Barbican
Cinema introduction:
Charismatic gay club performer Jason
Holliday talks about his life to camera in Shirley
Clarke’s documentary, described by Ingmar Bergman as 'the
most extraordinary film I’ve seen in my life.' Edited down from a
12-hour shoot, Portrait of Jason comprises an interview with
Black, gay nightclub performer Jason Holliday, talking directly to
camera about his fabulous life, with occasional off-screen
interjections and provocations by director Shirley Clarke and her
partner, Carl Lee. A gifted raconteur, Jason’s
tales of strife throughout his messy career – all laced with wit
and expert comic timing – make for a constantly entertaining
dialogue. The film remains controversial for the techniques used by
Clarke and Lee in interviewing Holliday. By the end, a very drunk
Holliday becomes increasingly distressed by the questioning of Clarke
and especially Lee, who berate him for his performative style and
accuse him of lying. Portrait of Jason remains a
powerful, provocative and challenging work.
New Yorker review:
A raw-edged sketch of furiously extended takes… A masterwork of
grand-scale intimacy. The extraordinary protagonist, alone onscreen for
an hour and a half, seems to give birth to his new identity in real
time. Meanwhile, he presents an agonizing time capsule of an age of
ambient racism, homophobic persecution, and moralistic hypocrisy. Jason Holliday’s stories of arrests and enforced psychiatric sessions, and of
the racist arrogance of white employers (for whom he worked as a
domestic), are adorned with as much self-deprecating, life-loving
laughter as his tales of sexual adventures and samples of his night-club
act (featuring impressions of Mae West and Katharine Hepburn, among
others). In his lifelong pursuit of pleasure, Holliday (who died in
1998) paid an outsized price in pain. But he was outspokenly wise to the
transaction—and he knew that this very performance, with its risky
self-exposure, involved both.
Richard Brody
Here (and above) is the trailer.
