Uptown Girl: The Cinema of Shirley Clarke

Overview

Provocateur. Feminist. Filmmaker. Shirley Clarke, one of the key but often overlooked figures of the New American Cinema, will be the focus of a retrospective at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) starting later this month.

A feature of the New York cinema verite movement during the '50s and '60s, Clarke’s films regularly explored controversial issues of race and class disparity. Her first feature, The Connection, told the story of a fictional documentary filmmaker following a group of African-American drug addicts. The movie was acclaimed when it screened at the Cannes Film Festival, but faced censorship in the United States. Later works dealt with similar themes, including her quintessential documentary Portrait of Jason, cited by director Ingmar Bergman as "the most extraordinary film I've seen in my life."

Uptown Girl: The Cinema of Shirley Clarke will showcase some of Clarke’s most iconic features and shorts, many of them newly restored by Milestone Films and the New York Museum of Modern Art.