Portrait of Jason

Shirley Clarke (USA, 1967)

A disarming man smartly dressed with thick black-rimmed glasses talks about his life. That is it. Portrait of Jason defies common rules of moviemaking. But is setting up a camera and shooting a man for one evening art? Such doubts have been uttered repetitively. A snapshot is not photography, a few dots on canvass not a painting yet some artists annihilate these general conceptions elegantly. Sheryl Clarke proves to be one of them, having created finest Cinema Vérité on grainy black and white 16mm film stock.
Jason smokes, drinks and laughs. A lot. He has gone through life as hustler and house boy in San Francisco, a place ‘so creative’ that he has reinvented himself from Aaron Payne to Jason Holliday, dreaming of his own nightclub act, which he is always trying to finance yet never realises.
In the convivial atmosphere of a cosy apartment the presence of the camera is easily forgotten until it forcefully reinstates the fact that it dictates the gaze. The evening goes on and glass after glass is drank, reel after reel is changed and with this focus is lost and regained. The atmosphere changes, sadness creeps in. Uneasy thoughts of exploitation interrupt the films flow, when Jason bursts into tears, being pushed further and further by the of-screen voices of film-makers Shirley Clarke and Carl Lee, telling him ‘sit down’ or ‘shut up you’re full of shit.’
Radically executed, the film is highly engaging and comments on politics, homosexuality, gender and race issues. It challenges boundaries between fiction and documentary by placing a flamboyant man in its centre who is deeply occupied with the showbiz yet never quite part of it, telling detailed stories only to end them with “Well I never tell!” A man whose emotions change in a matter of seconds and whose performance of a Funny Girl song touches on brilliance.