Each year the Library Of Congress chooses 25 films for preservation, which it considers are important enough to cinema that they deserve special protection. This year’s movies have now been picked, and the list includes Shirley Clarke’s seminal gay-themed 1967 documentary, Portrait Of Jason.
While not as well-known as it ought to be, the film holds a special place in the history of gay cinema, not least because it was one of the first films to focus on a gay person of color. Filmed over 12-hours in Clarke’s apartment, the doc consists solely of footage of the larger than life Jason Holliday, a gay hustler. He gets increasingly intoxicated as the evening wears on, while holding forth with stories of his life. It’s a fascinating film, which asks the audience to question the truth of what Jason is saying, both in terms of its objective reality and whether Jason is covering over the cracks in his life caused by oppression and self-destruction.
The Library Of Congress notes, ‘In one of the first LGBT films widely accepted by general audiences, Shirley Clarke explored the blurred lines between fact and fiction, allowing her subject, Jason Holliday (né Aaron Payne), a gay hustler and nightclub entertainer, to talk about his life with candor, pathos and humor in one 12-hour shoot. Clarke originally envisioned Jason as the only character, but she subsequently revealed: “When I saw the rushes I knew the real story of what happened that night in my living room had to include all of us [the off-screen voices. her crew and herself], and so our question-reaction probes, our irritations and angers, as well as our laughter remain part of the film.” Bosley Crowther of “The New York Times” described it as a “curious and fascinating example of cinéma vérité, all the ramifications of which cannot be immediately known.” Legendary filmmaker Ingmar Bergman called it “the most extraordinary film I’ve seen in my life.” Thought to have been lost, a 16 mm print of the film was discovered at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research in 2013 and has since been restored by the Academy Film Archive, Milestone Films and Modern Videofilm.’
You can read our review of Portrait Of Jason here, as well as the recent (but not very good) Jason & Shirley, which re-imagines what happened in Clarke’s apartment that night.
As well as Portrait Of Jason, the Library’s National Film Preservation Board has picked a mix of well-known and more esoteric films this year, with the former represented by the likes of LA Confidential, Ghosbusters, Top Gun and The Shawshank Redemption. The other side includes things such as Edison’s 1894 Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, 1946’s John Henry and the Inky-Poo (one of the first animated films to cast African-American folklore in a positive light), the Disney’s produced 1946 educational short The Story of Menstruation (yes, by Disney), and the unusually titled 1968 production, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. You can read more about all this year’s chosen films here.
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