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The Criterion Channel Presents: Portrait of Jason (1967)

There is an ethical question hanging over Portrait of Jason, especially towards the end of the documentary. Is it justifiable to capture a man deteriorating under the influence on camera and provoking with some cruel words certain reactions out of him? It’s a level of manipulation, arguably exploitation that is especially wrong when trying to produce a work of authenticity, like documentary filmmaking is meant to be. And yet, there’s not a whole lot here that can definitively be called authentic. It might just be 105 minutes of bullshitting -we’re not meant to know.
In any case, both director Shirley Clarke and subject Jason Holliday have been dead for quite some time and the 1967 movie exists as perhaps the central testament to both figures, whatever the issues and qualms about its making there may be. It is a minimalist and avant garde but still shrewd piece of filmmaking that does allow Clarke to construct a narrative out of a performance very broad and charismatic.
It is essentially one long sit-down interview, coloured by plenty of cigarettes and copious alcohol that Clarke conducts with the titular Jason, a gay hustler in New York with aspirations to perform in theatre and film. He is already engaged in performance, which he freely admits but conceals to what extent, given he presents as a character he invented for himself in San Francisco (his real name is Aaron Payne), quite talkative, flamboyant, and excitable. And while I say Clarke conducts, for much of the film she doesn’t need to as Jason freely monologues on his life, relationships, sexuality, and work with humour and frankness, and perhaps a little trauma under the surface.
Jason had no claim to fame before this movie, beyond the local nightclub and underground culture scene of the time. But he seems to have been fairly prominent within it, such that he was known by more than a few of his eccentric creative contemporaries (Andy Warhol first wanted to make a movie with him), including Clarke and her partner Carl Lee -something that is apparent in his attitude towards these unseen figures as the movie goes on and some vague past references are brought up between him and Lee especially. But you understand immediately why Clarke decided to spotlight him like this, even with no expectation of the movie being seen outside of arthouse circles. Jason is an incredible personality, even where he is a bit dull and repetitive in the stories he tells or the anecdotes he drones on; he’s got an engaging presentation and style, carrying himself with a great degree of glamour not always reflective of the lifestyle he details -and he does so in surprisingly frank terms for a gay sex worker in the 1960s.
In his flavourful way, he doesn't sanitize anything in reflecting on his early experiences as a "houseboy" for wealthy white women or his family's scandalized reaction to his sexuality. He colours things in with commentaries on celebrity encounters or celebrity impressions -he spotlights a little Mae West- clearly treating the interview in some small part like a screen test. But while there is a lot of humour, often from himself, in relating those stories, there is a palpable pain beneath them that he thinks he can conceal by his jovial delivery. It is however an overcompensation, one which becomes more obvious the longer the process goes on (the film is cut down from a twelve-hour session) and the more he casually drinks throughout -at one point holding a large vodka bottle close to his lips during his digression. He strains to keep up the facade the longer things go on. Or does he?
How much of what we see from Jason is performative is the question of the doc. Clarke and Lee want to dig deeper into his woes and miseries -and it is unclear if they actually get what they want. The slivers of apparent authenticity that come through might be real, but they may also be their own illusion -Jason being in more control of himself than he appears. Clarke ultimately seems to concede that point in her ending. At points throughout the movie the camera goes dark as they cycle through film and need to replace the reel -leaving purely Jason's audio. At other times the camera dips out of focus. The movie comes to a close at the end of about fifteen minutes of Lee (and potentially others) aggressively berating and confronting Jason, with him responding in as close to his established manner as he can through shakes and tears and defensive posturing -it's a sorrowful thing to see- only for the end of the interview to be declared, Jason apparently reverting to the genial personality of earlier in his cadence, though his face is blurred in focus making it impossible to read the sincerity of this reaction.
However authentic Jason himself may or may not be, and whatever Clarke's methods reveal about herself or the documentary medium, Portrait of Jason is a curious time capsule on race, class, and sexual identity in the 1960s. Jason's accounts and his coping mechanisms are believable -the stories he shares paint a picture of a cultural underground where homosexual activity and sexual diversity can exist but only in relief to the suppression of mainstream society. This was before Stonewall, before Harvey Milk. Through Jason, his tales and emotions, the movie is a glimpse into the complexity of his identity in that era -a worthwhile thing to take stock of, and reason enough for this movie's fascinating existence.

Criterion Recommendation: Fire of Love (2022)
Since we are on the subject of documentaries, Fire of Love by Sara Dosa is one of the most curious and captivating in recent years. Composed of exquisite natural footage of volcanoes, plenty of it shot by the subjects themselves, the movie hones in on the lives of married French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, their work in proximity to active volcanoes, and ultimately their untimely deaths in the Mount Unzen eruption of 1991. A film in which the grandiosity of these natural phenomenons is framed in relation to the personal romance and passion of two scientists, it is a documentary of feeling. There is a sympathetic lens to Dosa's framing and the narration from Miranda July -it doesn't ever veer into the cynical, critical territory of something like Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, though that theme on the folly of humans to contend with nature is still present (Herzog in fact made his own movie, a requiem, on the Kraffts the same year). It is a movie that asks its audience to understand the awe of its subjects, and perhaps even see a certain poetry to two people who understood the risks of their endeavours and comprehended the probability of their fate succumbing to the very force of nature they loved. An intense and beautiful, meditative film.

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