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Ornette: Made In America

Screening on Film
Directed by Shirley Clarke.
US, 1984, 35mm, 77 min.

Clarke’s free-associating, layered approach to her portrait of the legendary free jazz icon mischievously reflects the multidimensional fabric of Ornette Coleman’s inventive, radical approach to jazz. Initially dropping the project of filming Coleman in the Sixties, Clarke resumed production in the Eighties at the urging of producer Kathelin Hoffman, in part to document the inaugural concert of a new performing arts center opening in Coleman’s hometown of Fort Worth, Texas. Clarke magically and unpredictably blends dramatization, video collage and rhythmic editing techniques with interviews and concert footage, to craft an energetic and otherworldly journey through the cosmos of Ornette Coleman. Featuring appearances by fellow creative eccentrics like William Burroughs and Brion Gysin while conjuring the philosophies of Buckminster Fuller, Clarke’s biography dreamily sketches out the transcendental orbit Coleman has always followed while tenderly tethered to his humble beginnings in a Fort Worth ghetto. – BG

PRECEDED BY

  • Bridges-Go-Round

    Directed by Shirley Clarke.
    US, 1958, digital video, color, 4 min.
    Score by Louis and Bebe Barron.

One of her most acclaimed shorts in the loops series she made for the US pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, Bridges-Go-Round imbues inanimate steel structures with motion and emotion. Due to a copyright issue, the original electronic score by Louis and Bebe Barron which had to be replaced with a jazz score by Teo Macero. After the rights cleared, Clarke released both versions of the film, showing how profoundly the different scores alter the visual experience. The second version will screen in the shorts program on March 23.

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