Clarke's first feature film marks the first of her many depictions of American subcultures. "I never felt that anything about my own life was going to interest anyone else, so I chose surrogates-underdogs, outsiders-whom I identified with," Clarke said. Based on Jack Gelber's controversial play, The Connection is both a depiction of a group of junkies waiting for a fix in a claustrophobic Greenwich Village loft, and an interrogation of the documentary form. Using a jazz score, an inventive, dancing camera, and a film-within-a-film structure, Clarke "disconnects" all previous expectations of the documentary. The critic Penelope Gilliatt was alone in observing that "the audience...feels accused. This is...due...mostly to Shirley Clarke's brilliant insistence that the camera is the instrument of our own curiosity. In most films, the camera has no identity; it is simply a conveniently agile window through which one can stare without being seen....In The Connection, on the other hand, the camera is always a palpable object." -Kathy Geritz