The Cool World, the first feature film shot in Harlem, is the story of a black adolescent, Duke, who longs to lead his gang, the Royal Pythons. The pursuit of a gun takes him on a downward trajectory from stealing, selling drugs, and gang fighting to arrest. Described on its release as "a loud, long and powerful cry of outrage at the world society has created for Harlem youngsters and at the human condition in a slum ghetto," The Cool World has lost none of its relevance, and remains a powerful, poetic study of black youth. In it, Clarke continues her interrogation of the documentary form. She and Carl Lee, who collaborated on the film, selected the cast from students at Harlem junior high schools. Although based on a literary source, much of the film was improvised, with the result that, as Lauren Rabinovitz has observed, "out of traditional modes and antagonistic relationships between documentary and fictional narrative, Clarke inscribes new positions for social subjectivity."* -Kathy Geritz *Points of Resistance: Women, Power & Politics in the New York Avant-garde Cinema, 1943-71.