Tonight, Larry Clark’s The Smell of Us screens in Film Comment Selects, and in honor of the screening, here’s a look back at Clark’s early film Tulsa—from the late Sixties.

Tulsa

Tulsa (© Larry Clark; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Simon Lee Gallery, London and Hong Kong)

“A collection of photographs that assail, lacerate, devastate.” The verbs chosen in a Detroit Free Press review of Larry Clark’s 1971 debut photobook Tulsa could easily apply to his first film—also called Tulsa—from three years earlier. Rediscovered in 2010 by the artist, the long lost 64-minute artifact brings to life the young drug-infused peers who he hung out with in his birthplace. Tulsa the book, composed of work spanning 1963 to 1971, helped usher in a new era of autobiographical portraiture in which lines between photographer and subject are blurred. If the film, fragments of which appear in the photobook as contact prints, had been released at the time of its making—when Clark was still an unknown artist in his twenties—it would likely have garnered just as much interest as its harrowing counterpart. And although you can turn the page when reading the photobook, the camera keeps rolling in Tulsa the film.

Shot on a rented 16mm Bolex over three days and edited in camera, Tulsa is a silent black-and-white document that is like a last testament found in the basement of a dead addict. The photobook’s cover star, Billy Mann, and his gang are set into motion, only to show that their waking lives didn't involve much action—just endless injections of drugs. Not even a hint of euphoria is seen in their eyes as the amphetamine kicks in; the practiced precision of their shooting up confirms it’s a matter of habit more than desire. The empty stare of Billy’s girlfriend becomes all the more upsetting when she gets out of bed, revealing her pregnant features. For those familiar with the energetic teen subjects in Clark’s later films, the passivity of the Tulsa youth is all the more disturbing. The joyous chaos that Clark celebrates in Another Day in Paradise (98) and Wassup Rockers (05) is not to be seen here. Staring at the walls of their house with vacant expressions, the youngsters slouch as if their very body weight is a burden.

At times, the living ghosts become animated for a moment to break out of the documentary format and act out a scene for the camera. Billy and a few friends drive around seemingly aimlessly until they arrive at a house where a girl awaits with her baby. In the film’s most sincere series of moments—unusually, a staged sex scene—the girl and one of the boys enter a bedroom to embark in foreplay. Breaking the numbness of the preceding scenes of drug taking, the two non-actors touch each other with awkward nervousness, burying their faces in each other’s shoulders as if attempting to hide from the camera. Their clumsiness is profoundly touching in the context of a film that is so deeply filled with dreadful sights. As in many of Clark’s later films, the line between staging and unvarnished reality is playfully crossed. In a more violent scene of activity that appears to be staged, a young adolescent destroys all the furniture in his house. Reality comes crashing in when policemen appear out of nowhere and escort him outside to the street.

Tulsa

Tulsa (© Larry Clark; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Simon Lee Gallery, London and Hong Kong)

The potential dramatic punch of the world at large intruding on the drug haven is abandoned for a deflated affect that conveys sad routine. Moments of role-play don’t last for long; the youths tend to swiftly abandon their roles, distracted by the prospect of another hit. And for the most part, the needle hitting the arm is all we get. The film, which first screened in a 2010 retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, was presented all too appropriately as a looped installation last summer at Amsterdam's Foam Photography Museum. The format perfectly suited the perpetual repetition of action on screen, suggesting that there was no way out for Clark's subjects. The camera just keeps staring. Its unflinching long takes could be described as direct cinema without any drive, political or otherwise.

For the most part suggesting a nightmarish home-movie, Tulsa allows us occasional glimpses behind the camera to show us its director. As their friend and a drug-user himself, Clark maintains a short but necessary distance from his subjects while keeping the messy interior of their houses always in sight. He mostly shoots from one angle, with very little movement, showing remarkable patience for each scene and taking in whatever happens in front of him in a way that only a coeval could do. Occasional breaks from the hellish vision are interspersed with close-up shots of the carpet floor, but its patterns swirl and spread like a network of poisoned veins. And after each reel change, the camera wakes up only to find the slow but sure plight of its subjects continuing, naturally accruing the primitivist feel that Clark’s future collaborator Harmony Korine would attempt to simulate in Trash Humpers.

It took another 30 years before Clark picked up a movie camera to shoot Kids (95), his official directorial debut (written by a teenaged Korine). Tulsa can be understood as its precursor, right down to the dicey depictions of teenage sex. The kids of Tulsa could have fathered the delinquents of Kids—except that a fatal overdose killed Billy Mann only two years after the film shoot. Indeed, when discussing his re-discovery of Tulsa’s reels, Clark has said that most of those who appeared in the film have died. But he’s continued to channel these early experiences in his fictional tales of street youths, with Tulsa’s youth culture evidently haunting Clark’s mind for decades.