STUART CROFT FOUNDATION, IN PARTNERSHIP WITH JUPITER WOODS PRESENTSQUESTIONS: ‘THE BANG STRAWS’ WITH MICHELLE WILLIAMS GAMAKER

The Stuart Croft Foundation is hosting a series of online events called ‘Questions’, where we will be inviting artists, curators, researchers and writers working with artists’ moving image to discuss the process of thinking and making behind their projects.

For the first in a series, we are partnering with Jupiter Woods and will be welcoming artist Michelle Williams Gamaker to talk about her film The Bang Straws, which in 2020 was awarded the SCF Moving Image Award from the Stuart Croft Foundation and a ‘Herstories & Feminisms’ research and development grant from Jupiter Woods.

The Bang Straws draws its vision from the production history of The Good Earth (Sidney Franklin, 1937) which was one of cinema’s most notorious cases of casting discrimination, with American-German actress Luise Rainer winning the high-profile lead of the Chinese farmer’s wife O-Lan. To do so, she wore racist “yellowface” as so many Hollywood actors did. Despite Anna May Wong’s talent and clear desire to play O-Lan, MGM only offered her the role of sex worker Lotus instead. While the focus on Anna is now no longer directly present, the casting discrimination she faced in 1930s Hollywood remains, alongside the violence of the casting process, a recurring motif in Williams Gamaker’s work; The Bang Straws re-casts O-Lan and reconstructs its innovative analogue VFX: filming locusts in hyper close-up, a storm sequence and locust swarm made from tea leaves.

www.stuartcroftfoundation.org/questions-the-bang-straws-with-michelle-williams-gamaker/