A response to The Cool World by Pia Santaklaus

06 Augmented 2007

Hey n' Hi Brett…Again, one is inspired to write you a few lines. I didn’t expect to like this movie, but tonight’s Cinemateque feature, THE COOL WORLD (1963) [directed by Shirley Clarke], left me far more impressed and refreshed than I expected to be. It was infinitely better than I anticipated. As far as the art of good movie-making goes, I believe Shirley Clarke has created a great example with this excellent piece. I realize now that it is a most underrated work.

S.C has managed to cram so much vision and reality into this vanguard movie. Her eye for detail is astonishing. My mind boggles at how much she achieved so long ago without the benefit of today’s super-resources and technologies. She even extracted ultra-natural performances from the actors. At times I forgot it was a fictional piece.

I came away from it with a real sense that I’d just witnessed a genuine slice of the cross section of a people in the underbelly of an era that carried the seeds responsible a decade earlier for having inspired a hungry, white, awed boy called Kerouac (who desperately wanted to be black and understood their “coolness”) to invent white cool as we know it…further on, around this very period and while THE COOL WORLD was being shot, a ‘freewheelin’ Bob Dylan also knew their worth, following in Kerouac’s footsteps. It was so exciting to witness this time-capsule from the early 60s East-coast-USA in jazzy B&W. At one point we were driving through Greenwich Village and I realized that a young Dylan was actually somewhere there, in the vicinity, at the time, in some small, real dive. It blew me away. The current existing cars, clothes, dust, music, backdrops…the whole thing!

These blacks and their ilk, like their fathers and their ilk, provided the basis of cool attitude that moved the Beats to imitate them. I wonder if there are any movies of the same period that might portray in a similar realistic aesthetic the white outcasts and hipsters of society.

Interestingly, such desperate violent undercurrent in parts of America were being mirrored and building in the UK simultaneously. During this period (63), even a young Andrew Loog Oldham (soon to manage The Rolling Stones) was being massively inspired by the book of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and would later try to buy the rights to use it as a movie vehicle for the Stones. It’s all part of a connected web as the youth of the UK were digging US jazz and Beat poetry at the time. I’m so impressed by Shirley Clarke’s force. I can see how her independence, strength of vision and dedication to pure messages probably rubbed the conservative movie industry the wrong way and so they ignored her, robbing her of great kudos. Good choice of movie Brett.