Portrait of Jason Blu-ray Review
Mona Lisa Tears
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, January 23, 2015
Shirley Clarke was an Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker in an era when
documentaries were so little seen that their makers were not widely known. Clarke began as a
dancer and choreographer, and her first films were about dancing. When she turned her attention
to other subjects, she brought to them the same fascination with the abstract interplay of light,
shadow and color that is characteristic of many forms of modern dance. The 1958 short
Skyscraper chronicled the construction of a building on New York's Fifth Avenue; it was
Clarke's first Oscar nomination. In 1961, she released what would become her best-known film,
The Connection, which appeared to be a cinema verité documentary about a group of jazz
musician junkies waiting for their dealer. In fact, it was a scripted drama based on a play by
writer Jack Gelber. Clarke's 1963 film,
Robert Frost: A Lover's Quarrel with the World, won the
Oscar for Best Documentary.
As both a filmmaker and a professor of film, Clarke remained active until her retirement in 1985,
but her reputation has gradually faded as the work became unavailable and ceased to be shown.
(Clarke died in 1997, after a long battle with Alzheimer's.) Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, the
indefatigable founders of Milestone Films, have created "Project Shirley" to rescue, restore and
exhibit Clarke's work to a new generation. Due to various considerations, the release of
Volume
1 of "Project Shirley",
The Connection, was postponed until February 2015. Volumes 2 and
3
were released in November 2014.
Volume 2 contains Clarke's 1967 film
Portrait of Jason, which is 107 minutes culled from a
twelve-hour interview session shot in Clarke's apartment on December 2, 1966 with a man
known as Jason Holliday (which isn't his real name). Jason is the only person we see during the
entire film, but one of the many questions that Clarke raises is whether we ever really
see him.
Under the guise of cinema verité, which Clarke enhances by making her film look like raw,
unedited footage, the filmmaker sows doubt about the camera's ability to capture the truth,
especially when its subject is someone whose life has been devoted to evasion and deception.
Later documentary makers like
Erol Morris and
Joshua Oppenheimer explore similar themes by
more elaborate methods, but Clarke did it simply by finding the right subject and asking him to
be himself (which turns out to be a challenge).
Describing
Portrait of Jason is an exercise in futility, because the point of the film is to create an
extended encounter between the viewer and Clarke's subject. The entire film consists of Jason
Holliday talking, laughing, singing, smoking, drinking, telling stories from his life, or possibly
that he's made up entirely (one never knows). Off-camera, we occasionally hear the voices of
Clarke and of Carl Lee, Jason's long-time friend, prompting him to tell a specific tale or, as the
evening wears on, berating him for some past misdeed. The entire film is an act of self-revelation, but as Clarke has repeatedly said in interviews, not
everyone can reveal themselves
before a camera. A special talent is required. And even the most honest revelations can be just as
deceiving as deliberate lies. Clarke even warns the viewer at the outset by having Jason state and
restate his name, until he admits that his
true name is "Aaron Payne", and then explains how he
came to be called "Jason Holliday". As Clarke comments in one of the extras, a person who has
renamed himself from "Payne" (or "pain") to "Holliday" (or "holiday") has already told you a lot
about himself.
Articulate and dandyish, with thick glasses in heavy frames, Jason is never at a loss for words.
Likeable or not (and Jason elicits conflicting reactions, often within the same viewer), Jason is
obviously intelligent. He gestures and speaks in the exaggerated manner of a drag queen,
although he is wearing men's clothing, and he laughs continually at the ridiculous behavior of
both "whites" and "coloreds", although the laughter sounds increasingly painful and forced as the
evening wears on. Because he is openly gay, he is as much an outsider in the African-American
community as any black person in segregated white America (remember that the film was made
less than a year before Martin Luther King's assassination). Jason's very survival has been a
daily act of self-reinvention, of living by his wits, and this appears to have been the case ever
since childhood. His stories of harsh treatment by his father, who was known as "Brother
Tough", are made even more harrowing by the comic tone with which Jason tells them. When
Jason earnestly informs the camera that he is an evil person, it's unclear whether he is expressing
an honest self-evaluation or simply relating what many people think of him.
Some of Jason's most outrageous stories are about serving as a "houseboy" to rich white couples
(or widows) whose odd behavior he describes with relish. Relaxing at home, and frequently
worse the wear for alcohol, they treat Jason as a part of the furniture and express their racism
openly. At other times, Jason talks about his efforts to start a career as a nightclub entertainer,
although it's never clear how much of this is real. Jason claims he could have accomplished more
if he hadn't expended so much time and energy on sex, but one of the unanswered questions is
whether he is referring to sex for pleasure or sex for money. He repeatedly describes himself as a
"hustler", but as his presentation continues, it's evident that
everything in Jason's world is some
form of hustle—even this movie.
Jason's laughter is wild and extreme, but it's rarely infectious. If one were in the same room with
him, it would probably be frightening. By the end of the evening, it has cracked into tears, but
there is always the suspicion that everything, including the tears, is, at least in part, a
performance for the camera. When one has spent one's entire life wearing a variety of masks,
when does the masquerade end?
Clarke's photographic style is disconcerting for contemporary sensibilities; it screams
"experimental cinema". Although she was a professional filmmaker, she went out of her way to
make
Portrait of Jason look like the work of an amateur, almost as if it were the Sixties
equivalent of "found footage". The film has no opening or closing titles—an omission that
caused the film's 16mm interpositive to be miscatalogued for decades as "outtakes". Jason
routinely goes out of focus for long stretches and the screen goes to black periodically. Part of
the reason is that Clarke had much more audio than video, and the blurs and blanks allowed her
to edit Jason's "performance" seamlessly without synch issues, but another part was simply that
she liked the abstract shapes made by his face and glasses as they dissolve into blobs of gray. To
Clarke, this was the visual equivalent of Jason's constant self-reinvention, as well as a reminder
that what's seen through a camera is
not reality. With all due respect to Jean-Luc Godard, it may
not even be truth.
Portrait of Jason Blu-ray, Video Quality
Portrait of Jason has been restored from a newly discovered 16mm fine-grain interpositive
discovered by Milestone Films at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. A 35mm
print borrowed from the Swedish Film Institute was used as a reference, because the fine-grain IP
did not reflect the final editing changes made by Clarke and editor Gloria Hawkins. Milestone
has provided the following description of the restoration performed by Modern VideoFilm under
supervision of the Academy Film Archive:
At Modern VideoFilm, colorist Kathy Thomson and the Academy's Joe Lindner
scanned the 16mm interpositive at 2K. Modern Videofilm's Vincent Pirrozi
supervised and assisted on the work including the proofing of the 2K transfer,
the 35mm negative and the 35mm prints. Modern VideoFilm created a one-light
scan and a digital audio track of the 35mm print from the Svenska Filminstitutet
(Swedish Film Institute), which were used in conforming and creating the final
restoration. Because Shirley Clarke and Gloria Hawkins had done additional
editing after the fine grain was created, Modern VideoFilm's editor Roger
Berger used the Quantel IQ platform to piece together the film using . . .
Sweden's print as a guide. He discovered that with the exception of one optical
effect (footage of Jason smoking was used and then repeated in reverse), the
16mm material was complete. The team at Modern recreated all the optical and
transition effects in the print and removed flaws in the 16mm, including pen
markings and tape which were placed as optical and printing cues. They then
created a B&W LUT (Lookup Table) for output to 35mm, matching the exact
composition and sizing of the 35mm print; a DCP (digital cinema package); and
a HDSR (high definition) video master. Over 6 terrabytes of information have
been recorded to hard drive and tape formats to preserve the various digital
formations.
The 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray that has resulted from this painstaking work is a remarkable
achievement. One cannot expect a black-and-white 16mm source from an informal 1967 shoot to
arrive in pristine condition, but the source materials are free of any major damage, revealing
small scratches, blotches and an occasional vertical streak. Detail is impressive, revealing shifts
in Jason's expression, the texture of his skin, hair and clothing, and the surroundings in Clarke's
apartment. Perhaps most important, the densities and contrast are vastly superior to previous
sources (see screenshot 18, which is taken from "Jason Before and After" in described in
"Extras" ) so that the film's subject appears to be sitting and talking in an ordinary well-lighted
room. This setting only serves to accentuate the extraordinary nature of the personality and
presentation that are the film's central subject.
Having taken such care in the restoration, Milestone has encoded
Portrait of Jason at an average
bitrate of 32.97 Mbps, which is essential for a film where both the subject and the film's grain
are in constant motion.
Please note that the film's high score takes account of the nature of both the source and the film
itself.
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