The following is an excerpt from the 2009 essay “Film as a Battleground: Shirley Clarke’s PORTRAIT OF JASON.”
“I started out that evening with hatred, and there was part of me that was out to do him in, get back at him, kill him,” Shirley Clarke said in 1983. In 1967, when Clarke’s documentary PORTRAIT OF JASON hit the theaters, it was undoubtedly a shock. While gay films of the exuberantly campy, fantastical variety had been bubbling up from the 16mm Underground, JASON was the first of these to “get serious.” Adopting the mantle of cinéma-vérité (truth film), and appearing in art houses blown up to 35mm, JASON confronted adventurous viewers with a wholly new cinematic experience: 100 minutes on the silver screen of a talented, tortured, yet unabashed black queen more than ready for her close-up in the one-woman show of a lifetime. The film’s proceedings have lost none of their power to enthrall and disturb.
PORTRAIT OF JASON was Clarke’s major contribution to the cinéma-vérité canon […] PORTRAIT OF JASON (like Warhol’s CHELSEA GIRLS of the previous year, whose “beauty and power” Clarke claimed to be “haunted by”) is a key artifact of the 60’s psycho-dynamics of stardom-lust, self-exposure and ego-breakdown which have come down to us in the devolved versions of JERRY SPRINGER, reality TV, and AMERICAN IDOL. “People love to see you suffer,” Jason delightedly observes early in his PORTRAIT. Even though Clarke regularly defocuses Jason’s image to remind the viewer of her camera’s mediation, his infectious personality in all its dimensions dominates her film. Though Shirley Clarke was often designated the “Queen of the Chelsea,” on that winter night in ’67 Jason shared her throne, and does so again every time her portrait of him hits the silver screen.
— Brecht Andersch, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
