FerdinandGriffon wrote:
One question though. IFC had a short by Shirley and Wendy Clarke called Butterfly playing before the feature, only so-so but I can't seem to find any information about it on the web. Does anyone happen to know the date for this? It's practically a home movie, so maybe no such info exists, but I'd kinda like to know for my own record keeping.
Excellent question! There's no information on the film that I know of. BUTTERFLY is a Project Shirley discovery. Wendy Clarke and I went to the wonderful Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research to go through the Shirley Clarke paper and films. Though two days weren't enough, we did go through an awful lot and made some exciting discoveries. Thanks to the archive's extreme generosity, we'll be digitizing a lot of it in the coming months for our home DVD/BluRay releases.
However, one immediately caught my eye (and Mary Huelsbeck at the archive). Wendy barely remembered BUTTERFLY but it's a short 3-minute film she did with Shirley in 1967 for what she remembers as one screening at the Elgin as part of an anti-war program of various directors. It
might have played once more in Oakland that year since Shirley mentioned it in an interview there, but I can find no record of any screenings at all.
If anyone knows anything about the screening at the Elgin or any other information on the film, I'd love to know!Since it's a dual self-portrait (sort of) and it was made in the same year as JASON, the IFC and Milestone thought we should include it as a small present to NYC audiences. It's not a masterpiece but it's very good and it does have Shirley and Wendy appearing in the film.
Since then, we (and Joe Lindner at the Academy Film Archive) found another related-to-Jason discovery in the Shirley collection -- an audio (we added visuals) we're calling THE LOST CONFRONTATION from Portrait of Jason -- it's a three-minute argument Shirley had with Jason that she cut out of the film but said later it was the reason for making the film. That will be playing at the Orphans screening in Los Angeles on May 10th. Over the following months, I'm hoping we'll do more surprises at JASON screenings.
I'm glad you liked the restoration!
Dennis
Milestone F&V