Details:

JASON AND SHIRLEY REVISITED (2015/2025) with director Stephen Winter

JASON AND SHIRLEY REVISITED

(Stephen Winter, 2015/2025, 84 min, DCP)

RSVP

In 2015, director Stephen Winter followed up his legendary 1996 debut CHOCOLATE BABIES with another provocative, ahead-of-its-time experiment that forcefully creates space for queer Black perspectives where none existed before. JASON AND SHIRLEY reimagines the shooting of the 1967 documentary landmark PORTRAIT OF JASON as a power struggle between brilliant, manipulative director Shirley Clarke (Sarah Schulman) and her subject Jason Holliday (Jack Waters), a Black gay performer whose complexities far exceed the space Clarke’s camera affords him. Mirroring PORTRAIT OF JASON, Winters shot JASON AND SHIRLEY in a single, marathon 12-hour improv session, opening up the insular world of Clarke’s film through historical context, imaginative play, and impassioned critique. Upon its original release in 2015, JASON AND SHIRLEY met with a deeply polarized reception, leading Winter to put the film away essentially unfinished. A decade later, Winter and editor Ned Stresen-Reuter returned to the material, reshaping the 2015 film into something even more incisive and engrossing.

For this screening of JASON AND SHIRLEY REVISITED, Block Cinema will welcome filmmaker Stephen Winter and actor Sarah Schulman for a post-film discussion with Lauren Michele Jackson, Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern.

Cosponsored by the Chicago International Film Festival and presented with sponsorship from the department of English and the Gender & Sexuality Studies Program, and with support from the Black Arts Consortium, the Black Studies Department, the Performance Studies Department, the Radio/Television/Film Department, the School of Communications, and the Screen Cultures Program at Northwestern. 

Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu