“Clarke's images endow the characters' energies with a sculptural grandeur and embrace street life with a keenly attentive, unsentimental avidity.” - Richard Brody, New Yorker

“As we've come to expect of Miss Clarke's pictures, it is boldly and studiously styled as a literal documentation of a particular social scene, and its attack is more that of the reporter than of the interested teller of a tale.” - Bosley Crowther, New York Times

Friday, September 27, 6:15 p.m. | ​​As uncompromising a filmmaker as this country has ever produced, Shirley Clarke turns a compassionate but unflinching eye to the lives of Harlem youth in 1963’s THE COOL WORLD. Set to the driving hard bop of jazz legends Mal Waldron and Dizzy Gillespie, the film’s one-degree-from-reality narrative follows 15-year-old gang member Duke (Hampton Clanton) in his single-minded quest to buy a gun. Like Clarke’s better known features THE CONNECTION and PORTRAIT OF JASON, THE COOL WORLD probes the line between truth and fiction like an open wound, confronting the violence of American racial and economic inequality by pushing neorealism and cinéma vérité to their limit. A film of vivid interiors and exteriors—New York tenements and mean streets, yearning inner monologues and stifling social conditions—THE COOL WORLD’s still astonishing images and sounds truly come to life in this 35mm restoration by the Library of Congress, making its unmissable Chicago debut.

Awards & Nominations

Nominee - Gold Lion, Venice Film Festival

BlockFilms by Women/Chicago '74: In September 1974, at the height of the feminist movement, the Film Center hosted Films By Women/Chicago ‘74, a series of screenings, workshops, and discussions, drawing 10,000 patrons to more than 70 short and feature films by women filmmakers. This fall, we're partnering with Northwestern University’s Block Cinema to celebrate the 50-year anniversary of Films by Women/Chicago ‘74. Screenings held across the two venues will revisit some of the festival’s most original and daring films and filmmakers while reflecting on the event’s enduring legacies. Read more

The Film Center is ADA accessible. This presentation will be projected without open captions. The theater is hearing-loop equipped. For accessibility requests, please email filmcenter@saic.edu