ABSTRACT
This chapter places Shirley Clarke’s film Portrait of Jason in the context of the New American Cinema of the 1960s as a specific historical subset of American independent films. It traces the evolution of that movement and the film’s and filmmaker’s complex positions within it and briefly considers the film’s reception. Finally, the essay shows Jason’s performance in the film becomes a kind of authorship that ultimately makes the film as much his as Clarke’s, hence a pioneering work of gay cinema.
