss it with them. The scene is followed by another scene where Rouch and Morin are talking about the conversation between them and their subjects, drawing special attention to the idea that a situation seems to become unreal or untrue at the very instant when it is filmed. Not only is this anti-objectivist thought in contrast to the philosophy of direct cinema but also such scenes could never be identified as direct cinema, which is why I find it baffling that some use the terms interchangeably.

Having taken this excursion to Rouch’s cinema, which will hopefully not seem futile, one can conclude the differences between direct cinema and cinéma vérité. There is no use of voice-over narration in direct cinema, whereas there is in cinéma vérité. The former emphasizes the absence of the filmmaker, the latter emphasizes their presence. While direct cinema tries to attain an objective approach, cinéma vérité goes for an inter-subjective approach. If cinéma vérité constantly articulates and thus makes meanings, uncovering them as explicit to the spectator as well, direct cinema, on the contrary, avoids making meanings and tries to keep them as implicit as possible. All of this is true about the two Robert Drew films cited above, but also about such landmarks of direct cinema as Salesman (1968) and Gimme Shelter both co-directed by the Maysles brothers and Zwerin as well as Titicut Follies (1967) by Wiseman [3].

At first glance, direct cinema and cinéma vérité might seem similar, and they do have their similarities, of course, but on the level of philosophy their differences overcome their likenesses: direct cinema is realist in the sense that it is characterized by a belief in the direct nature of its representation which is presented as transparent (the spectator, hopefully, does not pay attention to it), whereas cinéma vérité is anti-realist in the sense that it emphasizes the indirect nature of its representation which is presented as self-aware (the spectator, hopefully or not, does pay attention to it). This is why their difference could be further articulated as a difference in the nature of structure: direct cinema highlights the natural development of the film’s structure which is seen as a causal consequence of the states of affairs taking place in reality before the unobtrusive camera, whereas cinéma vérité highlights the unnatural development of the film’s structure which is seen as a mutual consequence of the interaction between the filmmaker and the states of affairs taking place in reality before the obtrusive camera.

Rather than positioning Clarke and The Connection against cinéma vérité, it thus seems that she ought to be positioned in close connection to cinéma vérité and in opposition to direct cinema. In his influential theory of documentary modes, Nichols has also distinguished later modes of postmodern documentary called reflexive and performative mode both of which are about questioning representation in terms of both epistemology and ontology: they question whether representation can provide knowledge of reality and whether representation is real or not -- is it all there is or is it nothing. The interesting thing to notice after the brief sketch on Rouch above is that, well, Rouch was already doing this. Rouch’s cinema questions the nature of representation and its epistemic capacities. Most interesting in the context of the present essay, however, is that so was Clarke. If someone feels the difference between Rouch’s documentary and Clarke’s fiction (in The Connection) too strong, it should be noticed that both filmmakers make cinema which is beyond an absolute distinction between fact and fiction.

There still remains a few things to say about the questions which the cinema of Rouch and Clarke gives rise to. First, they challenge the notion of objective reality and perception. Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy did this in the 18th century and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy continued this in the 20th century when quantum mechanics also took these philosophical problems to physics. The problem, essentially, concerns whether the notion of mind-independent reality is entirely plausible and whether perception can provide us with objective information about reality. The problem states that human perception is always active and never merely passive. This challenges the notion of objective cinematic representation too, though I do not see a need to throw the notion away entirely (just like the temptation to keep it in philosophy and physics is too strong). Perhaps one can find solace in Kant’s famous thought that a transcendental idealist (that is, a philosopher who holds that the reality we experience is partially a product of our mind) must also be an empirical realist (that is, a philosopher who believes in the existence of a mind-independent reality). If one accepts this, one can still talk about the degrees of objectivity in terms of both natural perception (say, a perception of a book on a table is more objective than a hallucination of a unicorn) and cinematic representation (a documentary film without voice-over commentary and montage is more objective than a documentary film characterized by montage and voice-over commentary), though one must always remain epistemologically humble in accepting that there is no absolute guarantee with regards to such matters.

Second, it seems relevant to ask what do we mean by truth when we talk about cinéma vérité or truth cinema. In direct cinema, one can still vow in the name of traditional correspondence theory of truth, according to which truth is the correspondence between belief or description (read: the cinematic representation) and an object or a state of affairs (read: the event represented by the cinematic representation). Clarke and Rouch, however, step beyond the traditional view. One might take the easy approach and say that Rouch’s cinema embraces the so-called coherence theory of truth, according to which truth is internal coherence between beliefs or descriptions (for example, the mythological beliefs of the subjects in Rouch’s Les magiciens de Wanzerbé could be true in their own internally coherent system of beliefs), but I find it more appropriate to approach the issue from a phenomenological (or hermetical) perspective. According to such a view, truth means the disclosure of truth and this disclosure is historical by nature. Truth is simply how things give themselves to consciousness in some context of situatedness. To Martin Heidegger, truth is thus “unconcealment” (Unverborgenheit) of things themselves. In cinéma vérité, the “truth” is intersubjective, it is truth between people. In the films of cinéma vérité, there is an intriguing fabric of real emotions, ideas, and lies which can be called one kind of truth. Perhaps it is this which Picasso meant by famously calling art “a lie that tells the truth.”

Having been exposed to cinema in the company of the greatest American documentary filmmakers during the New York New Wave, Clarke was most definitely aware of direct cinema and cinéma vérité, though their distinction might not have appeared as clear as it does from the privileged vantage point of temporal distance. She even makes direct reference to Eisenstein and Vertov in The Connection both of whom (anachronistically speaking since they, of course, made their films in the 1920′s and the 1930′s) would be closer to cinéma vérité than direct cinema [4]. Clarke finds her own film historical position in the movement of New American Cinema which bloomed in between of the dying old studio era of classical Hollywood and the rising era of New Hollywood. In terms of film aesthetics, she might join the realist camp as many others of New American Cinema, but she could also be considered as a member of the formalist camp in closeness to Eisenstein. Thus it seems most appropriate to locate her somewhere in between. The way I see it, she belongs to the same world of cinema with Rouch and his mild anti-realism (see above), though their cinemas are also vastly different. In this case, however, their similarities overcome their differences: both of them approach realism and objectivity precisely by challenging them.

The Connection as a Thesis on Cinematic Realism

As a case study for Clarke’s cinematic position, The Connection would work marvelously, but it also appears as a thesis on the philosophical or meta-cinematic questions which interested Clarke. In order to uncover this, it is necessary to study the film closer. To recall, Clarke’s debut feature follows one day in the life of a two-men documentary film crew (Dunn and Burden) and their subjects (the heroin-addicted musicians) from the dawn of the day to another pointless sunrise.

Although The Connection is a fiction film, it begins by orienting the spectator to watch it as a documentary [5]. It begins with the cinematographer of the documentary, Burden reading a statement (in voice-over), appearing as text on screen, about his and the director’s project. In the following scene, the spectator follows the apartment slowly waking up where Leach is surrounded by sleeping drug-addicts and talks to the camera directly, establishing the scene. A little later all this turns out to be a film within a film, but -- interestingly enough -- this “revealing material”, showing Dunn the director, for example, has been shot with cameras that belong to the diegetic space. In other words, there is no non-diegetic off-screen space [6]. All off-screen space is diegetic. The whole diegetic world is reality. Dunn is often seen in the shots of the “revealing material” either as passive or as a second camera operator, whereas Burden remains in the diegetic off-screen space for most of the film with the exception of one shot where his figure is seen reflected on a window (judging by the duration of the shot, this is most likely intentional; judging by the nature of the film, this is most likely irrelevant). The structure of the film is dominated by a dialectics between these two levels: the film and the film within the film which, not surprisingly perhaps, cannot be separated from one another in any absolute sense [7].

Stylistically, Clarke’s film also situates between classically separated tendencies. Clarke uses long takes where the characters address the camera directly but also shorter takes and denser editing rhythm. The music is diegetic jazz played by the musicians, though it often seems to outgrow the diegetic space and become non-diegetic as if a higher level of discourse. Once again: it might be best to see it as something in between of them. The potential of the off-screen space is utilized to a large extent: the characters often talk to the camera residing there, they refer to characters or states of affairs beyond the framing, the bathroom where the characters receive their fixes from Cowboy is never shown, and the versatile movement of the camera (slow, fast, tracking shot, tilt, pan) both reveals and conceals the off-screen space.

As mentioned above, it is especially interesting that all these elements belong to the diegetic space. Of course, there still is the camera Clarke is using but since the film constantly draws attention to the fact that Burden is using the camera, the spectator finds it specifically difficult to keep a distance between the camera as a vehicle used by the characters in the diegetic space and the camera as a physical instrument used by Clarke or as an abstract entity created by Clarke’s cinema (an abstracted other perceiving the diegetic events). Even the sudden, recurring cuts to black seem diegetic by nature as they indicate the cracking of Dunn and Burden’s film material, though on some higher level of discourse they might articulate the artificial nature of cinema. The only thing, perhaps, which one could consider non-diegetic is the montage, the editing space (to use Bordwell’s concept) which is the space constructed by the relations between different shots. For example, there is a quick montage toward the end which reflects Leach’s drug delirium as he overdoses. Certainly this articulate montage (which takes a huge leap away from the notion of direct cinema) seems cut-off from the diegetic world. On the other hand, one could still see this as diegetic in the sense that Burden (as stated in the prologue text of the film) has edited the film in the diegetic world of the film (in a later time in the fabula never seen in the syuzhet). The film within the film and the film coalesce in a way unknown to most films about films. The question “what we perceive when we watch a film” starts getting too complex for film scholars to address.

These issues about the relations between the diegetic and the non-diegetic levels in The Connection give rise to problematic questions about narrative. Following Edward Branigan’s (1992) categorization of eight levels of film narrative, we can, again for our purposes, make two important distinctions. First, there is diegetic and non-diegetic narrative. The latter is the type of narrative where a purported narrator outside the diegetic world (and often from the perspective of temporal distance as if the purported narrator was telling a story that had happened in the past) provides diegetic information, whereas the former is the type of narrative where a character, who belongs to the diegetic world, provides diegetic information. Second, there is a distinction into four types of focalization: 1) there is non-focalized character-central focalization where narrative follows the characters but does not focalize into their perspective, 2) there is external focalization where narrative follows the events the characters see without embracing their perspective, 3) there is shallow internal focalization where narrative shares what the character sees (point of view shot) or hears (point of hearing), and 4) there is deep internal focalization where narrative shares what the characters feel and think (internal monologue in the form of voice-over).

These distinctions prove helpful when trying to make something out of the problems raised in The Connection. Who is the purported narrator in the film? It seems to be Burden who uses the camera in the diegetic space. The prologue text read by him focalizes narrative into his perspective. Most of the shots are, in one sense, point of view shots from Burden’s perspective which would make the film’s narrative shallow internal focalization. This focalization is challenged in three senses, however. First, the first scene where Leach addresses the camera directly, introducing himself and the setting, gives the spectator the opportunity to dismiss the prologue text as a detached announcement from the perspective of temporal distance. This would make the film’s narrative (at this point at least) non-focalized but character-driven or external focalization. Second, there are few shots in the film which have been shot by a handheld camera by Dunn. This is also shallow internal focalization but it provides a challenge for Burden’s ubiquitous voice. In one of these shots, a character talks to Dunn’s camera directly as Dunn tries to walk away from him. Thus there is an intriguing dialogue between different levels of narrative not only in this shot, of course, but also in the whole film which is characterized by a constant, challenging dialectics of different levels. Third, Burden remains a non-defined character, a type if you will, in the film whose perspective, which narrative might focalize into, thus amounts to pretty much nothing but a quasi-objective point of view whose objectivism is yet challenged by the whole of the film.

Despite the dominant narrator being Burden, there still seems to remain the question concerning the ontological status of the narrator. Even if Burden was a character belonging to the diegetic world, thus a diegetic narrator, the film still seems to have narrative beyond him. One factor motivating such a doubt is the aforementioned montage depicting Leach’s drug delirium. In a sense, the montage could be considered a device crafted by Dunn or Burden at a diegetically later time, but the cinematic device still draws attention to itself, making narrative self-aware rather than transparent, which easily makes the spectator aware of the author’s (Clarke) presence. One option is also to consider the film such avantgarde cinema that it cannot be conceived of as a form of narrative. As such, The Connection would be beyond narrative. To my mind, it seems most appropriate to say that at its highest level The Connection is indeed beyond narrative, but there are also lower levels of narrative in the film: abstract third person narrative, Burden’s perspective, Dunn’s handheld camera, Leach’s dominant voice etc.

Considering the fact that The Connection comes across as a film cinematically articulating the juxtaposition of different levels of narrative and reality (the diegetic and the non-diegetic), it is, to my mind, best seen as a cinematic thesis on cinematic realism. The film not only challenges the purported ability of direct cinema’s observational mode to expose and objectively observe reality without infiltration but also the purported directness of cinema in general. The most notable realist theorist of cinema is the French critic André Bazin whose thought serves as a clear counterpoint to what Clarke seems to be talking about.

In one scene of The Connection, Leach wonders why people do not die when they are constantly being bombarded by particles of light traveling the speed of light. In other words, how can people even exist without dying, non-existing. Though Leach’s characterization of light as particle-like might feel dated even in the historical context of the 60′s, it does strike a familiar chord with anyone who has read their Bazin. To Bazin, film is born in the objective, unobtrusive, causal process where rays of light hit the lens of the camera. In this process, real moments die on film where they attain their seeming immortality. In another scene of The Connection, Dunn explains to the musicians that if he shoots his hand with a camera, his hand stops being a hand, it becomes something else -- which makes one of the musicians to comment ironically that now the director is taking their hands away from them. Dunn is a Bazinian: the cinematic image is a model through which the real object is seen; the image is the model, and the object becomes the model. In the end of the film, in the stylish high-angle full shot of the set, Dunn realizes the sadness of this process as he himself achieves seeming immortality only by dying a little: he gets up and tells the camera, Burden behind it, and the audience: “It’s all over. It’s all yours now.”

This phrase “It’s all yours now” means that the objects and the states of affair in the diegetic space, in its past and present, have lost their being to Dunn and his subjects. On another level, it means that they have lost their being to all the characters as Clarke hands their immortal existence to the audience. They belong to us now. This loss is essential to cinematic realism. Photographs and cinematic images wear reality out, as Susan Sontag thinks. We get something else, a model, which carries something real and non-representational to it, but also something unreal and representational. We win and we lose in the game of cinematic realism.

Clarke announces the limits of cinematic realism in this line and the whole development behind it, but her thesis is not verbal but cinematic. It is based on the aforementioned interplay between different levels of narrative and reality. It is articulated as constant interaction between the subjects and the filmmakers, the camera and the characters, Clarke and her subjects, the film and the audience. It is especially interesting how the camera of the film (whose camera?) begins to lose its interest in the characters and thus starts to observe the details of the space. When one character tells the camera (Burden’s camera, on one level at least) a story, Burden demands visual interest to his story-telling; as a result, the man starts throwing a hoop of some kind and the camera follows it back-and-forth rolling on the ground by means of panning. In the end, the camera abandons the man with his story and starts following an insect on the wall until a surprising sound of a drum cymbal from an off-screen source interrupts the camera’s attention and takes it back to the medium shot of the characters in the space.

This insect might come across as an ironic comment on the Barthesque l’effet de réel, since it does not seem to signify anything but rather appear as a reminder of reality. It might be a found object, un objet trouvée, in the built studio location of Clarke’s film or a carefully placed element in the space for the shot, but its function is to give out an impression of reality. As the camera lingers on the bug, however, its presence seems to transcend the mere function of l’effet de réel as if it became a synecdoche for nothingness. To J. Hoberman, “the lengthy shot of a cockroach crawling up the wall occasioned by the drug-altered consciousness of the filmmaker within the film is a funny, daring bit of nothingness” [8]. As such, it is once again something that becomes something else when filmed, something that loses a part of itself, something that dies a little to become a little immortal, something that is all ours.

To sum things up, it feels tempting to formulate Clarke’s cinematic thesis on cinematic realism. Although such an attempt to put something that is non-verbal into a verbal form might be doomed, it still seems worthwhile to do so in order to clarify what has been said above. If the notion of cinematic realism entails that the cinematic image enables a direct or an indirect perception of the object through the image, Clarke challenges this notion by emphasizing not really the indirectness of cinema but its artificiality and its inevitable fall into narrative from a perspective. Film is always a point of view from somewhere and its realism -- to which it seems to be doomed like man to freedom and existence -- is always an artifact. This artificiality, however, does not need to be absolute; there is room, as mentioned above, for grades of realism and objectivity which is best grasped by the phenomenological notion of truth not as correspondence or coherence but as disclosure of things themselves, which is a disclosure that is always historical, meaning-laden, and mediated. Thus I present the following formulation for Clarke’s thesis:

(i) Cinema can only record objects or states of affairs limited by boundary conditions (the frame, all the screen spaces in the film, the duration, editing, the position of the camera etc.).

(ii) The world as a whole (all the objects and the states of affairs or some of them from all the perspectives) cannot be recorded from the outside because cinema can never step beyond the boundary conditions that limit its abilities.

(iii) Therefore, the world as a whole must be recorded from within.

In other words, if cinematic realism claims that a film can capture the world as it is, the world as a whole, so to speak, Clarke’s The Connection seems to claim that this is impossible because the film is always a film, an artificial product narrated from a point of view, created by someone with a more or less clear purpose, and therefore recording only some aspects of a whole. It is thus appropriate that Clarke has not made the film in a real apartment but a fake one which looks very real. The illusion is convincing. Due to these problems, cinema must capture the world as it is, the world as a whole, from within; that is to say, cinema must recognize itself and become self-aware in its quest for truth and reality. This sheds light on the aforementioned paradox of cinéma vérité: how it actually gets closer to truth and reality as well as their purported objectivity by precisely going against them. Film must become film within a film which is what happens to Rouch’s Chronique d’un été and Clarke’s The Connection. Cinema must become “endocinema,” or cinema-from-within, a self-aware cinema that knows its limitations and its true identity [9].

It’s All Over

In this essay, I have explored Shirley Clarke’s The Connection by looking at its style, narrative, and its connections to two modes of documentary cinema. I have claimed that The Connection stems from direct cinema and cinéma vérité, but it goes against the former while it embraces the latter. Clarke’s cinematic position lies historically in New American Cinema and philosophically in the anti-realist tendencies of Rouch. The cinematic thesis of Clarke’s film on cinematic realism was formulated as an argument against the limits of cinema and for a new kind of cinema from within.

While I have relentlessly limited the discussion to the question of cinematic realism, it should be mentioned that Clarke’s film has a lot more to it as well. It discusses interracial relations, drug issues, and class conflicts in the 60′s North-America as well as alienation in general. What is more, The Connection reflects enduring existentialist themes not only in Leach’s speech about particles of light but also in one musician’s speech to Dunn where he accuses the filmmakers of their attempt to make their subjects “a microcosm of self-annihilation.” The way I see it, these social and existentialist themes should not be seen as another district distinguished from the film-theoretic theme of realism but rather as elements of the same cinematic exploration of the world because Clarke’s film-theoretic questions are both metaphysical (what is the essence of film, if it has one, and what is its mode of existence) and existentialist (the raison d’être of cinema).

Unlike any other art form, film is doomed to be real(ist). It is tormented by the curse of realism. Literature is allowed to take liberties in its techniques of stream of consciousness and free indirect discourse where it often loses its tight grip on a clear reality. Even if painting, sculpture, and architecture are as concrete as it gets in the material they utilize, they are still allowed to attain abstraction from material reality. In cinema, on the other hand, one can see its curse of realism not only in its mechanic nature (how film always has a causal connection to reality due to its method of mechanic reproduction) but also in the way how spectators and film critics of daily newspapers often over-emphasize what David Bordwell calls realistic motivation (how elements in a film are made and organized as they are in order to give an impression of realism) at the expense of other cinematic aspects.

The Connection is an attempt to break free. It tries to be real by uncovering the difficulties of realism. It is realist in the modest sense, in the (post)modern sense of endocinema. It studies the world from within in exploring cinema from within. It repels the curse of realism by embracing it. In the company of many other films from the same period, it marks the beginning of something new in the end of something else, the being born a little in dying a little. To William Blick, The Connection “may be short on plot and character development, but is technically innovative and reminds the viewer of the unlimited potential of cinema” [10]. Precisely. The unlimited potential of cinema is what Clarke captures in her images which can simultaneously be one thing and another. In its revolutionary nature of breaking free, Clarke’s The Connection reveals what cinema could be.

Note on the source:

The main source used for the factual information about Shirley Clarke in writing this post is Milestone’s excellent Project Shirley, a project established to promote the cinema of Shirley Clarke, and their press kit. Take a look at: http://www.projectshirley.com/connection.html

Notes:

[1] It is obvious that this movement is not part of what is generally called “the new wave” (the modern film movement starting in France in the late 50′s and early 60′s from where it spread to East-Europe and other parts of the world, including the United States in the movement known as New Hollywood), but since some have taken the liberty to call the most significant Canadian directors of the 1980′s the Toronto New Wave (Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, Philip Borsos), I see no harm in calling the New American Cinema the “New York New Wave”.

[2] Such a claim is made, for example, in Project Shirley. Read their press kit especially. The claim is repeated in many articles written after the release of the project.

[3] The interesting thing about Titicut Follies in this case is that even as a landmark of direct cinema, it seems to go against the movement’s central ideas, especially in Wiseman’s use of montage to make meanings very explicit (the scene where an inmate of the mental institution for the criminally insane is being forced to drink is juxtaposed with the scene depicting the cold, bureaucratic burial of a fellow inmate).

[4] Let it be emphasized that I am talking about philosophical proximity rather than similarity here. Certainly the films of Eisenstein and Vertov are not cinéma vérité; they are something completely different.

[5] Apparently some contemporary critics actually thought the film was a documentary. This article claims that Variety called The Connection “a documentary”, though I have not found the original article by Variety.

[6] Traditionally, the cinematic space is distinguished into the screen space and the off-screen space, which is further distinguished into diegetic off-screen space (the spatial areas which belong to the fictive world of the film but are not seen in the frame) and non-diegetic off-screen space (the spatial areas which do not belong to the fictive world of the film and are not seen in the frame; for example, the spatial position taken by the camera).

[7] The way I see it, the separation, however, does finally take place in the use of closing credits. I was actually surprised that Clarke even used them (I assume they have not been added to the print I saw because they were rolling on top of the last shot which even continued after the credits for a short period of time).

[8] http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2012/05/05/talking-smack-about-junk-shirley-clarke-connection/

[9] Endocinema, a term I am making up just right now, comes from the words “cinema” and the Greek word “endon” (ἔνδον) which means “within”, “to contain”, or “inner”. See the term “endophysics” used by some quantum physicists to emphasize the limitations on the objectivity of the physical sciences.

[10] http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/the_connection/

References:

Branigan, Edward. 1992. Narrative Comprehension and Film. Oxon: Routledge.

Nichols, Bill. 2001. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

#The Connection #Shirley Clarke #1960's #American #New American Cinema

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