“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. She died in 1997 at 77 and is long overdue for a reappraisal.”
— Manohla Dargis, New York Times
“Shirley Clarke was a gorgeously baroque and complex personality, a character worthy of a novel or two. But what she did as a filmmaker, the subjects she chose, and how she related as a director to her medium has become so much a part of the vocabulary of cinema that her movies – ‘The Cool World,’ for instance, or ‘Ornette in America’ — are nothing less than essential.”
— John Anderson, member of the New York Film Critics Circle
“The most extraordinary film I’ve seen in my life is certainly Portrait of Jason… It is absolutely fascinating.”
— Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman