Portrait of Jason

About

Jason Holiday was a member of Warhol's factory and Warhol was interested in doing a film with him. When plans for that fell through, Shirley Clarke, a long-time friend of Holiday's, came in the picture. In the 12-hour production in Clarke's apartment, Clarke (and Jason's friend Carl) are off-screen, probing Jason to tell stories of his life, his secrets, and his heartbreaks. 

What came about was a verité-style film that blurs the lines between performance, lying, and tragic honesty. In an interview with Lauren Rabinovitz, Clarke said of the film and Jason's performance, "He cries, and then in the middle of his sobbing, he turns it off. I tried to make a good ending, but each time I thought it was over, he would pull back and do another trip on us: 'I’m not lying.' 'Yes I am.' You're right, and we are left with nothing else except that particular reality which happens to be Jason."¹

In an interview from March 15, 1968, Clarke described the film as, "It is a biography, with Jason talking. I've known him for years, and the voices you hear are those of me and Carl, a friend of his; so when we asked him questions, encouraging him to do things, and reminded him of things, he acted out his life, breaking through the barrier of the screen to the audience. The camera reveals him as far removed from middle-class white society. He represents everything alienated. Our society produced Jason, and his choices were made for him. Filming it, his life became funny, but it is tragic."²

The film premiered in October 1967 at a theater in Times Square, opened by The Filmmakers Co-Op.²

Movie Databases

Portrait of Jason - IMDB

Portrait of Jason - Letterboxd

Reviews

The Reader's Digest called it "a remarkable voyage into the twisted soul of a male prostitute, [that] compresses into less than two hours all the raw language and candid corners of life that find free expression in films today."³