Queen for a day / Deborah-Joyce Holman.

Queen for a Day' stages a conversation between two of Deborah-Joyce Holman's films and the work of cinema verité they take as a primary material: Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason (1967). One 'queen' of this title is Jason Holliday, the Black gay male subject at the centre of Clarke's film with whom Holman wants to act in solidarity. Finding Jason captured by the extractive gaze and exhausting line of questioning of a white female director, Holman works to reproduce his words, rather than his image, placing them as looping samples of script in the mouths of two performers. Newly commissioned essays offer close analysis of Holman's films, opening up diverse ways of understanding Holman's aesthetic strategies and politics of representation via film history, decolonial and queer theory.