Michelle Williams Gamaker is an artist working in moving image and performance, often in dialogue with film history. Through an interrogation of cinema and its artifice, she recasts characters as fictional activists, proposing critical alternatives to colonial and imperialist storytelling in early 20th-century British and Hollywood studio films. Her work has featured in BFI FLARE LGBTQ+ Film Festival (2017) and BFI’s LFF Experimenta programme (2018, 2021) and is in the Arts Council Collection. Her trilogy Dissolution recently screened for MattFlix and I Multiply Each Day, at Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland, and her work will also feature in The London Open 2022 at Whitechapel Gallery this summer.

Williams Gamaker is joint-winner of Film London’s Jarman Award 2020, and is recipient of the Stuart Croft Moving Image Award 2020 for The Bang Straws (2021), which won the Best Experimental Film at Aesthetica Short Film Festival. She is also a recipient of the FLAMIN production Award to support her new film Thieves, and between 2022-25 she will be supported by the British Academy’s Wolfson Fellowship to research Narrative Reparations: On Fictional Activism, Fictional Revenge and Fictional Healing.

www.de-ateliers.nl/en/event/artist-talk-michelle-williams-gamaker/

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/