The Connection
Classic Cinema
•
1h 42m
Directed by Shirley Clarke | 110 mins | 1961
“Shirley Clarke’s The Connection based on and adapted by Jack Gelber is a film way ahead of its time. Arguably the first film to use the “found footage” trope to tell a fictional story. This film blew my mind when I first saw it, the direction and the performances are incredible, I’m hesitant to say too much. We find ourselves in the apartment of Jazz musician and heroin addict Leach as we wait for their dealer to arrive before they can’t start shooting their documentary.”–Devonté Hynes
Reimagining Jack Gelber’s controversial off-Broadway play about a group of addicts—many of them jazz musicians—waiting for a fix, Clarke changed the slumming writer companion of the original to a fly-on-the-wall filmmaker out of the cinema verité scene. The result was a cross-examination of documentary ethics, a demonstration of freewheeling camerawork that erased the material’s stagebound origins while swinging along to the original jazz score, a cause célèbre of New American Cinema—and a target for eager censors across the United States, who assured The Connection would for a long time be more influential than it was screened. Well, it’s still around.
Up Next in Classic Cinema
-
The Draughtsman's Contract
Directed by Peter Greenaway | 104 mins | 1982
Greenaway’s 1982 arthouse breakthrough, a 17th-century murder mystery in which an aristocratic wife (Janet Suzman) commissions a young, cocksure draughtsman (Anthony Higgins) to sketch her husband’s seemingly idyllic property while he is away—in excha... -
The Falls
Directed by Peter Greenaway | 239 mins | 1980
Greenaway’s first feature, an epic mock documentary in 92 parts that catalogs the aftermath of a mysterious “Violent Unknown Event” that has killed many people, and left survivors suffering from symptoms including strange dreams and mutations into bir... -
The Queen
Directed by Frank Simon | 68 mins | 1968
Welcome to the 1967 Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant, held at New York’s Town Hall! Simon’s essential document of queer history takes us backstage to rehearsals and dressing rooms at a drag competition organized by Flawless Sabrina, and judged by a pa...
