Richard Avedon Film Series: Program 2

Behind Every Good Man — a short from Ursin, then a film student at the University of California, Los Angeles — documents a gay African American man and his meditations on love, queer life in the 1960s, and gender transgression. The film and its subject eschew period cliches about homosexuality and point to possibilities beyond disaster, despair, and tragedy.

Experimental filmmaker Clarke culled her Portrait of Jason from a grueling, 12-hour interview with her subject, Jason Holliday. A complicated examination of cinema verité conventions, the spectacle of the interviewed subject, and the seeming exoticism (for a mostly white, avant-garde audience) of a gay, African American performer and sometime hustler, the film is Holliday’s. His difficult performance of self against the filmmaker’s goading and unflinching gaze remains, in the end, his own.