Time Out DVD Review, 5/6 Stars.
For some time, a number of DVD labels - Artificial Eye, the BFI, Optimum and Tartan included - have been putting out good arthouse, archive, avant - garde fare, but special meniton should perhaps go to Eureka's 'Masters Of Cinema' series - October releases include Murnau's 'Sunrise', Inamura's 'Vengeance Is Mine' and Peter Watkins 'Punishment Park' - and Second Run which is making a real virtue out of bringing out comparatively (but undeservedly) unfamiliar titles by directors otherwise barely represented (if at all) on disc. Second Run has a particular liking for Eastern Europe, it seems, and a new batch of releases includes 'The Ear' (Czechoslovlakia), 'Interrogation' (Poland) and 'Another Way' (Hungary). But the best of the latest bunch is surely Shirley Clarke's 'Portrait Of Jason', a documentary made in 1967 and once praised by Ingmar Bergman as the most fascinating film he'd ever seen.


Certainly, it must have seemed amazing at the time of its making, since the whole film simply records a straight-to-camera conversation-cum-confession-cum-star-turn, shot in one room from one Jason Holliday. Actually, his given name was Aaron - being a fortysomething gay balck hustler in the pre-gay lib '60s wasn't easy, as his memories of an Alabama childhood make horribly clear - but that didn't prevent him from giving Clarke (occasionally heard off-screen) a performance of blistering social, sexual and other truths, notwithstanding his regular-as-clockwork resort to camp artifice (fab impersonations of Mae West included) and hysterics (in both senses of the word). It's an unforgettably vivid portrait of pride, guilt, forlorm longing and bitchy contempt that provides acute insights into issues of race, sex, class, age and celebrity; Warhol's influence is discernible throughout. The superior extras include footage of and by Clarke's daughter Wendy and a booklet comprising fine essays by Tony Rayns and Tom Sutpen.

- Geoff Andrew