Shirley Clarke is especially significant because she - along with Mary Ellen Bute, Maya Deren and Marie Menken - was a precursor of the women of today who have made a breakthrough on another level of filmmaking, sometimes known as the underground movement, sometimes as avant-garde. Like Bute, Deren and Menken, Shirley Clarke personifies through her assertiveness, her original subject matter, and her independent of Hollywood, the spirit of the new generation of women filmmakers. Clarke, who began her artistic career as a dancer, started making films in the fifties. Her avant-garde work, occasionally eerie or romantic, more often forceful and dramatic, is characterized throughout by a strong documentary undertone. At first she did a number of experimental shorts inspired by dance. They included Dance in the Sun (1953), In Paris Parks (1954), Bullfight (1955), and Moment in Love (1957, a 10-minute film in which the choreography for boy and girl moves through clouds, under water and through ruins).In 1958 she made Bussels 'Loops,' a series of fifteen shorts providing an imaginative view of the Brussels World's Fair, and Bridges Go Round, in which bridges are choreographed by the use of superimpositions and a continuously moving camera. In 1959 she was codirector of Skyscraper, which documents the construction of a skyscraper. The film won first prize at the Venice Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award. The following year she made a film for UNICEF, A Scary Time, on the topic of hunger, but it delivered its message in so shocking a way that it was never circulated. It did win a prize at Venice, however.Clarke's first full-length film, made in 1960, was The Connection, based on the Jack Gelber play about a group of narcotic addicts waiting for a delivery. The film, translated entirely into cinematic terms, was awarded the Critics' Prize at Cannes. Three years later she made the feature The Cool World, filmed in Harlem from the novel by Warren Miller. The Cool World is about a fifteen-year-old boy whose dream is to acquire a gun adn take over the leadership of a street gang. When the dream comes true and the gun is used in a gang fight, it is suddently the end of the road for the boy we have come to know an dcare about. Clarke followed that film in 1964 with a documentary on the poet Robert Frost - Robert Frost ... A Love Letter to the World - which she made at the request of John Kennedy and Stewart Udall.In 1967 she made Portrait of Jason, a 105-minute condensation of twelve hours of an uninhibited monologue by a black homosexual. That year also she created the continuity and editing concept of Man in the Polar Region, an 11-hour carousel film for Expo '67. Since then she has become involved with video to the exclusion of film. -- Sharon Smith, Women who Make Movies.[Source: Filmforum program notes, 1/31/1977. More information available here]