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He's got a round, affable face and large, black, hipster glasses. He's smartly dressed in a blazer and button-up shirt. He looks straight into the camera, talking, singing, smoking and drinking — just him, for upward of 90 minutes.

"It only hurts when you think of it," he says, his normally jaunty voice wobbling on the edge of a break. "And if you're real, you think of it a long, long time, that's for sure. Those are the dues."

"He" is Jason Holliday, born Aaron Payne, and he's the subject — no, the heart — of the film Portrait of Jason, Shirley Clarke's remarkable 1967 film.

Remarkable it was, and remarkable it remains, in more ways than one. Its unadorned, first-person portrait of a black gay man was a first for films. But it also challenged the notion of what a documentary could be.

"I can't think of any other film that put a gay person in the center and just allowed them to talk about their life before Shirley Clarke's film," says George Chauncey, chairman of the Yale University history department and author of Gay New York.

Now that it's playing in theaters again, in a newly restored version, the film feels in some ways more pioneering than ever.

"It's really impossible to imagine what it felt like 45 years ago, when this film came out," says Jeffrey Friedman, who co-directed The Celluloid Closet, an eye-opening survey of representations of LGBT people in cinema.

"You know, we'd never seen anything like this," Friedman says. "This was before reality television; before we were used to people baring their souls on national TV and on the Internet."

Movie Reviews

Peeling Away The Layers In A 'Portrait Of Jason'