Distributor: Milestone Films
Release Date: November 11, 2014
MSRP: $39.99
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Film: A / Video: B- / Audio: B+ / Extras: A-

Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason may be the quintessential verité film, yet from its opening, deliberately unfocused seconds, in which crew members can be clearly heard setting up the take, the movie is also one of the best critiques of the format’s shortcomings. Taking for its subject Jason Holliday, a black, openly gay man who confesses in his first address to the camera that his name differs from the one on his birth certificate, Portrait foregrounds how direct documentary techniques cannot uncover the truth, merely disguise the layers of performativity and guarded behavior of anyone who knows they’re being filmed.

Jason is the sort of person that the term “a born star” was made for, as well as an emblem for how short that term falls in attempting to describe how magnetic a real person can be. Despite scenes of camp reenactments of Mae West, Carmen Jones, and Gone with the Wind monologues, Jason, as Clarke’s partner Carl Lee notes while deliberately provoking the subject, can only play himself. Jason is a modest-looking fellow, with bug-eyed glasses, cropped natural hair, a gap-toothed smile, and a sense of fashion that brings a bit of tackiness to business casual. His magnetic screen presence has nothing to do with untapped star power, and even his charismatic detailing of anecdotes, as with all instances of the life of the party going on at length, occasionally hit deathly passages of pure, self-involved tedium. Jason would collapse if made to deliver someone else’s lines as some other being, but for the two hours that he tells his life story, including the dull bits, he’s the most fascinating man in the world.

It’s an aspect of Jason that the man knows about himself, and he clearly relishes the chance to have his personality recorded for posterity. “I am doing what I want to do,” he bombastically says at one point, “and it’s nice that someone is taking a picture of it.” Filmed over the course of one night, Portrait should be a blunt assessment of Jason’s honest character, but from the outset he shrouds a hard life behind a veil of boisterous laughter and bon vivant nonchalance. It takes a few minutes to start registering the pain hidden behind his energetic monologues, but then more and more horrors accumulate, from the day-to-day pressures of hustling in various ways to survive to the eked-out memories of a father who beat him for being gay. Through it all, the unvarnished honesty mixes with Jason’s abilities as a captivating storyteller who plays up the absurdity of his memories, and even when the film closes out on him in a state of drunken confession, it’s impossible to say that his booze-loosened tongue can be taken for truth any more than his rousingly camp exterior.

Clarke and the crew likewise point out the discrepancies between their shooting methods and its ability to reveal. The frame constantly blurs with each new wrinkle in Jason’s life story, the refocusing a visualization of the portrait being recalibrated in the search for truth. Most interesting is the active presence of Clarke and Lee, despite remaining off-screen. Whenever Jason’s energy flags, or even when they simply don’t find a certain angle interesting, they prod and insult him to get the subject going again. It’s the most explicit gesture in a film filled with aesthetic giveaways that this supposedly unvarnished portrait is consciously shaped by someone other than Jason. That Clarke, a straight, white woman, ultimately had power of final cut on a gay, black man’s presented identity only makes the notion of total truth even more elusive.

A/V

From an objective standpoint, Milestone’s restoration of Portrait of Jason cannot fix many deeply embedded print issues. Scratches blot most of the frames, and image quality in general has a softness that looks more like 16mm than the 35 Clarke used. But this nonetheless represents an incredible leap in quality from previously existing museum prints (as helpfully illustrated in a feature that compares Milestone’s transfer to the print housed at MoMA), and I can’t imagine this long-neglected film ever looking better. The sound is also drastically cleaner, lacking nearly all of the tinniness of pre-existing versions with consistently crisp rendering of Jason’s speeches.

Extras

Milestone’s disc comes laden with extras. “Where’s Shirley?” is the video prepared by Milestone husband-wife team Dennis Doros and Amy Heller to promote the crowdfunding campaign for Portrait’s restoration. “The Lost Confrontation” contains a cut clip from the film in which Clarke called out Jason for some vaguely defined harm he committed against her, which largely consists of a by-then totally sloshed Holliday slurring a tearful apology. The disc also includes “Butterfly,” Clarke’s anti-war student short that only screened once, plus a trailer and a short film with footage of Clarke marching in protests with Allen Ginsberg.

And that’s not all! “Jason Unleashed” offers audio outtakes from the shoot that add another half-hour of material. The clips are not that strong on their own, at least compared to the hypnotic effect of the entire film, but they’re especially interesting as yet more context for the movie as a consciously sculpted affair. Two lengthy audio extras complete the disc, one a 53-minute radio interview with Clarke, the other an hour-long suite of over-produced clips entitled “The Jason Holliday Comedy Album.” A homemade party record, the LP is an odd affair, presenting cut-up snippets of Jason’s anecdotes and stomping over his natural sense of punchlines with oversold jokes and hacky music and sound effects. These features don’t explain much about the film, but then the movie itself is such a wonderfully forthright thing, and instead the extras appropriately go off on long tangents related to the matter at hand.

Overall

Certain unfixable print issues aside, Portrait of Jason has never looked or sounded better, and with a host of extras to boot, Milestone boasts one of the most crucial re-releases of the year.