One dark and cold evening in December 1966, film maker Shirley Clarke and her then partner, the actor Carl Lee, welcome their sometime friend Jason Holliday to a room at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. The African American “gay hustler” and aspiring cabaret performer, Holliday, has been an enigmatic presence in both Clarke and Lee’s lives for some time. Their aim, at least on the surface, is to capture his troubled life-story, epigrams, anecdotes, and recollections on film.
Over the course of 12 hours, the filmmaker’s intentions shift. The duo begin to berate their increasingly drunken interviewee with a catalogue of taunts and accusations. The feel is something akin to witnessing a verbal punishment beating; of a man whose life is being broken into pieces under the glare of an intense and unforgiving camera. Clarke’s resulting film, Portrait of Jason, confronts issues of sexual identity, race, and class that until this point in history have been more or less unaddressed on camera. The movie, a landmark in queer cinema and a masterwork of cinéma verité, marks the invention of the one-person documentary genre. Ingmar Bergman labels it “the most extraordinary film I’ve seen in my life”.
In Jason, currently running at the VAULT festival, co-directors Marcus Amaglo, Chloe Claudel, Mitchell Polonsky draw on the techniques of verbatim theatre to recreate the events of that evening to vivid and gripping effect. Using only edited portions of the words actually spoken and recorded, Amaglo, who plays Jason, brings out much of Holliday’s obvious charisma and talents as a raconteur. But even as he swigs on vodka his humiliations, degradations, disappointments, and evasions brutally exposed, the nature of the man himself remains indistinct and enigmatic. What does come across with brutal clarity in this sharp, clever, and concise theatrical reimagination is the brutally exploitative nature of the filmmaker Clarke (played by Claudel with suitable acidity) and her disdainful partner Lee (a measured and intense performance by Ju Zahkarii).
Directors: Marcus Amaglo, Chloe Claudel, Mitchell Polonsky
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