Portrait of Turner

Portrait of Turner re-enacts Shirley Clarke’s original screen experiment, Portrait of Jason (1967) —what happens when one performer narrates his life story for the camera over a 12 hour period, as time, fatigue, intimacy, and conflict shape the quality of the performance and even its documentation? The film asks a familiar set of questions in a new historical moment: What is an "authentic" performance? What is "realism"? What is a “positive” or “negative” image? Re-posing questions that also animated Clarke’s film, Portrait of Turner challenges its audience to reflect on its own, sometimes pleasurable and sometimes uncomfortable, relation to the figure before the camera.