In Portrait of Jason, a man talks to the camera for almost an hour and a half; yet the film is intensely interesting. We hear some other voices besides his—an old friend named Carl, who berates him toward the end from offscreen, and a female voice (Shirley Clarke's) laconically directing the proceedings. The camera tracks Jason around from couch to chair, to hearth, from a fixed position; it zooms in and out on Jason's face; sometimes, when it goes out of focus, moments of soft, abstrac...

Shirley Clarke was originally a dancer. Before making films she took the precaution of learning a great deal about film technique; but she remains an instinctual film-maker, whose feeling for movement generally seems to have carried over into her feeling for the camera. The theme of Bridges-Go-Round—as far as words can describe it—is the bridges that link Manhattan to Brooklyn, queens, the Bronx, and the New Jersey shore. In actuality, the bridges become plastic materials for a highly abstract...

Thanks to the responsiveness of the subject, and the cold simplicity with which Miss Clarke handles the camera, ["Portrait of Jason"] is a good deal more than an unusually frank interview with a homosexual who, at one point, exults: "I'm bona fide freaksville!" The truth is, of course, that he isn't.

Perhaps the closest that cinema has yet approached the province of Genet, [Portrait of Jason] is an incredible peeling away of a man's soul layer by layer—his defenses, his pretensions, his lies and, ultimately, his truths. The film is an attempt not so much to find the core of the man as to see the whole structure in its internal relationships, to see the man with all that jumbled baggage that one calls personality…. It is obviously a film of sociological and psychological relevance be...