On Shirley Clarke's 'The Connection'

The Bad Sex Award, crowning a writer deemed to have written the most mortifying sex scene(s) that year, has been handed out annually by the Literary Review since 1993. Past winners include Tom Wolfe, Giles Coren (for a book in which the narrator compares his ejaculating dick to a shower-head dropped in the bath) and Morrissey. The enterprise, while certainly adding to the gaiety of the nation, is in many ways a rather dispiriting one, which errs on the side of sex-shaming, and which trades in a peculiarly British way of smirking at or being disgusted by sex.

Of course, what makes the passages singled out for lols seem funny is the fact that by the time the words are out they are already old-hat, absurd, obsolete. Put down on the page by their authors at the height of their horn, these words needed to be immediate to have any power - they seized an aspect of their writer's libido at a particular stage, and - as that fuck-want disappeared, so the words themselves came to seem ridiculous. Have a look again at some of your own sexts, perhaps: hardly the most sophisticated stuff, I'll warrant; and yet, when you bashed out your fervent fuck-me the words may have seemed more potent than any more timeless I-love-you. The best writers of sex have a way of tackling the act that at once gets to the grips with all the dumb, fun, sweaty mechanics of the thing, while making the moment feel universal, un-bound by time.

This is because nothing ages more creakily than the very immediate. Slang, haircuts and the avant-guarde sometimes, perhaps unfairly, seem to rust all too quickly: we can only associate these things with their time, which fossilizes them like a bug in amber. When I studied Accidental Death of an Anarchist at university, the experience was eye-opening: Fo was awarded the Nobel prize for his extraordinarily vivid, piercing, politically astute writing - and yet, now, once you have said that Fo was a politically-minded Italian playwright of the 60s through to the 80s, you have pretty much said all that can be said about the literary qualities of his work.

These questions, and a few other besides, came to mind recently when watching Shirley Clarke's interesting, experimental early work The Connection, about a bunch of junkies waiting for their man, which came out in 1961. The film is styled as a kind of "found footage" movie centring on the work of a director filming crack users in their den. The junkies address the camera directly and challenge the director to try drugs himself. Finally the dealer arrives, culminating in a still fairly bracing scene depicting a character shooting up.

One idea that the film brings up is how we watch and assess films of the past: do we consider them as products of their time, making allowances for various bits of wear and tear over the years? Or do we look at them anew, trying to see them with fresh eyes, devoid of these considerations? My feelings about the film kept coming back, dispiritingly, to the particular time and place of its genesis: I couldn't divorce it from its era, could somehow not engage with it as much more than an interesting museum piece under a bell jar. Most of this boils down to the elements of the film that, while they may have been burningly modern when Clarke's film first showed in Cannes, now seem rather hoary: the improvisatory dialogue; the screentime allotted to woozy jazz fugues; the camera's freewheeling busy-body gaze; the "found film" conceit and breaking of the fourth wall; the drug terminology; the wobbly attitude to race, which sees the movie's black characters mostly take a back-seat; and the stuttering acting style born out of New York's theatre scene, where cardboard-y line readings rub up against some far more beatnik stylings. All of this looks elderly now.

This isn't to say that it isn't good - the black-and-white lensing pops nicely, and Clarke has plenty of ideas; edits between scenes, which fizzle or burn out like stock overrunning, are a good touch and contribute to the film's excellent understanding of time. In the movie, the boredom and inertia, the jonesing of these men, ebb and flow, and time seems to fold in on itself or stretch out, druggily enough. Clarke is good at faces, and the cast give great face; the camera, wheedling its way among them, getting up in their grill, seizing snatches of light here and there, helps create a kind of iconography of what Baudelaire called spleen. Also, by having the story centre on a filmmaker who interferes with and exploits the drug users, Clarke is able to distance herself from that sensationalising instinct, or perhaps lightly mock herself for it.

But the issue with The Connection is that it is a film of sensations - of discovery, of novelty - and when those have worn off, what you are left with is bound to lack welly. More than this: the lack of stuff here shows up some of the film's artifices. In particular, the latent 'coolness' of the movie seems a touch on the tedious side now, trading on counter-culture and blackness to gain some edge. Carl Lee, arriving late in the movie as 'Cowboy', the dealer, lends so much presence to proceedings - and there is ambiguity here, as J.J., the filmmaker within the film, is shown as being compromised by his own ideas and preconceptions of Cowboy, to whom he seems to be in thrall. Clarke understands the complexity of the author/subject relationship, and seems to grasp how awkwardly it intersects with race. And yet - still the film, I think, utilises blackness to create its lexicon of otherness. This contributes to giving The Connection a queasy tone that sits uneasily in our times.

The Connection is a short 90 minutes, but its experimental trappings make it feel paradoxically long. The movie works best as an arresting curio or objet d'art - certain abstract sequences, in fact, would work superbly as art-film in a gallery, allowing viewers to distance themselves and regard the work critically, rather than attempt and fail to be drawn into the movie's increasingly dusty story.

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