"The Connection" and the artist behind the curtain behind the curtain

Fifty years after it was first screened, then banned, then largely and idi­ot­ic­ally dis­missed, the auda­city of Shirley Clarke’s 1962 film The Connection still packs a stag­ger­ing wal­lop. The movie, in a won­der­ful res­tor­a­tion from Milestone Films in col­lab­or­a­tion with the Film Foundation, opens again tomor­row at the IFC Center, and it’s abso­lutely unmiss­able, an unas­sail­able high-water mark for American cinema. Manohla Dargis has writ­ten about the film and its maker, pas­sion­ately and elo­quently, here; and Eric Kohn presided over a lively and inform­at­ive exchange about the movie between David Sterritt, who knew Clarke a bit, and Ann Hornaday. I have a few notions about the pic­ture I want to share, but the import­ant thing is that you go if you can. If you can­’t, the movie will hope­fully tour the coun­try’s art houses before get­ting the cus­tom­ar­ily excel­lent DVD (and hope­fully Blu-ray) treat­ment that Milestone gives its pictures.

Clarke adap­ted the film from a play by Jack Gelber that was a sen­sa­tion at the Living Theater. While it was­n’t audience-participation theat­er on the Sleep No More level, The Connection’s con­ceit was to put its audi­ence more or less in the loft apart­ment where the argu­ably too-aptly-named junkie Leach and a cohort of fel­low junk enthu­si­asts wait for the title char­ac­ter to show up. 

In film, there’s a more spe­cif­ic dis­tance between the audi­ence and the work, and Clarke and Gelber address that by mak­ing it some­thing like a found-footage film. Something like, but not quite. The pic­ture opens with a prin­ted state­ment from one J.J. Burden, who announces that what the audi­ence is about to see is the assembly of the foot­age he shot at the behest of a dir­ect­or who, for reas­ons unstated in the open­ing text, but which the view­er will infer by the movie’s end, became unavail­able to com­plete the film. 

Aside from the human interest of the depic­ted junkies and their vari­ous “scenes,” the strained cool of con­nec­tion “Cowboy” (played by Carl Lee, to whom Clarke was mar­ried at the time; that’s him above in the shades, with Leach por­tray­er Warren Finerty, an Ur-Steve-Buscemi if ever there was one), and the unforced demon­stra­tion of the soul-crushing power of addic­tion, The Connection’s about some­thing else, just as every Living Theater present­a­tion was. The film’s form­al inven­tions and muta­tions bring up a lot of ques­tions about both rep­res­ent­a­tion and appro­pri­ation that are all the more power­ful and inter­est­ing for nev­er being verbally stated. With the excep­tion of one wizened Salvation Army type who accom­pan­ies Cowboy on his vis­it to the den of nodded-out iniquity, all the char­ac­ters in The Connection are men, a mix of white and African American. The four mem­bers of the jazz quar­tet that “rehearses” and dozes inter­mit­tently through­out are black, and one of the oth­er junkies is Ernie (Garry Goodrow), a white fel­low who’s also a play­er, and who’s got his horn in hock (guess why), and who every now and then entreats sax­ist Jackie McLean to let him bor­row his alto, which request Jackie kindly but firmly (and wisely) refuses. While would-be “dir­ect­or” of a doc­u­ment­ary on junkie­dom Jim Dunn (William Redfield) is an arty white dilet­tante, the afore­men­tioned J.J. Burden, we see on those few occa­sions when he steps in front of the cam­era, is black. And giv­en the way some of the sub­jects address J.J., it’s clear he’s hip, or has been hip, to their scene. He’s played by Roscoe Lee Browne, who brings per­fect insinu­at­ing not-quite-diffidence to the role. There are no dis­cus­sions in the film about wheth­er a white man can play the blues, or any such thing. This is part of its wis­dom. Nick Tosches once observed: “Nothing can bet­ter bring togeth­er a black man and a white, a young man and an old, a coun­try man and a city man, than a dol­lar placed between them.” Replace “man” with “junkie” and “dol­lar” with “bag of heroin” and you’ve got the dynam­ic here, although one would be mis­taken maybe in refer­ring to such an unavoid­ably tension-fraught alli­ance as “togeth­er­ness.” 

But what Clarke does in fil­ter­ing the story through the lens of Dunn com­mand­ing Burden, and then Burden shoot­ing alone and with Burden’s “edit­ing” (Clarke is here cred­ited as both dir­ect­or and edit­or) demon­strates the way that as even “real” events are unfold­ing, the per­son con­trolling the nar­rat­ive, or try­ing to, imparts a cer­tain amount of respons­ib­il­ity to the view­er. Which is one of the things that makes The Connection such a thor­oughly engross­ing exper­i­ence, in spite of its closed-off set­ting. What’s more excit­ing is the way that Clarke ups the ante in the final sec­tion of the film. In the Sterritt/Hornaday exchange, Kohn asks “Is The Connection a satire of under­ground film and yet also an under­ground film itself?” This ques­tion rep­res­ents one of the many things that get me so exas­per­ated by cer­tain film writers: their eager­ness to ascribe their own glib­ness to the artist they’re sup­posed to be examin­ing. Hornaday and Sterritt indulge Kohn, being polite and all, and allow that Clarke was “mis­chiev­ous” but there’s a deep­er dimen­sion to the poin­ted­ness with which Dunn and the whole idea of “authen­ti­city” is treated in the film.

There’s a very funny shot dur­ing a junkie’s mono­logue dur­ing which the dis­trac­ted Dunn’s hand­held cam­era breaks its gaze off the man and decides to fol­low an insect crawl­ing up a brick wall. It’s not too long after this, though, that The Connection breaks free of its self-imposed con­straint. The char­ac­ters begin talk­ing to the cam­era less. Burden stops get­ting in front of the cam­era. Dunn is in a sense absent. A crisis occurs for one of the char­ac­ters, and the film’s edit­ing rhythms become more emphat­ic, the cam­er­a­work more stable. Having erec­ted a frame of arti­fice with­in her own frame, Clarke pulls back all of the cur­tains only to put a com­pletely new frame in place: she turns The Connection into some­thing like a con­ven­tion­al nar­rat­ive film, and that’s where she leaves it until its con­clu­sion. And the fact that she makes it into that thing, and does so with utter con­vic­tion and makes it stick, is a test­a­ment to the almost alchem­ic­al powers of cinema and an acknow­ledge­ment of her own par­ti­cip­a­tion in the pro­cess, one in which she finally deigns to fully take the reins and does so with admir­able tact and com­pas­sion and no trace of condescension…while nev­er abandon­ing a cer­tain tough-mindedness. It’s breathtaking. 

And of course one of the not entirely incid­ent­al pleas­ures of the film is see­ing and hear­ing the jazz quar­tet, led by pian­ist Freddie Redd and fea­tur­ing the afor­men­tioned Jackie McLean on alto, and Michael Mattos and Larry Ritchie on bass and drums respect­ively. All four are excep­tion­ally natural-seeming act­ors, and when they’re play­ing, you can see them sweat; the sul­len McLean of the film is, as it hap­pens, a far cry from the free-jazz enthu­si­ast por­trayed by A.B. Spellman in Four Lives In The Bebop Business, which con­tains a few of McLean’s obser­va­tions about work­ing on both the theat­er piece and the film. As for Redd, I saw him lead a quin­tet a few months ago at New York’s Small’s, and he’s still got it at 83 years of age.

UPDATE: Richard Brody, my fel­low jazz enthu­si­ast (inter­est­ingly enough, we were both read­ing Hampton Hawes’ gal­van­ic mem­oir Raise Up Off Me earli­er in the week, total coin­cid­ence) has a lot more good stuff on the movie and McLean and more, here.