Tongues

A 1957 rehearsal film test for a dance film inspired by Pablo Picasso's 'Family of Saltimbanques'. Anna Sokolow can be seen on the lower left of the frame. Based on the script found in Shirley Clarke's collection, this looks to be a complete version of Ms. Sokolow's choreography for Act One of the film. Plot subtitles are taken from Shirley Clarke's script. Pierrot and Pierrette's duet transformed into Shirley Clarke's 1957 dance film 'A Moment in Love'.

In 1953, Shirley Clarke went to make a film about French mime Ettiene Decroux. The legend goes that he had left town and instead, she created In Paris Parks. Not known, is that in 1955, Clarke tried a second time to make a film about Decroux. This is the unfinished workprint.

Filmmaker Shirley Clarke ("The Connection") directs this powerful, stark semi-documentary look at the horrors of Harlem ghetto slum life filled with drugs, violence, human misery, and a sense of despair due to the racial prejudices of American society. There is no patronizing of the black race in this cinematic cry for justice. A fifteen-year-old boy called Duke is ambitious to buy a "piece" (a gun) from an adult racketeer named Priest, to become president of the gang to which he belongs, and to return them to active "bopping" (gang fighting) which has declined in Harlem. It is a clearly patent allegory of an attempt by Duke to attain manhood and identity in the only way accessible to him - the antisocial one.

Eight drug addicts are waiting for their connection in a New York apartment belonging to Leach. Jim Dunn, a budding filmmaker, has agreed to pay for the fix if the addicts will allow him to film the connection.

First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. Part of the protest festival Week of the Angry Arts, the epic compilation film incorporated minute-long segments which were sent from many corners of the country, spliced together and projected. The original presentation of the works was more of an open forum with no curation or selection, and in 2000 Anthology Film Archives preserved a print featuring around 40 films from over 60 submissions.

A couple in love interacts across a multitude of environments.

A prelude to Tongues (1982) which languishes over love and its effect on people.

A highly edited work complimenting an exhibit on Persian art in the Los Angeles Museum of Art.

Beatrice Seckler rehearses a dance, filmed by Shirley Clarke in 1952.

York City's various bridges transform into an urban jungle (jazz version) or an alien landscape (electro-acoustic version).