Whose Film? Our Film: Shirley Clarke's The Cool World

Whose Film? Our Film: Shirley Clarke's The Cool World Jaimie Baron (bio) We have today a vast and detailed record of the past century preserved on film. Yet there are absences in this record, some of which do damage to our historical consciousness and ability to learn from the past. 1 Thousands of films are simply gone, either destroyed or never preserved. 2 In other cases, films are absent because public access to them is restricted, constituting an antidemocratic withholding of potential historical knowledge and understanding. The unjustifiably limited distribution of The Cool World (Shirley Clarke, 1963) is one example. The film tells the story of Richard "Duke" Custis (Hampton Clanton), a Black teenage boy living in Harlem, whose only End Page 158 goal is to acquire a gun so that he can become the leader of his gang, thereby attaining respect from his peers. His desire for some form of power within a racist context that has denied him any is presented in the film as both reasonable and tragic. More importantly than its specific content, however, it was one of the first films shot on location in Harlem, its cast included numerous non-professional actors who lived in Harlem, and it modeled a cross-cultural (or at least subcultural) collaborative form of filmmaking long before that was a defined concept or practice. Of the approximately 126 US feature films released in 1963, The Cool World was the only US film directed by a woman, and it is listed on the Library of Congress's National Film Registry, which was founded in 1988 "to ensure the survival, conservation and increased public availability of America's film heritage. "3 Despite all these important credentials, access to The Cool World is extremely limited. Notably, The Cool World was produced entirely outside the auspices of the Hollywood studios. Although directed and edited by Clarke, the film was produced by Frederick Wiseman, who financed the film by recruiting numerous small investors (the same way Broadway plays are often financed). As a result, Wiseman's production company Zipporah Films owns the rights to the film. Currently, Zipporah Films rents a VHS tape or 16mm print for educational purposes, including public performance rights, for 400. 4 The Library of Congress holds the original negative and will rent a 35mm print to those who can show it. 5 For those who do not have access to a film projector or a VHS player or 400, an illegal, bootleg version of the film circulates as a digital file, but its sound and image quality are low, and yellow French subtitles are burned into the file. When I asked Zipporah Films why the film has not been digitized, I was informed that they "have not had the financial resources to digitize the film yet since we are currently working on digitizing the other Wiseman films that are not available in DCP Digital Cinema Package. "6 If the issue is indeed simply one of money, the Library of Congress or a private donor should step in and fund the digitization. Here are the reasons why. The Cool World was an important early instance of collaborative filmmaking across racial lines, and its production history offers important lessons for negotiating the complexities of such collaboration. It was the first feature film not only to be shot on location in Harlem but also with a multi-racial crew and a cast that employed many non-professional Black actors living in that neighborhood, including the teenage star Hampton Clanton. Indeed, this film was an unprecedented collaborative project involving numerous people of diverse backgrounds at different stages in the film's realization. It was, moreover, a radical act for a Jewish woman in 1963 to transform a novel about Harlem written by a white man (Warren Miller) into a film script in close collaboration with a Black man (Carl Lee), with major roles cast and End Page 159 performed by actual Black Harlem residents. And, as Black writer and activist June Jordan, who worked as an assistant to Wiseman on the film, puts it, it was "the only feature film about what it means to be Black in a racist white country from. . .