Thoughts on Portrait of Jason

     On Criterion, I watched Portrait of Jason, a 1967 documentary directed by Shirley Clarke, where she and her then-partner, actor Carl Lee, interview Jason Holliday, a gay Black hustler and aspiring cabaret performer, who tells stories about his life and his friends in a very charming, bon vivant kind of way, getting drunker throughout the 12-hour shooting of the interview in December 1966 at Clarke's Chelsea Hotel penthouse apartment in New York City. 

    His personality is loud, and as a gay Black man living in the 1960s, it's important that his personality takes up space, because he has had to live with racism and homophobia, and his attitude is a performance to protect his more vulnerable self. He tells stories of sex work and musician friends and his abusive parents, and he easily slips into impressions of Katharine Hepburn and other stars, putting on a show for Clarke and Lee.

    Throughout the film, the production keeps being interrupted, with off-screen talk from Clarke and Lee, the screen going to black with the audio heard, fading in and out of focus, re-starting shots, etc. It is interesting to watch a documentary from the 1960s that leaves all the messy bits in, as well as in the last third of the film, where Lee keeps antagonizing Holliday and telling him he's full of shit and cursing at him, trying to get him to open up about painful parts of his life, even as Holliday is very drunk and crying and being broken down emotionally. It's rough, as that part of the film becomes more raw and vulnerable to watch. It feels more exploitative, and yet Clarke left it in anyway, as if to feel more "real."

    I've read other reviews that explore this film in a much more insightful way than I can, bringing up themes of classism (Clarke came from a wealthy family and made this film where she enabled an addict hustler for a film to show white "intellectual" audiences); racism (Holliday came up in the Jim Crow-era South), homophobia, and blurring the lines between performance and reality.

    I really liked this film and found it fascinating, to watch for two hours, with an interview with a man who was interesting, and luckily lived a long life (he died in 1998 at age 74). The film was added to the National Film Registry in 2015 by the Library of Congress for its historical and cultural importance.