After nearly 60 years, Shirley Clarke’s documentary provocation PORTRAIT OF JASON (1967) remains irreconcilable. An architect of American independent cinema, Clarke legendarily filmed PORTRAIT in one 12-hour interview session in Clarke’s Chelsea Hotel apartment, capturing the testament of Jason Holliday, nightclub performer, hustler, and peerless practitioner of Black subterfuge. In near-relentless close-up, Clarke and partner/collaborator Carl Lee engage Holliday in a well-lubricated session of reminiscence, performance, and compulsory truth-telling; as their curiosity turns to open prodding, PORTRAIT OF JASON lays bare the contradictory impulses of neutrality and prurience that defined the burgeoning cinéma vérité movement. Electrifying and enervating, PORTRAIT OF JASON is a dense quagmire of observational overreach, queer opacity, and history from below — one of the most indispensable American films of any age. As Stephen Winter, director of CHOCOLATE BABIES (1996) and JASON AND SHIRLEY (2015) has observed, there’s “never [been] anything as singularly devastating, albeit brilliant, as PORTRAIT OF JASON.”
Following a 35mm screening of PORTRAIT OF JASON, Block Cinema and program organizers Nick Davis and Sarah Schulman will welcome filmmaker Stephen Winter for a post-film discussion with Justin Mann, Associate Professor of English at Northwestern.
Cosponsored by the Chicago International Film Festival and presented with sponsorship from the department of English and the Gender & Sexuality Studies Program, and with support from the Black Arts Consortium, the Black Studies Department, the Performance Studies Department, the Radio/Television/Film Department, the School of Communications, and the Screen Cultures Program at Northwestern.
Cost: Free
Block Museum of Art
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