Shirley Clarke

Thinking Through Movement
Examines the films of Shirley Clarke using theory from creative practice and distributed cognition.

Shirley Clarke: Thinking Through Movement is the first film-philosophy book on "radical, pioneer, visionary' (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.