A Well Spent Life with Portrait of Jason
A Well Spent Life with Portrait of Jason
Special guest: Conversation following A Well Spent Life with Miriam Bale, film programmer and critic and Maya Cade, Try A Little Tenderness guest programmer and creator/curator of the Black Film Archive.
A Well Spent Life
This touching tribute to Mance Lipscomb—one of the all-time great guitarists—is a sentimental vision of the songster and sharecropper’s open heart. This intimate portrait is a meditation on how love, community, hope, and faith have shaped the musician’s life.
Portrait of Jason
In this warm portrait, queer performer and houseboy Jason Holliday draws you in with a tender retelling of his life’s joy and pain. Jason spins you around his remarkable world with an intricate flair for combining performance and personal history.
A Well Spent Life
DIRECTED BY: Les Blank, Skip Gerson. WITH: Mance Lipscomb, Elnora Lipscomb, Hattie Franklin, Alfred Franklin. 1971. 44 min. USA. Color. English. DCP.
Portrait of Jason
DIRECTED BY: Shirley Clarke. WITH: Jason Holliday, Shirley Clarke, Carl Lee. 1968. 105 min. USA. B&W. English. DCP. Preserved by the
Academy Film Archive with funding by the Academy Film Archive,
Milestone Films, the Toronto International Film Festival and a
Kickstarter campaign. It was restored from the original 16mm fine
grain master positive and a 35mm print.
Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.
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