Shirley Clarke
Shirley Clarke Shirley actually Brimberg Clarke ( born October 2, 1919 in New York City, New York, † September 23, 1997 in Boston ) was an American film director and film producer.
Life
Shirley was born in New York City, the daughter of a Polish father. Her mother was the daughter of a Latvian earned multi-millionaire made his fortune as a manufacturer and inventor. Her sister was the writer Elaine Dundy. She attended Stephens College, Johns Hopkins University, Bennington College and the University of North Carolina.
Clarke studied with choreographers such as Martha Graham, Hanya Holm and Doris Humphrey. She took dance classes at these schools and initially began an artistic career as a dancer in the New York avant-garde (a modern dance movement). As a success failed to materialize as a choreographer, her hit her psychiatrist before a career change. After her marriage and the birth of a daughter, Clarke turned to film and cinema area and has become a recognized filmmaker and this at a time when few women were active in this field. Her first works were short films that reflected their love of dance. Your first movie Dance in the Sun she turned in 1953 with Daniel Nagrin. From the New York Dance Film Society, he was voted the best dance movie of the year.
For her film, The Connection, 1961, she received a lot of praise for the choreography and the unglamorous portrayal of drug use. For the film, The Cool World, she worked with Carl Lee, an African American star, with whom she was privately until his death in 1986, friends. In 1963, Clarke made a documentary film about the poet Robert Frost, entitled A Lover's Quarrel with the World ( roughly " The quarrel of lovers with the world" ). This film was made a few months before his death and shows Frost at lectures and privately at home. This work was awarded Best Documentary at the Academy Awards 1964 in the category.
After Clarke despite some successes was barely financial support for their film projects, she taught from 1975 to 1985 in the field of film and video production at the University of California, Los Angeles. During this time, she turned more documentaries like Ornette: Made in America, a portrait of the eccentric musical genius Ornette Coleman.
Shirley Clarke died in 1997 in Boston of a stroke.