Screen Picks

David Holzman's Diary/Portrait of Jason

by Sam Adams

David Holzman's Diary/Portrait of Jason(Sat., Nov. 11, 7 p.m., $5-$7, International House, 3701 Chestnut St.) Although the American filmmakers of what has come to be called cinema verite put their faith in the veracity of the seemingly unmediated image, Jean Rouch, the French filmmaker who coined the phrase, described it as "the truth of cinema, not the cinema of truth." In Rouch's formulation, verite could as easily be fiction as fact, as long as the film concerned itself with the one relationship on which all films are based: that between observer and observed.

Released in 1967, as lightweight cameras and portable sound equipment were enabling a new generation of both documentarians and experimental film diarists, David Holzman's Diary was conceived as an attack on camera-eye absolutists, the kind who quote Jean-Luc Godard's aphorism "Film is truth 24 times a second" without finishing the phrase "and every cut is a lie."

Portrait of Jason

Surrounded by movie posters and films spools in a cramped apartment on New York's Upper West Side, David Holzman venerates Godard and announces his intention to record his life on film, to "get it all down" so he can analyze it by hand. David's obsession soon prompts a split with his camera-shy girlfriend, so he develops an imaginary relationship with a woman whose window looks down on his, naming her for a character in a Visconti movie. Even as his real life falls to shreds, David seems unaware that he's trading a flesh-and-blood existence for a life lived through celluloid. Perhaps he should pay closer attention to the titles of the movies whose posters grace his walls: Suspicion and Touch of Evil.

Much of Diary's reputation (to say nothing of its popularity in intro film courses) rests on its closing-credit gotcha: the revelation that David has been played by the actor (and later Paris, Texas co-writer) L.M. Kit Carson, and that, therefore, much of what seemed real before must have been at least partly staged. But the movie's real interest is in revealing how difficult it can be to separate truth from fiction, even if the questions are more clearly posed by a study of the film than by watching the film itself. For instance, it's only in reading interviews with director Jim McBride that you learn that the curbside conversation between "David" and a horny, husky-voiced woman was an unstaged encounter between McBride and a pre-op transsexual. On the surface, the movie's critique of voyeuristic film obsessives seems shallow and a bit scolding; it's only when you dig underneath that its complexities start to reveal themselves.

Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason, also released in 1967, is an even more polarizing experience. Composed entirely of interview footage shot in a single drunken evening, Clarke's portrait of Jason Holliday, a black gay hustler and self-described "houseboy," is aesthetically rigorous and unfailingly intense. It's also cold, alienated and vaguely ethnological. The more you watch Holliday gesture and grimace in front of a white living-room wall, the more he starts to resemble a butterfly pinned to a slide. The hazy focus-pulls which start and end most shots turn Jason's howling laugh into a rictus of pain, dissolving his face into undifferentiated blotches. And the ubiquitous drinks in his hands, not to mention the off-camera prompts for favorite stories, gives the exercise the queasy feeling of a cross between a minstrel show and a chicken dancing on a hot plate. In a 1983 interview, Clarke admitted, "I started out that evening with hatred, and there was a part of me that was out to do him in, get back at him, kill him," a sentiment evidently shared by her boyfriend Carl Lee (the son of the actor Canada Lee), who lashes out at Jason during the movie's climactic confrontation, calling him a "rotten queen."

After 90 minutes of repartee, you can see the source of Clarke's frustration. Jason is a polished raconteur, tossing off anecdotes about cleaning up after San Francisco society women and palling around with Miles Davis in the same brisk, besotted cadence, always implicitly shilling for the nightclub act he's never gotten around to composing. His uncontrollable laughter never stops, even when he's describing being beaten by his father. But Clarke seems to see his forced joviality as a dodge rather than a defense, not satisfied until she's ruptured his facade and reduced him to tears. To be fair, Clarke said that she "grew to love" Jason over the course of editing the film, and its unfettered depiction of a homosexual man was nothing short of sensational in 1967. But from this distance, its embrace seems all too guarded, its intensity less exacting than uncharitable.

Thin (premieres Tue., Nov. 14, 9 p.m., HBO) "I just want to be thin," says Alisa, 30, a patient at the Renfrew Center in Coconut Creek, Fla. "If it takes dying to get there, so be it." Like the other women in Lauren Greenfield's upsetting, unforgettable documentary, she has been struggling with eating disorders for most of her life. Thin offers only a few statistics on the breadth of eating disorders and only a smidgen of social critique. (Alisa, for one, traces her problems back to age 7, when a pediatrician told her parents she was fat.) What it offers instead is an unflinching look at the women who suffer, and suffer horribly, at the hands of such disorders, and how unbelievably tenacious their disease can be. There's Shelly, 25, who's learned to purge through the feeding tube in her stomach; Polly, 29, who slit her wrists after eating two pieces of pizza; and Brittany, 15, who in the year before her admission dropped from 185 to 97 pounds.

In one of the movie's most telling sequences, Alisa is asked to draw an outline of her body as she sees it, and then shown the difference between her self-image and her actual, much slimmer, shape. But awareness doesn't come so easily, and the best Thin can hold out is a tentative hope for some (not all) of its subjects. But as much as you may be stunned by the depth of the women's pathology, you're awed by the bravery it takes to face it, and the sense that they'll be doing so for the rest of their lives.

(sam@citypaper.net)