Name: Portrait of Jason
Director: Shirley Clarke
Released: 1967
Duration: 107 min

In Shirley Clarke’s magnetic work of queer cinema, New York hustler, would-be cabaret star and raconteur supreme Jason Holliday delivers a monologue for the ages.

Holding court over a long, boozy December night at New York’s Hotel Chelsea, Jason Holliday serves up wild anecdotes of a life lived on the city’s margins, including working the streets as a hustler, doing time on Riker’s Island and even befriending Miles Davis – fraught, flamboyant tales that become profound reflections on race, class and sexuality. Meanwhile, the offscreen prompts from director Shirley Clarke (Ornette: Made in America, MIFF 1987), a pioneering figure in documentary’s avant-garde, add to the film’s air of electric, off-the-cuff vérité.

Just how much of Jason’s studied fabulousness, in which the self is nested within endless layers of performance, is an elaborate shield against a hostile world, including the provocations of his director? And to what extent might Clarke, whose antagonism stokes the film’s irresistible frisson, be said to be exploiting him? Both an exquisite study in character and a fascinating look at the ethics behind capturing performance in documentary, Portrait of Jason – like its subject – is a slippery, shapeshifting work, as exhilarating as it is unsettling.

“Holliday is on camera for an hour and forty-five minutes, but he fills them with his whole life. He’s a monologuist of mercurial, Falstaffian genius.” – The New Yorker

This screening will be introduced by critic and programmer Maya S. Cade (Black Film Archive), who will host a panel discussion with writers and curators Michael Sun and Bruce Koussaba following the film.

Maya S. Cade is the creator and curator of Black Film Archive and the inaugural CCDI scholar-in-residence at the Library of Congress. Her work has been featured in publications including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, The Paris Review and Vulture, and she has been awarded special distinctions by the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics for the Archive.

Michael Sun is a critic, essayist, and editor from China and Australia. He is currently film programmer at Art Gallery of New South Wales and his writing on culture has been published in the Guardian, the Paris End, Esquire, Sydney Review of Books and at the ABC, among many others.

Bruce Koussaba is a filmmaker and writer based in Sydney on unceded Gadigal and Wangal Lands. His involvement in cinema extends into criticism, festival work, programming, introductions, and writing-directing. He is currently an organiser for the grassroots community film program Liberation Cinema and an editor for the independent online film magazine Nosebleed. He has a song in his heart and it goes like this...