Alchemy Film and Arts: SHORTS PROGRAMME BODY MOVES, Screening The Bang Straws (2021)

Combined, the three films in this programme explore bodies, in both their physical and conceptual form, as repositories for mis/communication, mis/remembrance, lived experience – and wilful, institutionalised erasure. w

The Bang Straws by Michelle Williams Gamaker restages scenes from a 1937 film by Sidney Franklin entitled The Good Earth, a film about the struggle of a Chinese farming family. Chinese-American actor Anna Mae Wong was overlooked for a starring role in The Good Earth that would eventually be played by a white actor in ‘yellowface’. In creating restaged scenes with actor Dahong Wang, The Bang Straws interrogates The Good Earth and a gaze which expects the actor to perform in a particular way according to their race. In addition, the film produces a set of visually striking tableaus with an attention to the bodies of locusts – essential to the plot of Franklin’s film. Affecting sounds – eating a peach, or the description of locust flights – bring the focus of the film back to the extractive nature of using the body only as sound, as object, rather than as a subjective voice.

​alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk/festival-2022-shorts-body-moves/