In Paris Parks

synopsis

A playful film which captures a quiet afternoon in a park in central Paris: playing children, fairground rides, walking couples, men playing croquet. The optimistic mood is complemented with playful music and the dynamic editing shows authorʼs enthusiasm for the newly discovered form of artistic expression.

“Dancer, bride, runaway wife, radical filmmaker and pioneer — Shirley Clarke is one of the great undertold stories of American independent cinema. A woman working in a predominantly male world, a white director who turned her camera on black subjects, she was a Park Avenue rich girl who willed herself to become a dancer and a filmmaker, ran away to bohemia, hung out with the Beats and held to her own vision in triumph and defeat. She helped inspire a new film movement and made urgently vibrant work that blurs fiction and nonfiction, only to be marginalized, written out of histories and dismissed as a dilettante.” — Manohla Dargis

biography

Shirley Clarke (1919–1997) was an American director and university teacher, initially a dancer and a choreographer. In the 1950s she made short films and later she directed various documentaries and feature films. She was active in the feminist movement and her work is often included in the New American Cinema.

more about film

director:

Shirley Clarke