{"id":8671,"date":"2026-07-28T12:12:22","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T10:12:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/?p=8671"},"modified":"2026-07-29T10:29:54","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T08:29:54","slug":"mdwp009-004","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/mdwp009-004\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWhose Portrait?\u201d Fabulations and Triangulations in Shirley Clarke\u2019s Portrait of Jason (1967)"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"author\"><em>Nanna Heidenreich<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-0762-8573\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-600\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/orcid.png\" alt=\"orcid\" width=\"19\" height=\"19\" \/><\/a><\/h3>\n<style>\n        .tsquotation strong {\n            font-weight: bold;\n        }\n        .tsquotation em {\n            font-style: italic !important;\n        }\n        .bibliography {\n        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id=\"zp-ID-8671-4511395-D2TIIEV2\" data-zp-author-date='Heidenreich-2025' data-zp-date-author='2025-Heidenreich' data-zp-date='2025' data-zp-year='2025' data-zp-itemtype='bookSection' class=\"zp-Entry zpSearchResultsItem\">\n<div class=\"csl-bib-body\" style=\"line-height: 1.35; padding-left: 1em; text-indent:-1em;\">\n  <div class=\"csl-entry\">Heidenreich, Nanna. 2025. \u201c\u2018Whose Portrait?\u2019 Fabulations and Triangulations in Shirley Clarke\u2019s Portrait\nof Jason (1967).\u201d In <i>Facing Drag. Gender Bending and Racialized Masking in Performing Arts and Popular Culture<\/i>, edited by Evelyn Annu\u00df and Raz Weiner. mdwPress. <a class='zp-ItemURL' href='https:\/\/doi.org\/10.14361\/9783839471708-004'>https:\/\/doi.org\/10.14361\/9783839471708-004<\/a>. <a title='Cite in RIS Format' class='zp-CiteRIS' data-zp-cite='api_user_id=4511395&item_key=D2TIIEV2' href='javascript:void(0);'>Cite<\/a> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><!-- .zp-Entry .zpSearchResultsItem -->\n\t\t\t<\/div><!-- .zp-zp-SEO-Content -->\n\t\t<\/div><!-- .zp-List -->\n\t<\/div><!--.zp-Zotpress-->\n\n\n<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n<div class=\"bdaia-toggle close\"><h4 class=\"bdaia-toggle-head toggle-head-open\"><span class=\"bdaia-sio bdaia-sio-angle-up\"><\/span><span class=\"txt\">Outline<\/span><\/h4><h4 class=\"bdaia-toggle-head toggle-head-close\"><span class=\"bdaia-sio bdaia-sio-angle-down\"><\/span><span class=\"txt\">Outline<\/span><\/h4><div class=\"toggle-content\"><p>\n<a href=\"#1\">References<\/a><br \/>\n<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n<hr>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><span class='bdaia-btns bdaia-btn-medium' style=\"background:#b2b2b2 !important;color:#000000 !important;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/10.1436_19783839471708-004.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\" style=\"color:#000000 !important;\">CHAPTER PDF <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/download-1459070_1280.png\" style=\"vertical-align: middle\" alt=\"Download-Logo\" width=\"17\" height=\"17\"><\/a><\/span>\n<p><em>Portrait of Jason<\/em>, the fourth feature-length film by American filmmaker Shirley Clarke, was released in 1967. It is a white heterosexual female filmmaker\u2019s film about and with a Black gay man, the self-professed \u201chustler\u201d and performer Jason Holliday. After <em>The Connection<\/em> (1961) and <em>A Cool World<\/em> (1963), <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em> was Clarke\u2019s third film about\/with Black protagonists, a series if you will,<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn1\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref1\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> which she concluded in 1985 with her last film, <em>Ornette Made in America<\/em>. All of Shirley Clarke\u2019s films were restored by Milestone Films in New York between 2012 and 2016. Each time a film\u2019s restoration was completed, it was shown in the Forum section of the Berlinale, the International Film Festival Berlin. This was my introduction to <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em>. In 2013, I was asked to write a short text for the Forum catalog that, despite its brevity, was supposed to address the complex and critical reception of the film.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn2\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref2\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> This critical reception mainly revolves around the relation between the filmmaker and the film\u2019s protagonist. Is this film, made out of material from a nonstop twelve-hour shoot at Shirley Clarke\u2019s penthouse suite at Hotel Chelsea in New York City, with Jason Holliday increasingly drunk and stoned and presumably on heroin, a display of exploitation? How do we understand the constellation of white, heterosexual, middle-class, avant-garde filmmaker and Black, gay protagonist, at least temporarily homeless, addicted, and dreaming of stardom? Whose portrait is it actually? What is this film a portrait of?<\/p>\n<p>The soundtrack of the film contains numerous requests for Jason Holliday to tell \u201cthe truth\u201d and to be \u201chonest,\u201d and the critical reception to the film for the most part appears troubled by the tension expressed in this directive. The two poles (truth\/lie) thus have been transferred into constellations of two, such as Gilles Deleuze\u2019s analysis of the relation between the \u201cfilm-maker\u201d and the \u201ccharacter,\u201d the \u201cwhite camera\u201d and the \u201cblack forger,\u201d or, in Rachel Brown\u2019s words, \u201cthe duality of fantasy and reality\u201d (Brown 2017)<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>a longtime fascination of Clarke\u2019s. In a footnote however, Brown describes the troubling uncertainty of the film with the phrase \u201cthe audience\u2019s unanswered questions\u201d(ibid.). Instead of relegating the audience to a footnote, in what follows I propose to think it as a third party that demands consideration. Instead of asking whose truth the film reveals or hides<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>that of Shirley Clarke or her protagonist, Jason Holliday<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>I would like to leave this duality, these \u201cquestions of two,\u201d behind and consider the film as a set of triangulations. I loosely borrow this term from Haile Gerima\u2019s concept of triangular cinema, which he presented at the Edinburgh Film Festival\u2019s Third Cinema Conference in 1986, and which insists on the necessity of creating a relationship between audience\/community, filmmakers\/storytellers, and critics\/activists. For Gerima, the political potential of cinema, especially in the confrontation with racism and through the lens of an Afro-diasporic perspective, must be thought of as triangular (Gerima 1989). I would like to expand from this and consider triangulation as a queer mode of reading (and filmmaking); as that-which-is-not\/beyond\/more than-binary. These triangulations serve to complicate the truth\/lie constellation that seeps into literal understandings of drag, and they also address the entanglements of race and sex that inform every aspect of the film, its making and its reception.<\/p>\n<p>In relation to <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em>, some of these triangulations involve additional actants in the (making of the) film, some concern the film\u2019s materiality, in other words its (un)availability, some follow along the line of critical reception, of scholarship and film criticism as well as less formal forms of writing and engagement, while some connect to other works<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>films<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>that expand the notion of what <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em> actually <em>is<\/em>. In following these triangulations, I take my lead from what Marc Siegel has called the \u201cporousness of the cinematic text,\u201d which makes it possible to \u201copen onto a cinematic experience beyond that of the moment of projection\u201d (Siegel 2017, 196). Siegel argues against the tendency to fix \u201cboth images and identities\u201d in an \u201coriginating textual system\u201d and instead shifts his attention to \u201cthe dynamic, speculative relationship between them\u201d (ibid.). He theorizes this as \u201ca gossip of images,\u201d as a queer practice \u201capposite of cinema.\u201d Gossip always requires more than two<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span><em>you didn\u2019t hear it from me!<\/em><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>to come into being. Gossip is always about an absent other, or several others, and it covers its tracks by refusing authorship, or taking credit, yet gossip is based on its own version of credibility, trust, and of fact-&#173;checking. Its scene is that of intimacy (as opposed to rumor, as Siegel argues)<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>in other words, it is not speaking from a distance, but from a position involved. In this sense, I also think of triangulations of\/with\/in\/around the film as vectors of desire, expanding <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em> in numerous directions. Like Marc Siegel, I want to look at the circulation of images and \u201cintel,\u201d or words, in relation to <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em>, joining a queer cinema practice that does not aim at a \u201cconclusive truth claim\u201d (ibid., 200) but (with Marc Siegel taking a theoretical lead from the late Douglas Crimp\u2019s writing about queerness as fabulousness) as \u201cnon-normative possibility\u201d (ibid.). This not least as Jason Holliday himself claims to be fabulous, but also because his performance has been described as a form of fabulation. Fabulation, following Marc Siegel reading Deleuze, effects a transformative movement, destabilizing the positions in front of and behind the camera.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn3\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref3\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> In this sense, fabulation has to be understood as a form of <em>drag;<\/em> here specifically not only in relation to gender, but also in terms of race and class. Or, as Tavia Nyong\u2019o succinctly argues, <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em> should be understood as a form of \u201cafro-fabulation\u201d (2019). Before going into this in more detail, first let me introduce the film and the people involved in its making<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and its remaking.<\/p>\n<p>Shirley Clarke was born in New York in 1919 to a wealthy Jewish family of inventors and engineers. She first studied dance, including with Martha Graham, and in the 1950s went on to study film at the City College of New York with Hans Richter and others. Clarke made numerous short experimental films<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>first dance-related, then an architectural film nominated for an Oscar<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>joined the New York Independent Film Makers\u2019 Association, and soon became one of the leading figures on the American avant-garde film scene.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn4\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref4\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> She won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 1964 for her portrait of Robert Frost. Her first feature-length film, <em>The Connection<\/em> (1961), was banned in the US for many years as obscene, since the term \u201cshit\u201d was constantly used in the film, which in this case was actually a slang term for heroin. Beginning in the mid-1970s, Clarke taught film and video at the University of California. In parallel, she experimented with live video, thus returning to her roots as a dancer. Shirley Clarke died in 1997 in Boston, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n<p>Milestone Films, the company that restored Clarke\u2019s films, was founded in 1990 by husband and wife team Amy Heller and Dennis Doros, who called their work with and on Clarke\u2019s films <em>Project Shirley<\/em>. The intimacy suggested by this title<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>just the first name<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>is essential here.<\/p>\n<p>What is known about the film\u2019s protagonist, Jason Holliday, is much sparser, not least because he himself provided various different biographical narratives. He was born as Aaron Payne, and his parents owned a restaurant in Trenton, New Jersey, where they had moved to from the South. He apparently contributed to the family\u2019s finances as a child performer, attended but did not finish college, went on to study acting and dance (also with Martha Graham among others), performed on stage and in nightclubs, and died in 1998 in Flushing, in New York. Milestone Films\u2019s press release for the restoration of <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em> provides further information.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn5\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref5\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> However, they are a very involved player with interests of their own, and their narrative does little to reveal \u201cthe truth\u201d either<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>not least as they appear only to follow the tracks of written accounts and documents, and most of which speak the language of whiteness in twentieth-century USA.<\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cOkay, Jason, go!\u201d<\/em> This call goes to Jason Holliday at the beginning of <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em>. The image is blurred at first, then comes into focus and Jason answers to the camera: \u201c<em>my name is Jason Holliday, my name is Jason Holliday <\/em>\u2026 laughter, pause \u2026 <em>my name is Aaron Payne.<\/em>\u201d Aaron Payne is Jason\u2019s birth name, but Jason<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>that is the name that best expresses his personality, as he states in the film. Jason\u2019s decision to introduce himself not just once, but three times, sets the tone of his <em>portrait<\/em> right from the start: \u201c<em>What I really want to do is what I am doing now: perform.<\/em>\u201d And that is what he does: he stages himself, is staged, narrates, invents, confesses, asserts. He challenges first and foremost the 16mm Auricon camera that records him and that is handled by Shirley Clarke and her longtime lover and collaborator Carl Lee, son of the legendary African American actor Canada Lee. It was Carl and Canada Lee who introduced Clarke to Jason Holliday. Clarke had also worked with Carl Lee on <em>The Connection<\/em> and <em>The Cool World<\/em>, films in which he also starred as actor. Also present was Jeri Sopanen, the Finnish-born cinematographer who had previously worked with luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Cousteau. But Jason Holliday not only challenges the camera and the team; he also challenges us viewers and our ideas of identity, identification, and truth.<\/p>\n<p><em>Portrait of Jason<\/em> defies categories: documentary, fiction film, casting reel, interview. It may well be all of these things, as well as a \u201ccritical test of reality,\u201d in Irene Gustafson\u2019s words (Gustafson 2011). The film was enthusiastically received immediately after its release. To this day, many texts about the film quote Ingmar Bergman, who was among the first to see it as part of a carefully curated sneak preview audience,<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn6\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref6\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> who allegedly had called it \u201cthe most extraordinary film I\u2019ve seen in my life.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn7\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref7\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Despite its fame, the film has barely been available for decades. With remaining film prints in utterly poor condition, it circulated mostly on VHS, and since 2006 also as a first restoration attempt on a DVD by the British company Second Run Features, accompanied by a booklet containing a speculative note by Tom Sutpen: \u201cIt\u2019s been described as so many things that one possible explanation for the persistent unavailability through the years of a film so exceptional has been its unusual way of eliding all categorization.\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn8\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref8\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Then in 2013, <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em> was restored by Milestone Films and released on DVD and Blue-ray (and for cinematic distribution as DCP); an event that seems to echo Jason Holliday\u2019s own words, \u201c<em>This is a picture I can save forever.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the course of the film, Holliday talks about drugs, about the almost exclusively white women he works for (as a domestic servant<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>\u201d<em>a houseboy<\/em>,\u201d in his words), his big nightclub show project, the sex he no longer wants to have, but talks about, the doctors he consults and his white \u201c<em>head shrinks<\/em>,\u201d presumably psychiatrists \u2026 and he also talks about racism (without using the word)<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>for instance when he calls these white doctors cops. He talks about props and uses them to reenact scenes from the movies and musicals he performs, many of which could be called \u201cclassic\u201d drag performances, such as a Barbra Streisand musical number from the stage version of <em>Funny Girl<\/em>, and impersonations of Mae West, whom he calls a female faggot. He distances himself from the concept of gay marriage understood as a long-term monogamous relationship: \u201c<em>I have better taste<\/em>,\u201d he says. He identifies as a lesbian, he tells us about his childhood, about his violent father, about his mother, and he tells us about feeling lost and being homeless. He tells us that he has to tell, that he will better not tell: \u201c<em>I\u2019ll never tell<\/em><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span><em>I have to tell. I AM HERE ON THE THRONE. I get to tell whatever I want<\/em>. <em>THIS IS MY CHANCE TO REALLY FEEL MYSELF AND SAY<\/em><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span><em>I\u2019M THE BITCH.<\/em>\u201d In between, he is asked by Clarke to tell more: \u201c<em>what else have you got?<\/em>\u201d The picture becomes blurry time and again, the sound continues, even when the camera is off and we see a black screen. The only person we do see in the film is Jason Holliday<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>but off-screen, on the soundtrack, we hear the voices of the other crew members, including Carl Lee, who in the last part of the film begins to berate Jason Holliday: \u201c<em>be honest, motherfucker,\u201d <\/em>\u201c<em>you\u2019re just full of shit.<\/em>\u201d Holliday responds with, among other things, a declaration of love and a request for attention: \u201c<em>Please turn around and smile at me<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Since the release of the restored version on DVD and Blue-ray by Milestone Films, additional layers have been added to the film, its restoration, and its reception, expanding the film in several directions. These new layers include, in the words of Tavia Nyong\u2019o, \u201canother chapter\u201d added to a \u201csaga that began almost a half century ago\u201d (Nyong\u2019o 2015), namely, Stephen Winter\u2019s 2015 film <em>Jason and Shirley.<\/em> It is a fictional reenactment of the twelve-hour film shoot, starring Sarah Schulman, who cowrote the script, as Shirley and Jack Waters as Jason. Like Rebecca Brown, who connects her wording of \u201cthe audience\u2019s unanswered questions around Portrait of Jason,\u201d to Winter\u2019s film (Brown 2017), Nyong\u2019o too understands <em>Jason and Shirley<\/em> as a response to the viewing experience of <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em>: as \u201can attempt to dig a little deeper into the dynamic of attraction and repulsion between the auteur and her star, and offers one plausible answer to the question that has bedeviled viewers of the confrontation\u201d (Nyong\u2019o 2015).<\/p>\n<p>Stephen Winter, who himself is both gay and Black and probably best known for his film <em>Chocolate Babies<\/em> (1996), said of <em>Jason and Shirley<\/em>, or rather regarding his motivations for making it, that <em>Portrait of Jason\u2019s<\/em> years-long unique selling point<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>the only American film with an openly gay Black protagonist<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>had been both extraordinarily relevant to him and, especially as a cinema-loving kid, utterly disturbing. The film stayed with him for decades:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">My take after over 20&#160;years of viewing is that Jason is not only complicit in his exploitation but ultimately the film\u2019s primary engineer of narrative and characterization. Remember, Jason\u2019s profession was hustling and part of the hustle is to take more for your service than what was originally offered, and hold your liquor longer than the mark. Shirley is the one who seems to give up and say, \u201cEnd, end, end,\u201d when she can\u2019t stand to film anymore. (Winter in Kohn 2015)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I will come back to Winter\u2019s film and its relationship to Milestone Film\u2019s restoration project. Before I do so, however, I would like to address Tavia Nyongo\u2019s concept of afro-fabulation, that is, a \u201ctheory and practice of black time and temporality\u201d (Nyong\u2019o 2019, 5), which he develops in resonance with Saidiya Hartman\u2019s concept of critical fabulation in his 2019 book <em>Afro-fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life<\/em>. I am particularly interested here in the chapter \u201cCrushed Black: On Archival Opacity,\u201d in which Nyong\u2019o discusses <em>Portrait of Jason.<\/em> Nyong\u2019o\u2019s focus is the impossibility of repair, and a critical reading of restoration and\/or as reparation. The history of racism and violence, he argues, cannot be repaired, especially not in a present that is equally, albeit differently, marked by it. The restoration of <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em> by Milestone Film incorporates the release of additional material<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>including the fifty-four-minute comedy act recorded by Jason Holliday sometime after the film shoot, but in the same year, 1967, as well as a scene that was present in the first cut of the film, the preview version, but which Clarke then edited out. In this scene, she confronts Holliday with accusations concerning Carl Lee<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>what Holliday did or didn\u2019t do with him, revealing the centrality of Lee to her relation to Holliday. By including these extras, we might concede, Milestone Film also wanted to give Holliday space, to give him credit, not only to Clarke. In a sense they tried to restore him too.<\/p>\n<p>Nyong\u2019o asks what happens when practical restoration and historical reparation collide. His argument expands on the photographic term \u201ccrushed blacks\u201d: \u201cThese are the \u2018shadow areas that lack detail and texture due to underexposure\u2019 and are thus called \u2018blocked up\u2019 or \u2018crushed,\u2019 according to the Illustrated Dictionary of Photography\u201d (ibid., 47). Crushed blacks need to be \u201cimproved\u201d in postproduction or, as with <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em>, in digitization:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">To link the phenomenon of blocked-up shadows to the question of African American representation in cinema, theater, and visual culture might appear to overburden a technical detail with symbolic and cultural weight. If I persist in drawing these connections, it is because I am persuaded that representations must be treated as immanent to the technical apparatus that construct them, especially if we would wish to unburden ourselves of their oppressive weight. (Ibid., 49)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Nyong\u2019o suggests considering technical imperfections for their queer antira&#173;cist potential and he links these to, in Gavin Butt\u2019s words, the \u201cimperfect and troublesome relations\u201d (Butt quoted in ibid., 54), within the film and in the production of the film<em>:<\/em><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">That is to say, if <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em> was from its inception troublingly imperfect, then the best that restoration or recovery could hope for might be to amplify those imperfections. The tangled relationships in the film would need to grapple with the feelings of shame, delight, exposure, and anger that <em>Portrait<\/em> both depicts and evokes, complications that strike at the heart of all we risk when we claim both life and art for performance. (ibid., 55)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>By looking at the restoration of the film, the question of who owns (or controls) the story<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>Holliday, or Clarke, or Lee<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>begins to shift. The same goes for the question of who<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>or whose truth, if any<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>the film actually shows: Aaron Payne, Jason Holliday, or Shirley Clarke? I would suggest that the film both shows and embodies constellations<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>including power structures and contradictions<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>because the film is thoroughly embedded in desire. Desire is multivectorial, yet its existence does not require reciprocation. On the contrary, it lays claims, can become possessive, violent even. At the same time, it makes the desirer dependent. Desire is also key to cinema, it makes cinema come into being, driving performers, filmmakers, audience, and critics alike. Desire is a messy, at times violent, potentiality.<\/p>\n<p>I would like to return here to Stephen Winter\u2019s film <em>Jason and Shirley<\/em>, the reenactment of the making of <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em>. The film\u2019s release led to a remarkable backlash by Milestone Films founders, Amy Heller and Dennis Doros, who publicly denounced the film (and were on the verge of suing Winter) under the headline \u201cThe Cruelty and Irresponsibility of Satire\u201d (Heller 2015). They claimed that, while they believed in freedom of speech, they felt: \u201cwe must go on the record about the film\u2019s inaccurate and simplistic portrayals of a brilliant filmmaker and her charismatic subject\u201d (ibid.). Heller and Doros called the film \u201cbad cinema and worse ethics<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>that cynically appropriates and parodies the identities of real people\u201d(ibid.). Winter responded with astonishing calm to this public accusation, insisting that his point was not to set the record straight<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>or to misrepresent it, as Doros and Heller had claimed. Instead:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">It was never my intention to replicate that day, but rather to reimagine its historical and emotional significance from Jason\u2019s point of view. So contacting people whom I don\u2019t know wouldn\u2019t help me get to the film I wanted to make. I wasn\u2019t crafting a documentary, or biopic, or a remake. I needed to go deep into the archive of my own life to find the emotional truth of Jason. I had to get to the Jason within me so I could reveal the Jason within us all. (Winter in Kohn 2015)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The argument of Doros and Heller vs. Winter once again revolves around questions of truth, and realness. In reference to <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em> both parties miss the point: The film is not a \u201ctrue portrait,\u201d but it is also not a \u201cfalse\u201d one, it is <em>cinema v\u00e9rit\u00e9<\/em> in the sense of Deleuze: not a cinema of truth, but the truth of cinema. In his second cinema book, <em>Cinema 2:<\/em> <em>The Time-Image<\/em>, Deleuze reflects on fabulation as a form of storytelling in which the character and the author\/director are mutually dependent, each invented by the other:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">What cinema must grasp is not the identity of a character, whether real or fictional, through his objective and subjective aspects. It is the becoming of the real character when he himself starts to \u201cmake fiction,\u201d when he enters into \u201cthe flagrant offence of making up legends\u201d and so contributes to the invention of his people. The character is inseparable from a before and an after, but he reunites these in the passage from one state to the other. He himself becomes another, when he begins to tell stories without ever being fictional. And the film-maker for his part becomes another when there are \u201cinterposed,\u201d in this way, real characters, who wholly replace his own fictions by their own story-telling. (Deleuze 1989, 150)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>A few pages later Deleuze directly addresses <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em>, a film in which \u201cit is the passage which must be grasped in all its possible \u201cdistances,\u201d in relation to the character and to his roles, but always internal distances, as if the white camera had slid into the great black forger\u201d (ibid., 154).<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn9\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref9\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>9<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>What Deleuze is missing here however, is that the camera is not only white. It was not only Shirley Clarke who directed the camera (and Jeri Sopanen), but also Carl Lee, who is the key presence in the much-discussed disturbing final sequence of the film. In this scene, he throws accusations at Jason Holliday and argues with him, audibly giving directions, speaking from the off space, from \u201cbehind the camera.\u201d The camera is, in this sense, also Black. And what the film shows is not just a relationship of, in Deleuze\u2019s words, black forger and white camera, but a constellation with several agents.<\/p>\n<p><em>Portrait of Jason<\/em> is a film that was supposed to explore cinema\u2019s potential as a medium of the \u201cself,\u201d and had therefore initially been planned as a self-&#173;portrait, as Clarke later stressed in various interviews, only to declare herself too camera-savvy to be suitable for the project.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn10\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref10\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>10<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> So it became a film about Jason Holliday. However, Milestone Films\u2019 furious response to Winter\u2019s <em>Jason and Shirley<\/em> seems to suggest that <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em> is in fact a self-portrait of Shirley Clarke. Doros and Heller took issue with what they thought was an attack on Clarke\u2019s reputation, and not on Holliday\u2019s.<\/p>\n<p>The vehemence of their reaction, however, speaks also to a different relation. I have already pointed out the strange name they chose for the restoration project of Clarke\u2019s feature-length films: <em>Project Shirley<\/em>. The use of her name indicates the intimacy Doros and Heller assumed with the subject of their work. In a public announcement after the completion of this project, Dennis Doros describes this moment as \u201cthe end of a long and happy marriage.\u201d He writes: \u201cAmy liked to call Shirley Clarke the other woman in my life\u201d (Doros 2016).<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn11\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref11\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>11<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> And as disturbing as this possessive cis-male claim to a polygyny marriage, in which one of the partners is dead and thus deprived of the possibility of giving consent, might be, it is one of the triangulations that I consider to be key to <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and to the film\u2019s incommensurability, as Nyong\u2019o puts it with reference to Jos\u00e9 Mu\u00f1oz (see Nyong\u2019o 2019, 49ff.).<\/p>\n<p>Shirley Clarke is said to have made the film to outmaneuver Andy Warhol, who apparently had had his eyes on Jason Holliday too.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn12\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref12\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>12<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> So, we also have a competitive triangle of Clarke, Warhol, and Holliday. Then, as Nyong\u2019o points out, the restoration and work with Clarke\u2019s archive revealed that the film may actually be dealing with a love triangle between Shirley Clarke, Jason Holliday, and Carl Lee:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">As the night progressed, Holliday\u2019s increasingly belligerent audience derailed his intended performance and set the stage for the angry confrontation between Holliday and an off-screen Lee. The final edit of the film is elliptical about what those \u201clies\u201d are, exactly. But notes left by Clarke in her log books now held in her archive refer to some of the topics Jason discussed on those other ten hours of film: \u201cstraight guys\u201d who are \u201cidiots waiting to be had\u201d; \u201cgigolos\u201d who are \u201creally fags-for-money\u201d; and, most scandalously, a story \u201cabout stealing a guy from a girl.\u201d When this missing footage is included in the extended cinema of every night life, it is the bizarre love triangle between Lee, Holliday, and Clarke that emerges as the true subject of Clarke\u2019s portrait. (ibid., 64)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>And this kind of archival gossip<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>the porousness of the cinematic text<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>continues in other directions too, complicating everything even further, as it includes heterosexism and racism expressed in or as desire.<\/p>\n<p>When Nyong\u2019o speaks of \u201ccrushed blacks,\u201d he is also addressing another layer of meaning of the term, namely, that of having a crush, being smitten, crushed out on someone or something. Nyong\u2019o\u2019s theorization of the crush refuses any romantic notion of shared mutual desire. Instead, he looks at the emotional manipulation of the documentary camera turned into a hostile tool for interrogation, as in the final scene of <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em>, where Jason Holliday is verbally tackled and taken apart by Carl Lee, where he bursts into tears, only to abruptly recompose himself and declare that \u201cI am happy about the whole thing.\u201d As Nyong\u2019o puts it:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">To be crushed, after all is to be dejected, defeated, and abject in the face of another. But also: to \u201chave a crush\u201d is to construe love as a kind of defiant ownership of one\u2019s abjection: I may not have you, we crushed ones say, but I have the way you have me. (ibid., 56)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The \u201cI have the way you have me,\u201d the desire for someone else\u2019s desire, can also become very icky, to say the least, as the next constellation of triangulations reveals, which entails racist, homophobic, and sexual violence. \u201cI am not to my knowledge a homosexual,\u201d writes filmmaker James Toback in an article on Alain Delon.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn13\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref13\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>13<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Since 2017 hundreds of allegations of sexual harassment have been made against Toback by numerous women* (Whipp 2018). By claiming that he is not a homosexual, Toback expresses his desire for Delon by means of disavowal for this man he desperately wanted to work with, as he tells Roger Ebert in an interview, using the words \u201cwho is my most desired\u201d (Ebert 2012). In addition to a number of comedies, Toback directed the film <em>Black and White<\/em> in 1999, a story of white middle-class teenagers fetishizing the \u201cblack\u201d lifestyle of rap, guns, and big cars. This \u201csemi-improvised piece of documentary fiction,\u201d as Michael Sragow writes in the introduction to his Toback interview (Sragow 2000)<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>featuring, among others, parts of the Wu Tang Clan, Mike Tyson, Claudia Schiffer, Ben Stiller, and Brooke Shields<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>is a difficult piece to watch and is not my subject here. I mention this film because, on the one hand, the film supposedly cross-references Shirley Clarke\u2019s 1963 film <em>The Cool World<\/em> in terms of content and form. On the other hand, in an interview following the release of <em>Black and White<\/em>, Toback talks about his desire for Black men, for which Shirley Clarke again plays a crucial role. The interview is titled with the N-word, quoting Toback\u2019s claim in the interview that as a teenager he lived the life of a \u201cWhite N\u201d (Sragow 2000). To explain his motivations for making <em>Black and White<\/em>, Toback begins by locating its origins in his childhood. He recounts his obsessive interest in the sons of the domestic worker his parents had employed<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>in his words \u201cthe woman who worked in our apartment when I was growing up\u201d<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>and nonchalantly interjects a violent episode: \u201cI was keenly aware of them being a completely different kind of person because of race. I think I ended up doing something physically violent to one of them, but it was out of a competitive friendliness\u201d (ibid.). In the interview, he immediately moves on from this creepy story to then talk about his best friend in high school, the only Black boy \u201cin a purely white, liberal, upper-middle-class, largely Jewish private school in New York,\u201d with whom he was \u201cquite close,\u201d to then switch to Clarke<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>more precisely to her partner\/boyfriend\/lover, to Lee:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">The real turning point came when I met and fell under the spell of Carl Lee. When I was 15 or 16 I saw Shirley Clarke\u2019s <em>The Cool World<\/em> [the 1963 urban underground classic] and was magnetized by Carl Lee. I went back to 72<span class=\"Hochgestellt\">nd<\/span> Street, where I lived, and down the block, there, two hours after seeing him play the lead on screen, was Carl Lee standing in front of his white Triumph TR6, smoking a cigarette in his navy-blue blazer and his white shirt, looking very debonair. I told him I\u2019d just seen the movie and that he was great. He was effusively friendly, and by the end of the conversation I had lent him $20 and bought some marijuana for him. (ibid.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>James Toback moves on to praise Carl Lee, as \u201chip-black-actor icon \u2026 He had a huge effect on everyone who knew him\u201d (ibid.). Then he shifts to describe the relationship between Clarke and Lee, thereby claiming intimate knowledge:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">Shirley Clarke\u2019s whole life revolved around Carl Lee; they had this on-and-off 30-year relationship and she totally supported him the whole time. His influence was a combination of language, style, personality and psychology. \u2026 The attraction was definitely physical, and stylistic and psychological. (ibid.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>This is also exactly the moment where he expresses his own desire for Lee, which he introduces with his \u201cstrange little thing\u201d for Alain Delon: \u201cIn my first sentence I say, \u2018I am not to my knowledge a homosexual.\u2019 That would be the appropriate phrase to describe my response to Carl Lee\u201d (ibid.). James Toback goes on to describe his relationship to Lee as a \u201cvery unusual, interesting friendship\u201d(ibid.), which is said to have lasted until Lee\u2019s death<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>claiming more years than Lee\u2019s relationship with Clarke. His claim resembles the disturbing intimacy that Dennis Doros claims to have with Shirley Clarke beyond her death, and is further reinforced by his account of financial domination. Carl Lee played a small role in James Toback\u2019s 1983 film <em>Exposed<\/em>. Toback reports that Lee showed up to the set completely high and in urgent need of money, which he, Toback, provided: \u201cHe died of an overdose an hour later\u201d (ibid.). However, Carl Lee died in 1986, so this too is a telling fable, a fabulation, revealing nothing about Lee, but a lot about Toback.<\/p>\n<p>His claim to have supplied Carl Lee with money two times<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>first he \u201clends\u201d him twenty dollars in exchange for weed, then he provides fifty dollars for the last fix<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>also hints at another triangular constellation, that of drugs, more precisely heroin. Both Lee and Holliday were addicts, and the intimacy of shared drug use also constitutes something of a love affair (in addition to Holliday\u2019s profession of love for Lee). This intimacy definitely played a big part in the legendary jealousy of Clarke that set the film project in motion in the first place.<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn14\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref14\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>14<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span> Toback\u2019s \u201csugar daddy\u201d act, however, simply means that he is trying to force himself violently into a constellation that he too is crushed out on. But Clarke herself is also caught in an abject kind of possessive crush. Between 1964 and 1972 Janine Bazin and Andre Labarthe produced a series of portraits, called <em>Cin\u00e9astes de Notre Temps<\/em>, filmmakers of our time. Clarke was included in the series in 1970 (<em>Rome Brule, portrait de Shirley Clarke<\/em>). In this film portrait, she fabulates about her films and filmmaking in the presence of an illustrious audience of mostly figures from the French film avant-garde, such as Jacques Rivette. Here, she delivers the very portrait of herself that then became that of Jason Holliday. Or in the words of Gilles Deleuze, who gossips about <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">The \u201cI is another\u201d of Shirley Clarke consists in this: that the film that she wanted to make about herself became the one she made about Jason. What has to be filmed is the frontier, on condition that this is equally crossed by the film&#173;maker in one direction and by the real character in the opposite direction.\u201d (Deleuze 1989, 154)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>In her actual portrait<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>that is that of Burch and Labarthe<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>Clarke fabulates in style and tonality as \u201cone of the boys,\u201d attempting to deflect the way those male colleagues of her tried to gender her by talking about \u201c<em>ladies and cameras<\/em>.\u201d She does her best to show that, in fact, she\u2019s got more balls and definitely a bigger dick than them. Her claim to rank among the (white straight) boys<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>her \u201cholding court\u201d<span class=\"Hochgestellt\"><span><a href=\"#fn15\" class=\"footnote-ref\" id=\"fnref15\" role=\"doc-noteref\"><sup>15<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>leads to a bizarre homophobic denial of Holliday\u2019s gayness:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\"><em>Jason is very symbolic. Obviously, he is a real person, but what has happened to Jason, and what has made Jason who he is, is definitely the fault of American white society. And what intrigues me so much in the film is that Jason, without ever once saying this, you can\u2019t leave that film and not be aware of what has been done to him. Not only his de-emasculation <\/em><span class=\"Regular\">[sic]<\/span><em> because I\u2019m absolutely convinced for instance that Jason is a made-up homosexual.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Clarke claims in this portrait, her own fabulation, that Holliday \u201c<em>screams at you I love you!<\/em>,\u201d but that he could never truly love. Holliday does however declare his love<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>but for Lee, not for her. Nyong\u2019o comments on this scene:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">Setting aside the question of what a \u201cmade-up\u201d (as opposed to real?) homosexual might be, I am taken by Clarke\u2019s telling misremembering of her own film, the film that she claimed to have obsessively edited over months. In this quotation, she implies that Jason screamed \u201cI love you\u201d at her, when in point of fact, as she must know, he screamed it at Lee. So her insistence that he could never, never, really love must be read as overdetermined by her refusal to admit that her beloved Lee could ever have made a reciprocal \u201cadjustment\u201d to America, could ever have \u201cde-emasculated\u201d himself to a level where he could desire someone like Holliday, even for one night. (Nyong\u2019o 2019, 66)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>What speaks here, in this postscript portrait masked as prequel to <em>Portrait of Jason,<\/em> is Clarke\u2019s denial of her own feelings and desires, even if these are what set her film in motion in the first place. But what <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>\u201d<em>this is a picture I can save forever\u201d<\/em><span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>does, is continue to expose that very desire.<\/p>\n<p>Shirley Clarke, in her \u201cown\u201d film portrait, calls for a specific coming together: \u201c<em>the filmmaker, the audience and the film must all be part of something together. And I don\u2019t want them separated behind the screen anymore.<\/em>\u201d A suggestion that in my mind resonates with Haile Gerima\u2019s triangular cinema:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"tsquotation\">This triangular relationship best functions through constant critical and innovative deliberation that includes an analysis of the history and practice of conventional cinema. In this process, all inevitable, spontaneous, aesthetic outbursts take motion, becoming organised, coherent, dynamic and vibrant cultural moments. (Gerima 1989, 69)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I do consider <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em> an aesthetic outburst, but one that defies becoming coherent or organized<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>because it is suffused with desire. This desire opens the film to constellations beyond \u201csets of two\u201d and beyond the binaries of true\/fake and revealed\/hidden, beyond simplistic understandings of drag<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>to what I have described as triangulations. But this desire is not only \u201ccrushed out,\u201d it also potentially crushes that which it lays claim to with the violence that informs it.<\/p>\n<h4>Endnotes<\/h4>\n<hr class=\"HorizontalRule-1\" \/>\n<ol>\n<li id=\"fn1\">\n<p>In Irene Gustafson\u2019s words a \u201cseries of films in the 1960s that centrally explore issues of Black masculinity\u201d (2011, 26n1).<a href=\"#fnref1\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn2\">\n<p>Some of the ideas developed here began to take shape in that catalogue contribution and I have taken up some of the formulations used there to develop them further in this article. See Heidenreich 2013.<a href=\"#fnref2\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn3\">&#9;Marc Siegel argues this in his forthcoming book <em>A Gossip of Images<\/em>. In all of my thinking about and with <em>Portrait of Jason<\/em> Marc\u2019s work and input and his generous sharing of ideas as well as bibliographical references and of course, gossip, has been constitutive. This text would basically not exist without his work.<a href=\"#fnref3\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn4\">\n<p>For biographical references see, for instance, Milestone Film\u2019s press kit \u201cPortrait of Jason\u201d (n. d., a), the Berlinale Forum 2013 catalogue (\u201cPortrait of Jason\u201d 2013), but also Nyong\u2019o 2019 and Siegel (forthcoming).<a href=\"#fnref4\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn5\">&#9;See Milestone Film\u2019s press kit \u201cPortrait of Jason\u201d (n. d., a). I use Jason Holliday without the much used addendum \u201cn\u00e9 Aaron Payne,\u201d as he claims in the film that Jason is the name, that he chose for himself and that best suits his personality. The use of the prefix \u201cn\u00e9\u201d is used in the frame of the patriarchal logic of name changing in marriage for women (n\u00e9e). From today\u2019s perspective of naming politics within queer, trans, and nonbinary communities, I refrain from using \u201cn\u00e9\u201d because I cannot ascribe this formulation to Jason Holliday himself, but to a logic of origin and truth that both the film and my (as well as others\u2019) critical thinking seek to defy.<a href=\"#fnref5\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn6\">&#9;Including luminaries such as Amos Vogel, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer, Elia Kazan, Andy Warhol, Geraldine Page and Ruby Dee, see Milestone Films\u2019s website \u201cPortrait of Jason\u201d (n. d., b).<a href=\"#fnref6\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn7\">\n<p>Milestone Films press release uses the attributed quote as epigraph without referencing a source.<a href=\"#fnref7\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn8\">\n<p>As quoted in Gustafson 2011, 2.<a href=\"#fnref8\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn9\">&#9;See also Marc Siegel\u2019s thinking about fabulation and his complex reading of Deleuze in his forthcoming book <em>A Gossip of Images<\/em>.<a href=\"#fnref9\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn10\">\n<p>Clarke talks about this in Burch\u2019s and Labarthe\u2019s film (1970): \u201cThe reason I didn\u2019t do me and did do Jason, is that I think it\u2019s very difficult for a person who is a filmmaker who is so aware of filmmaking to make a film about themselves. A person who that is done to \u2026 can\u2019t be as au courrant as a filmmaker would be. I would have destroyed the film before the film is over.\u201d<a href=\"#fnref10\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn11\">&#9;The article by Doros on the website of Milestone Films is framed by two photographs, one showing a woman in a bridal dress (Clarke? Heller?), the other a baby. This one has a caption: \u201cShirley Clarke in 1919.\u201d Doros\u2019s claim is also one of genealogy, of patrilineage, the project is his baby, as is Shirley Clarke, who is also his second wife\u2026<a href=\"#fnref11\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn12\">\n<p>See for instance the press by Milestone Films\u2019 press kit \u201cPortrait of Jason\u201d (n. d., a), in which she is quoted off record: \u201cIn a 1969 interview at the George Eastman House, Clarke said, off-the-record, that a month before shooting her film, Warhol coincidentally met Jason Holliday at a bar through Paul Morrissey. He then tried to shoot a film with Jason and Edie Sedgwick, which Clarke said, was in the wastebasket as far as she knew. \u2018They simply couldn\u2019t do it.\u2019\u201d<a href=\"#fnref12\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn13\">\n<p>I could not find this article that Toback says he published in the paperback magazine <em>Projections<\/em>&#160;41, no.&#160;2. This quote is based on Toback\u2019s own self-referencing in various interviews, such as Sragow 2000 or Ebert 2012.<a href=\"#fnref13\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn14\">&#9;See, for instance, Bob Fiore\u2019s comments in Wolfe 2010.<a href=\"#fnref14\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li id=\"fn15\">&#9;See \u201cRome Is Burning\u201d 2025.<a href=\"#fnref15\" class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<h4 id=\"1\">References<\/h4>\n<p><\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">Burch, No\u00ebl and Andr\u00e9 S. Labarthe, directors. 1970. <em>Rome br\u00fble: Portrait de Shirley Clarke<\/em>. Paris: Audiovisuel Multimedia International Production.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">Brown, Rachel. 2017. \u201cPortrait of Jason (Shirley Clarke, 1967).\u201d <em>Senses of Cinema<\/em>&#160;82 (March&#160;2017). <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sensesofcinema.com\/2017\/1967\/portrait-of-jason\/\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">www.sensesofcinema.com\/2017\/1967\/portrait-of-jason\/<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. <em>Cinema 2: The Time Image<\/em>. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">Doros, Dennis. 2016. \u201cThe End of a Long and Happy Marriage.\u201d <em>Milestone Films<\/em>. June&#160;21, 2016. <a href=\"https:\/\/milestonefilms.com\/blogs\/news\/the-end-of-a-long-and-happy-marriage?srsltid=AfmBOorm3_BigOBx7CzJ6LtJchQP7ZWFTTagUqZGo60uxcIFSQIbjBJI\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/milestonefilms.com\/blogs\/news\/the-end-of-a-long-and-happy-marriage?srsltid=AfmBOorm3_BigOBx7CzJ6LtJchQP 7ZWFTTagUqZGo60uxcIFSQIbjBJI<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">Ebert, Roger. 2012. \u201cToback on Life, Death, Tyson and His Own Personal Hit List.\u201d <em>RogerEbert.com<\/em>. December&#160;14, 2012. <a href=\"www.rogerebert.com\/interviews\/toback-on-life-death-tyson-and-his-own-personal-hit-list\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">www.rogerebert.com\/interviews\/toback-on-life-death-tyson-and-his-own-personal-hit-list<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">Gerima, Haile. 1989. \u201cTriangular Cinema, Breaking Toys, and Dinknesh vs Lucy.\u201d In <em>Questions of Third Cinema<\/em>, edited by Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, 65<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>90. London: British Film Institute.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">Gustafson, Irene. 2011. \u201cPutting Things to Test: Reconsidering Portrait of Jason.\u201d <em>Camera Obscura&#160;<\/em>26, no.&#160;2 (77), 1<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>31. doi.org\/10.1215\/02705346-1301521.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">Heidenreich, Nanna. 2013. \u201cPortrait of Jason.\u201d In <em>Berlinale Forum 2013<\/em>, catalog. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.arsenal-berlin.de\/assets\/Legacy\/user_upload\/forum\/pdf2013\/forum_pdf\/Portrait_of_Jason.pdf(t\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">www.arsenal-berlin.de\/assets\/Legacy\/user_upload\/forum\/pdf2013\/forum_pdf\/Portrait_of_Jason.pdf<\/span><\/a>. Accessed November&#160;4, 2024.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">Heller, Amy. 2015. \u201c\u2018Jason and Shirley\u2019: The Cruelty and Irresponsibility of Satire.\u201d <em>SydneysBuzz The Blog<\/em>. June&#160;23, 2015. <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.sydneysbuzz.com\/jason-and-shirley-the-cruelty-and-irresponsibility-of-satire-9037ffc84459\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/blogs.sydneysbuzz.com\/jason-and-shirley-the-cruelty-and-irresponsibility-of-&#173;satire-9037ffc84459<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">Kohn, Eric. 2015. \u201cStephen Winter Explains the Challenges of Being a Gay Black Filmmaker and His Controversial Decision to Reimagine a Classic Film.\u201d <em>IndieWire<\/em>. July&#160;10, 2015. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.indiewire.com\/features\/general\/stephen-winter-explains-the-challenges-of-being-a-gay-black-filmmaker-and-his-controversial-decision-to-reimagine-a-classic-film-60423\/\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">www.indiewire.com\/features\/general\/stephen-winter-explains-the-challenges-of-being-a-gay-black-&#173;filmmaker-and-his-controversial-decision-to-reimagine-a-classic-film-60423\/<\/span><\/a>. Accessed November 15, 2024.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">\u201cPortrait of Jason.\u201d 2013. Catalog. Berlinale Forum. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.arsenal-berlin.de\/assets\/Legacy\/user_upload\/forum\/pdf2013\/forum_pdf\/Portrait_of_Jason.pdf\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">www.arsenal-berlin.de\/assets\/Legacy\/user_upload\/forum\/pdf2013\/forum_pdf\/Portrait_of_Jason.pdf<\/span><\/a>. Accessed November&#160;4, 2024.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">\u201cPortrait of Jason.\u201d N. d., a. Press kit. Milestone Films.<a href=\"http:\/\/www.projectshirley.com\/press\/portraitofjason.pdf\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">http:\/\/www.projectshirley.com\/press\/portraitofjason.pdf<\/span><\/a>. Accessed November&#160;2, 2024.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">\u201cPortrait of Jason.\u201d N. d., b. Website. Milestone Films. <a href=\"https:\/\/milestonefilms.com\/products\/portrait-of-jason?_pos=1&amp;_sid=abf3829ee&amp;_ss=r\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/milestonefilms.com\/products\/portrait-of-jason?_pos=1&amp;_sid=abf3829ee&amp;_ss=r<\/span><\/a>. Accessed November&#160;4, 2024.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">Nyong\u2019o, Tavia. 2015. \u201cJason and Shirley: Restoring an Underground Star\u2019s Lost Honour.\u201d <em>The Guardian<\/em>. September&#160;19, 2015. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/film\/2015\/sep\/19\/jason-and-shirley-restoring-an-underground-stars-lost-honour\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">www.theguardian.com\/film\/2015\/sep\/19\/jason-and-shirley-restoring-an-underground-stars-lost-honour<\/span><\/a>. Accessed November&#160;2, 2024.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">Nyong\u2019o, Tavia. 2019. <em>Afro-fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life<\/em>. New York: New York University Press.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">\u201cRome is Burning (Portrait of Shirley Clarke).\u201d 2025. American Film Festival. November&#160;6<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>11, 2024, Wroc\u0142aw, Poland. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.americanfilmfestival.pl\/film.do?lang=en&amp;id=7075\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/www.americanfilmfestival.pl\/film.do?lang=en&amp;id=7075<\/span><\/a>. Accessed November&#160;15, 2024.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">Siegel, Marc. 2017. \u201cThe Secret Lives of Images.\u201d In <em>The State of Post-cinema: Tracing the Moving Image in the Age of Digital Dissemination<\/em>, edited by Malte Hagener, Vinzenz Hediger, and Alena Strohmaier, 195<span class=\"EM-Dash\">\u2014<\/span>210. London: Palgrave Macmillan.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">Siegel, Marc. Forthcoming.<em> A Gossip of Images<\/em>. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">Sragow, Michael. 2000. \u201cThe Return of the White Negro: Filmmaker James Toback Talks about Race, Sex, Warren Beatty and His Explosive New Movie, \u2018Black and White.\u2019\u201d <em>Salon.<\/em> March&#160;30, 2000. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.salon.com\/2000\/03\/30\/toback\/\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/www.salon.com\/2000\/03\/30\/toback\/<\/span><\/a>. Accessed November&#160;2, 2024.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">Whipp, Glenn. 2018. \u201c395: The Number of Women Who Have Contacted The Times with Allegations of Sexual Harassment against James Toback.\u201d <em>Los Angeles Times<\/em>. January&#160;7, 2018. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment\/la-et-mn-james-toback-women-sexual-harassment-breaking-silence-20180107-story.html\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">www.latimes.com\/entertainment\/la-et-mn-james-toback-women-sexual-harassment-breaking-silence-20180107-story.html<\/span><\/a>. Accessed November&#160;2, 2024.<\/p>\n<p class=\"bibliography\">Wolfe, Matt. 2010. <em>Another Portrait of Jason<\/em>. Commissioned by Triple Canopy. <a href=\"https:\/\/canopycanopycanopy.com\/contents\/another_portrait_of_jason\"><span class=\"Hyperlink\">https:\/\/canopycanopycanopy.com\/contents\/another_portrait_of_jason<\/span><\/a>. Accessed November&#160;2, 2024.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nanna Heidenreich &nbsp; Portrait of Jason, the fourth feature-length film by American filmmaker Shirley Clarke, was released in 1967. It is a white heterosexual female filmmaker\u2019s film about and with a Black gay man, the self-professed \u201chustler\u201d and performer Jason Holliday. After The Connection (1961) and A Cool World (1963), Portrait of Jason was Clarke\u2019s &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[273],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annuss-weiner-facing-drag"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>\u201cWhose Portrait?\u201d Fabulations and Triangulations in Shirley Clarke\u2019s Portrait of Jason (1967) &#8211; mdwPress<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/mdwpress\/mdwp009-004\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"de_DE\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u201cWhose Portrait?\u201d Fabulations and Triangulations in Shirley Clarke\u2019s Portrait of Jason (1967) &#8211; mdwPress\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Nanna Heidenreich &nbsp; Portrait of Jason, the fourth feature-length film by American filmmaker Shirley Clarke, was released in 1967. 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