FILMS
Video screening Schedule at
ICP
35mm films at the Pioneer Theater
The distinctive style, controversial subject matter, and critical success of Clark's small body of feature films easily establish him as one of the leading independent directors today. After three decades of still photography, Clark's move to filmmaking seemed natural; he had set his sights on movies since the early Tulsa days. His first feature film, Kids (1995), was a day-in-the-life tale of a young HIV-positive lothario and his skateboarding teen cohorts. Its documentary-like look and its nonjudgmental point of view, particularly on teen sex and drug use, created a national controversy when first released. The follow-up to Kids, Another Day in Paradise (1998), was Clark’s version of a crime-spree road movie, in which two experienced criminals and junkies take a young couple under their wing. It evolves into the young man’s coming-of-age story as his makeshift family disintegrates under the weight of the violence and drug addiction around him. His subsequent films, especially Bully (2001) and the unreleased Ken Park, offered an increasingly bleak and explicit view of the alienation, boredom, and hostility of white, middle-class youth culture in the context of rudderless parenting. Clark has said that these films are intended to spark a dialogue about what is really going on with America’s youth. So, while these films revive the images of teen sex and violence, Clark really sees them as about a loss of innocence.
Screening Schedule
RETURN TO INTRODUCTION