…there was Jason Holliday, the gregarious subject of Shirley Clarke’s still-somehow radical 1967 Portrait of Jason, itself the subject of today’s Foreign Region DVD Report. I got to thinking about Clarke the other day, Ornette Coleman’s birthday, and the sorry state of her filmography (her Ornette doc included) on home video. The fantastic Second Run disc of Jason is a notable exception. Ah, it’s good to be writing about FILM again…!
At The Auteurs’.
“The particulars of Jason’s situation at that moment in time and space—black and gay in pre-Stonewall New York— had almost doomed him from the get-go.”
This sort of reminds me of an interview I saw with James Baldwin, in which the interviewer asked him if, as a young boy he thought he was cursed, given that he was poor, black, and gay, and given his dream of being a writer. Baldwin said, “I thought I hit the jackpot.”
For those interested in seeing this onscreen, we’re playing it Mar 29:
http://www.ifccenter.com/films/portrait-of-jason/