Connection

This is an arthouse drama about a group of heroin addicts hanging around an apartment in Harlem, waiting for their connection to arrive with the day's fix. The characters monologize about their pathetic lives, while a few of them play jazz music. The film is presented as a documentary being filmed by a director (William Redfield) and his cameraman (Roscoe Lee Browne, in his debut). Featuring Warren Finnerty, Jerome Raphael, Jim Anderson, Barbara Winchester, Henry Proach, and Carl Lee. Shirley Clarke directed this film version of a play which structurally resembles the later mockumentary genre, only without the humor. The subject matter and the presentation ensure that this will have little appeal outside of the arthouse crowd, as most audiences will find this tedious, self-indulgent and of minimal entertainment. I applaud the effort and the intent, but the end product isn't something I'd want to revisit.

The opening text states that documentary filmmaker Jim Dunn gave all the footage to J. J. Burden who claims responsibility for putting this film together. Rather quickly, an experienced modern film watcher can pick out the obvious clues that this is a play rather than a documentary. The actors are talking too well and clearly. They are professional actors doing lines from a script, not lines lines. They don't look bad enough. Some of the actors have good hair. The black guys probably didn't trim for a week. That's not junkie enough. Then, there is the room itself. It looks like a stage. Look out windows. The fake backdrop is right there. The big giveaway is that the lighting is too good. The audience can see everything. Finally, the traditional closing credits tell the story. Then I consider the era and maybe the closing credits weren't there. Back then, the audience was probably not looking for the found footage genre. They could be fooled. Of course, Fargo still got people in the 90's although they didn't claim that it was a documentary. Looking at this like a stage play. I can see this off-Broadway. It could be edgy enough to get some attention. Like I said, the actors are solid professionals. This may be experimental back in the day, but it is well-made.

And what a stupid comment by a previous viewer. "Are all jazz musicians heroin attacks?" C'mon, there isn't a trend here, and perhaps you don't like jazz because you have no taste in music. Anyway, Shirley Clarke's cinema verite'style is put to the test , as we witness some sleazed-out New Yorkers in their subterranean dwelling, as they await their heroin "connection" -the mysterious Cowboy, played by Clarke's real-life lover, Carl Lee.

I don't know why anyone would call this realistic. It looks and feels like a play...the "acting", the overblown dialogue (almost Odets-like), etc. And unless you were a junkie in 1961, how would you know if it's realistic? And Sister Salvation? How could that possibly be real?! Noone is that clueless.

It's obviously dated for many reasons....the "lingo", the lack of serious profanity, the odd discussion of homosexuality.

Still, the film hooks you in...and I'm not exactly sure why. I guess it never really slows down. The camera tricks are cool, the band is great, some good dialogue. And the acting and characters are interesting, if not realistic.

Worth seeing...

Regular readers of my comments know I study folding, and I suggest that it is a deep concern for many filmmakers going back many decades. Most of my viewing these days comes from reader suggestions.

This is one, and very interesting. Group it with "The Saragossa Manuscript" as an early experiment, probably influential. Crude and obvious, but of historical interest.

I will describe it because it is hard to find.

Ostensibly it is a documentary drama, filmed of then contemporary jazz musicians (man, dig?) in a seedy apartment. They are there for their pooled money to turn into a pooled high, then pooled music. The thing is framed by a device: the film is made by two people, the director and a photographer. During the film, the director has his first hit of heroin, and presumably succumbs to it thereafter. The movie starts with a statement by the photographer that the director has abandoned the project and he (the photographer) has assembled it for us.

In what we call the real world, this is a play about this film-making. So to begin, it is a film about a play (a very obvious play) about a film about a "real" drama. A theory of theater at the time was that such abstraction and acknowledgment of the medium would allow the form of the reality to shine through.

It is the theatrical equivalent of an architectural notion that you can see in the Paris Museum called Pompidou, where all the structure is more than exposed, exposed in a way so obvious it is supposed to be invisible.

You may buy this. I certainly did when I was an architect in this era until I actually designed a building using it.

The difficulties of making this work are enormous.

You can see those problems here. Cowboy is the agent who brings the high. He arrives in pristine white, an articulate black man who used to be a musician and now is a savior. He brings an old woman, a salvation army warrior from 70 years earlier, incidentally 70 years old and worried about her burial.

For this, you need extremely clean images, touchstone dialog (where you jump from pad to pad without muddying yourself), and actors who understand all the folds and can inhabit them all.

This has none of that. These are street performers after the manner of "The Living Theater" which eschewed just the kind of thinking this project demands.

What we end up with is a bunch of actors with empty lives without layers who give us a layered story about a bunch of musicians with empty lives because they left layers behind.

You'll probably want to watch "Hurly Burly" for something like this done well, or this for historical interest.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.