Shirley Clarke's THE COOL WORLD (1963)

The Cool World, which is a *difficult film to see in the 21st century, is not a perfect film but one that grabbed me and wouldn't let me go for its 105 minute run-time in showing me an imperfect world (and then some), and that still feels special and vital to me, especially as I get older.  

It's one thing to see an independent work, something very much on the fringes or the "Avant-Garde" as it was called (another way to put it is just outside of Hollywood, and that could be Stanley Kubrick with his first film Killer's Kiss or what Stan Brakhage was doing or Cassavetes with Shadows), and to appreciate it under Sociological grounds like "Oh, here's how this world was at the time, isn't that interesting" blah-blah-blah.  It's another to see a director sort of throttle you to the ground with their honest approach to showing the world.  The Cool World does that much the same way that Night of the Living Dead would do a few years after this, though that got more widely seen because it fit a little more (and transgressed harder) into genre.  

But I felt that same ethos of Romero's here, that idea of "my filmmaking *doesn't lie to you, even if it might be f*cked up*" through the entire story of Duke (Clanton), who is a very young guy who feels, whether justified or not, that he has no prospects or hopes outside of being the head of his gang, the Pythons, and he slowly rises to being the head of the gang.  This is not necessarily because he does anything all that impressive to his fellow young "Gang" - except, maybe, the way he hits a breaking point and pushes away the drug addict Blood (Clarence Williams III, in an early and Holy Shit this Guy is Going Places kind of performance ala Samuel L Jackson in Jungle Fever) - but because who else is going to do it and has the ambition to do so is the thing.  Plus, we are following him and hear his voice-over, which has that edge to it like anyone who is 14 or 15 and really discombobulated because it is time to be an adult and to be BIG and imposing, but you don't understand your brain is still developing.

What we are seeing is Shirley Clarke, and Carl Lee (who plays Priest, another excellent and understated performance, and the co-writer of the film), find an aesthetic and approach to life that is much closer to the Italian Neo-Realism just several years before, only this does not give the sort of Melodramatic release valves of those stories like with a musical score that tells us "Oh, This is Where It Gets Sad" or something like that (or, I am re-editing to add, the NYC Los Olvidados)  The score is all jazz, performed by Dizzy Gillespie, and much of the movie is jumpy and kind of making it up as it goes along.  That does lead to some seams from time to time, or a performance or two that is flat (Rodriguez as Luanne, though that may be intentional on Clarke's part give how Luanne is so closed off from the world she doesn't know the Atlantic ocean is... a subway ride away), but this is one of those times I can sort of look past that, or just accept it as part of the film, because of how rebellious and free the style and approach to the world we are seeing is.

Maybe context is part of it, the fact that at the time no one (at least in America, maybe in Britain a bit) was doing cinema like this, taking cameras off of their typical Dolly tracks and putting them on shoulders and showing working class and even criminal life in such a way that there was little in the way of distance (especially with Black American life - a couple of pictures on a wall of Hollywood actors one of the kids has featuring Sidney Poitier is a reminder of the barrier just being pushed at the time).  Again, when I say this is great it is more in that it is special; at the same time, there is real drama drawn here, scenes where Clarke with her cast is creating dramatic stakes, like the scene with Duke's mother (Gloria Foster, also wonderful), who keeps building little by little over a scene until it is clear, at least to Duke, why he can't stay at home and has to break out into whatever he is going to do.

The Cool World shows youth in Harlem that is messy, out of control, care-free, more status than money obsessed, and yet the grit of the environment doesn't mean there isn't beauty to be seen, so many non-professional on-the-go shot sort of faces filmed on the streets, that makes Clanton's own performance even more resonant.  It shows Black life in NYC in all of its dimensions, of desperation and spots of joy (the Coney Island escape scenes), the discrimination, the violence, the power dynamics.

I don't know if everyone else coming to this, however that might be, will have the same experience I did but I can only express what I felt watching it which was like getting a time portal into a place and period (and through the narration, a raw and unbridled mindset) that hard and tough but also sort of redeemed in a way by the black and white 35mm cinematography and the unpredictable editing and that irresistible Gillespie and Mal Waldron score.  This deserves one of those super-packed 4K disc releases with art work that you can put on the wall at the MoMA.  

(*kind of wild that it is, though perhaps lending to the same reason all of Frederick Wiseman's films are, of which this was his first film as a producer, as control of the rights is important to not muck up by a distributor... for now),