Cool Connection

ON A STREET IN HARLEM, New York, in 1963, a Black child runs back and forth.

- Carlos Valladares

We hear Dizzy Gillespie’s swift trumpet runs. We also hear teenager Duke Custis (Rony Clanton) singing the praises of owning a gun: ‘You ge yourself a piece, everything opens up for you.’ He wants to get a gun to become the feared leader of the Royal Pythons gang. The child’s ball rolls down the street. Dizzy plays fast and faster. Duke picks up the ball. He tosses it back and the kid keeps running. Duke looks up at a street sign he has seen, sees and will always see: ‘West 120th Street’.

It’s 1970. In a London flat full of artists, sitting between Jacques Rivette and Yoko Ono, American filmmaker Shirley Clarke is being interviewed for French television. She’s the white director of the aforementioned film, The Cool World (1963). Clarke says she is afraid of being seen as superficial. She does not want to deal with ‘broad clichés’ in her work. ‘In order to avoid this, I tend to look obliquely.’

Yet, her adaptation of Warren Miller’s 1959 novel – then-attorney Frederick Wiseman’s first film production – doesn’t paint the full picture. On the one hand, it aims to present a kind of urban life ‘as it