All Movie Guide
Portrait of Jason is a disturbing but fascinating 90-minute exercise in the Avant Garde (earlier prints ran 105 minutes). Experimental filmmaker Shirley Clarke, produced, edited, directed and provided voiceover for this landmark film. Essentially, the picture consists of an interview with "Jason," a young black homosexual and male prostitute. Despite her kaleidoscope style, Clarke takes great pains not to editorialize: Jason is Jason, like it or not. While mainstream critics expressed nausea and disgust over Portrait of Jason, Swedish director Ingmar Bergman declared it to be "the most fascinating film I've ever seen."
Time Out Film Guide
Shirley Clarke's third feature is almost as straightforward as its title. It picks up the passionate interest in ghetto subcultures that Clarke established in The Connection and The Cool World, but this time without feeling any need to create a fiction: Portrait of Jason is simply a two-hour conversation with a middle-aged, black, homosexual prostitute. The new simplicity of approach reflects the enormous influence of Andy Warhol on independent film-making in the '60s: a new trust in basic film-making techniques, and a new distrust of 'artifice' like editing. Jason himself certainly provides enough artifice to keep any audience engrossed: his colourful, self-mocking account of his life reveals a great deal about the situation of a ghetto boy with 'white-boy fever'. The moral catch is that by fulfilling Jason's dreams of himself as a 'performer', the movie deliberately pushes him out of his own control...
The Chicago Reader
Shirley Clarke's study of a black male prostitute, Jason Holliday, was a pioneering study of the cinema verite movement--a 105-minute record of Jason conversing, performing, confessing, dissolving. It's an intense, commanding film, though Clarke's wholesale appropriation of Jason's life and pain for the purposes of art causes a moral queasiness that, typically for the verite movement, is never addressed or acknowledged.
“In part hilarious and in total compelling…..”-- London Film Festival, Paul Taylor
