Description

Shirley Clarke: Thinking Through Movement

Visionaries: The Work of Woman Filmmakers

Author/Editor: Karen Pearlman

CONTENTS

Only a dancer, choreographer and brilliant filmmaker could have written this superb book. Karen Pearlman’s expert research blends the history of modern dance, film history, the arts and social turbulence in America into my mother’s biography and each of her films. I know my mother would have loved this book and I love it too. — Wendy Clarke

Shirley Clarke: Thinking Through Movement is the first film-philosophy book on “radical, pioneer, visionary’ (Manohla Dargis 2013) filmmaker Shirley Clarke and the films she edited and directed. The book draws on film analysis, archival research, dance and film theory and creative practice expertise, to think through Clarke’s work as a dancer turned multi-award-winning editor and director of dancefilm, fiction, documentary and video art. This account of Clarke’s creative oeuvre offers the reader insight into a too long overlooked filmmaker. Its creative practice and distributed cognition framework provides tools for dismantling some of the exclusionary aspects of authorship theories and offers a novel method for analysis of films, filmmaking practices and cultures of film production.

Contributor Bio:
Dr. Karen Pearlman is an Associate Professor of Screen Practice and Production at Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia) and co-director of The Physical TV Company. She writes, directs and edits films and has won over thirty highly competitive awards from peak industry bodies and film festivals. Pearlman’s research into creative practice, cognition and feminist film histories is widely published and her ideas about editing are having global impact through multiple editions and translations of her book Cutting Rhythms (2009). Like the subject of this monograph, Shirley Clarke, Pearlman had a distinguished career as a professional dancer before turning to film editing and directing.Series: Visionaries: The Work of Women Filmmakers

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Publishing Date: January 31, 2025
ISBN: 9781399501446
Dimensions: 0.48″ H x 8.5″ L x 5.5″ W
224 pages