Shirley Clarke (1967)
Late one evening in December 1966, Shirley Clarke started filming Jason Holliday, a gay African-American hustler in his early forties, in the living room of her apartment in the Hotel Chelsea in New York. The filming continued for the next twelve hours and the result was Portrait of Jason, which runs 105 minutes. Getting ever more intoxicated on booze and drugs and by the sound of his own voice, Jason talks about himself: it’s a one-man show, interrupted only occasionally by the voices of others in the room – Clarke, her partner Carl Lee and members of her film crew. The Wikipedia article on Portrait of Jason describes it as a documentary and it’s a ‘Documentary, Biography’ on IMDB. But according to a Bright Lights (May 2005) piece by Tom Sutpen, which BFI used as the programme note for this screening in their ‘Black Star’ season, Clarke’s film ‘isn’t a documentary, really; it isn’t even a cinéma vérité exercise’ or ‘an interview either … if Portrait of Jason is anything we can give a name to, it is a record of a performance’. A ‘record of a performance’ and a ‘documentary’ aren’t mutually exclusive categories: I’ll stick with the latter in this note.
This black-and-white film was first shown at the 1967 New York Film Festival. I don’t know enough about contemporary Underground film-making to be sure but Portrait of Jason may have been unusual half a century ago – in form and in shedding light on the lifestyle of a man like Jason Holliday. If what Jason says is to be believed (this may be a big if), Clarke’s documentary also has historical interest as a description of aspects of mid-twentieth-century gay life in New York City and San Francisco, where Jason spent several years. The piece doesn’t, however, seem extraordinary now, either formally or in its subject matter. The continuous filming in the same space, the blurring of the image to create breaks between ‘scenes’, a few sound-only bits after the screen goes blank as the reel has to be changed – these are lineaments of the low-budget-but-arty documentary. (I don’t doubt the film really did keep running out as Jason carried on talking but this was, in stylistic terms, a happy accident.) Most of the non-Jason soundtrack is supplied by Carl Lee’s voice prompting him to tell particular anecdotes or, at one point, to do songs and mini-sketches from the nightclub act Jason dreams of turning into professional reality. Gay iconography is now so familiar that his shtick seems predictable: a song from Funny Girl; impressions of Mae West and Scarlett O’Hara; references to Carmen Jones and Tennessee Williams. The only relative surprise is that Jason does Katharine Hepburn’s Calla lilies routine from The Philadelphia Story rather than one of Vivien Leigh’s Blanche Dubois highlights.
Jason’s adopted surname (he was born Aaron Payne) echoes that of a tragic black diva. The combination of his ethnicity and his sexual orientation provides a few sharp insights into racial issues, most notably when Jason tells Clarke that white men often tolerate gay black men because they’re not after white girls. He talks about the Bowery, working as a houseboy, being kept as a ‘housewife’. He recalls a mother who knew her ‘coloured’ place and a stern, physically abusive father, referred to as ‘Brother Tough’. Although all this is interesting, Jason’s solo ‘performance’ is severely limited. He’s like a singer with a limited repertoire of songs and a standard delivery; the relentless, off-his-head laughter is the equivalent of an overused and too insistent musical score. After a while, Jason is compelling only in the rare moments when the laughter gets completely, worryingly out of control or when he’s briefly silent and reflective. We soon perceive the desperation underlying and driving his verbal energy and wit but, as the show goes on, he doesn’t, in spite of Shirley Clarke’s in vodka veritas approach, reveal startling new sides to his personality. Perhaps Clarke is increasingly aware of this – that this is why, in the final reel, she has Carl Lee berate Jason for the bad things he’s done. Whatever the motive for Lee’s invective, it delivers a big emotional finish, reducing Jason to rueful tears before he finally recovers his poise.
In his paean to Portrait of Jason, published in the New Yorker in 2013, Richard Brody writes that ‘Holliday’s exuberant, floridly expressive personality and extravagantly uninhibited self-revelation was also an act of self-creation; it’s as if he created, on screen, in real time, a new identity from the scattered and broken pieces of his life’. It’s highly unlikely that Brody, still a teenager when this documentary was made, had – as Shirley Clarke had – prior knowledge of Jason Holliday. So how can this grand claim be justified? Any screen appearance by someone you’ve not seen before is, to some extent, ‘an act of self-creation’. If Jason were still alive – he died in 1998, at the age of seventy-four – he might be pleased to know that, fifty years after Portrait of Jason first appeared, people are still getting the opportunity to watch him up there on the screen. On the evidence of this BFI screening, not too many people are seizing the opportunity, though: the NFT2 audience was sparse at the start and four of them walked out before the end. There are times when Shirley Clarke makes you feel you’re experiencing the full twelve hours of filming. But for someone who loves the camera, and wants to be loved by it, as much as Jason evidently does, this would be a very secondary consideration. There’s nothing to suggest either that he felt, as some critics did in the 1960s, that the film-makers were exploiting him. At quite an early stage, he says how much he’s enjoying the experience. He’s already treasuring the knowledge that, once Clarke has done her work and whatever happens in his life to follow, he’ll ‘always have this beautiful thing’.
8 November 2016
