»She really wanted to break moulds. She really wanted to break rules. And with The Connection, she broke just about every rule you could in film. She played with the idea of what’s reality, what’s fiction, what you think of people. One of the things that upset people is that these junkies are unrepentant, that there’s no tragedy that happens to them. They’re not people who have fallen on bad times and regret their lives. There is no regret in these films.«
– Dennis Doros

The film shows a group of drug-addict musicians waiting for their »connection« in a New York apartment while a two-man documentary team films the proceedings. The drug dealer arrives in the company of a female street preacher. By the time the film-maker, whose bible is Kracauer’s Theory of Film, demands that the dealer stop looking at him and reaches for his camera as if it were a weapon, the power relations have shifted irrevocably. The film team and the protagonists grapple with questions of ethics and society as well as the relationship between reality and fiction in a dizzying choreography of different states: clear- headedness, intoxication, and withdrawal. The camera – sometimes hand-held, sometimes stationary – becomes the main character, appearing to possess not just a body and mind but a conscience as well. The Connection, dissects cinema itself and has entered into the annals of film history as both a milestone of cinéma vérité and a jazz musical. In 1962 – just after clinching the Jury Prize at the Cannes Festival – the film was prohibited by the authorities in New York. But when one cinema screened it nevertheless, the police turned up. And the reason for the ban? Well, the protagonists’ language was considered too vulgar.

Film programme Seduction