Portrait of Jason / Shirley Clarke

« A l'époque de The Cool World, je voulais que la caméra suive les acteurs, dans le prolongement de ce que j'avais entrepris dans The Connection : si un acteur bougeait, je me déplaçais avec lui et nous dansions une sorte de ballet. Aujourd'hui, c'est une chose que je n'aime plus, [ce côté] chorégraphié. […] C'est de là qu'est né Portrait of Jason 1 ». Ancienne danseuse et chorégraphe, Shirley Clarke (1919-1997) choisit en 1967 un dispositif simple : une caméra qui ne « bouge » qu'optiquement, via des zooms, et un sujet filmé seul douze heures d'affilée, dans le studio de Clarke réarrangé pour l'occasion.
Mais une telle unité de temps, de lieu et d'action n'exclut pas toute mise en scène : car Portrait of Jason, dans une typologie du cinéma direct, exemplifie le documentaire qui laisse toute latitude à son sujet pour se mettre lui-même en scène. Jason, homosexuel noir qui décline volontiers ses qualités de « prostitué, bonne à tout faire, majordome », est en constante représentation de lui-même. C'est ce que capte Clarke: une parole que même la fin de la bobine ne stoppe pas, le magnétophone prenant alors le relais sur fond d'écran noir. Soucieuse de rendre palpable les ellipses effectuées de cette nuit sous influence (alcool et drogue), Clarke indique à son opérateur, en lui touchant le bras, s'il doit zoomer ou passer au flou pour ponctuer la coulée verbale ininterrompue de Jason.
En enregistrant et même en provoquant, par des indications soufflées de derrière la caméra, les rires et les pleurs de Jason Holiday, Shirley Clarke n'exploite pas un vague folklore underground. Elle rend visible le fait que Jason, petit garçon noir élevé par un père surnommé « le dur », n'a pu s'adapter qu'en se confectionnant des masques – celui de l'homosexualité et de la vénalité. Jason Holiday est d'ailleurs né Aaron Payne : dans le choix d'un nom, il a troqué la douleur (pain) contre les vacances (holiday). Désigner la persona sociale de Jason n'équivaut pas pour la cinéaste à la déplorer mais à rapprocher, comme elle le fit dans un entretien, la condition des femmes de celle des Noirs – dans ce sens, il faut voir Portrait of Jason comme un Self-portrait of Shirley.

1Shirley Clarke dans Rome Is Burning : Shirley Clarke, A Portrait, d'André S. Labarthe et Noël Burch, Cinéastes de notre temps, 1970.




The eponymous subject of Shirley Clarke's fascinating documentary Portrait of Jason is Jason Holliday, a gay black man, originally from the deep South, who led a rough and varied life. Clarke simply puts Jason in front of the camera and lets him speak, and this proves more than enough to make this portrait engaging, funny, and genuinely moving in a surprising way. Jason seems to be a born entertainer, and the camera hardly phases him in the least. He immediately launches into a stream of hilarious anecdotes, acts out scenes from famous Hollywood movies, and generally riffs on himself and his life. He'd been a male hustler, a houseboy, a kind of amateur con man, and done all sorts of odd jobs — everything, that is, but hold down a steady 9-to-5, which he says early on is not for him. Jason's bitchy, extravagant persona is a perfect focus for a documentary of this kind, where he's the only thing on screen throughout the film. Clarke occasionally lets the camera lose focus, reducing the image to a blur, which allows her cameraman to imperceptibly switch reels while Jason's voice continues on the soundtrack. But other than these moments of visual abstraction, the whole film takes place in a single room, with the camera aimed squarely at Jason, sometimes showing him lounging in full body, sometimes focusing in for a tightly framed close-up on his expressive face. In the memorable image I've captured above, Clarke allows a skull in the background to provide a mirror image to Jason's strained grin. 

Jason is always grinning here, and laughing too. He's one of those people who will laugh longer and harder at his own jokes and stories than anyone else around him, and his wild laughter is contagious. After many of his stories, he simply throws his head back and howls, collapsing backwards in gales of laughter. Even so, one senses almost immediately that there's something behind this merriment. In unguarded moments, when there's a lull in the unceasing monologue, Jason seems a bit drained and empty, uncertain even, as though only the constant flow of words and fun can keep him from fading away. In one striking scene early on, Clarke films a break in the streams of words, with Jason quietly smoking a cigarette; she shows him in a head-on tight close-up, and his unfocused eyes and blank slate of a face are a stark contrast to the vibrant, dynamic figure we'd seen before then.

Indeed, as the film goes on, the portrait being created here becomes darker and darker, with more subtle hints of what's to come. Jason's drinking, pronounced throughout the film, becomes increasingly reckless towards the end, and by the final twenty minutes he's visibly stumbling and slurring his words, clutching a bottle as his monologue takes an introspective turn. What emerges is a sense of a man who has created his entertainer persona as a shield against a pretty ugly life — an abusive father who beat him daily, racism encountered everywhere, lots of empty sex and a lack of real love. Clarke simply allows him to keep talking long enough so that the created persona falls away and the man begins to show. She's clearly heard most of his anecdotes before, and when he seems uncertain of where to go next, she's heard off-camera coaching him, "Tell the one about..." So one definitely gets the sense that she's playing a kind of waiting game here, letting Jason get through all his usual stories and acts until he runs out of the everyday stuff and has to dig deeper. He winds up digging into his childhood and his darker experiences of racism and homophobia, telling them increasingly without the nervous laugh that often accompanied his earlier, more humorously presented tales. 

Clarke's film is endlessly fascinating and entertaining, largely because Jason is so fabulously interesting. The hallmark of a great documentary is to treat the subject with an aesthetic that brings out its essence, and Clarke is certainly able to do this with Jason. This sustained focus on his words and his life provides an intimate glimpse into the man, in the process casting a harsh glow on the social prejudices that guided him into the life he wound up leading. This is a stark, uncompromising portrait, both wildly entertaining and ultimately harrowing as well.

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