Michelle Williams Gamaker works with moving image, performance, and installation. Her practice is often in dialogue with film history, particularly Hollywood and British studio films. Restaging scenes to reveal their politically problematic, imperialist roots, her work is a form of fictional activism to recast characters originally played by white actors with people of colour. She combines scriptwriting, workshopping with actors, revisiting analogue SFX, and producing props to create intricately staged films. Williams Gamaker is joint-winner of the Film London Jarman Award 2020 and is also recipient of the Stuart Croft Moving Image Award 2020 for ‘The Bang Straws’ (2021). This film will premiere at BFI’s London Film Festival (2021) and is selected for the Short Film Award. It will also feature at Aesthetica Short Film Festival in addition to Winterthur, Switzerland. Williams Gamaker is a Senior Lecturer in BA Fine Art, and is a Decolonising the Archive research resident, developed by UAL Decolonising Arts Institute.
http://www.michellewilliamsgamaker.com/biocontact.html
Michelle is introduced to the lecture by Michelle Atherton. Michelle Atherton talks about her experiences at University and how paying for fees came in just in her second year and didn’t encounter any Poc teachers apart from Steve McQueen.
Michelle started off with documentary films and started to move into fictional films.
Michelle studied in the Netherlands and returning to London.
http://www.michellewilliamsgamaker.com/houseofwomen.html Michelle talks about this video she created.
In 1946, auditions were held for the character of the silent dancing girl Kanchi in Black Narcissus (1947), the upcoming film by venerated British directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. In a nationwide search close to 1000 hopefuls applied, with over 200 girls tested and interviewed. The coveted role finally went to seventeen-year-old Jean Simmons, who had recently won worldwide acclaim for her performance as Estella in David Lean’s Great Expectations. To fulfil the role, the white English actor had to wear dark Panstick make-up and a jewel in her nose to become the “exotic temptress” of Rumer Godden’s novel of the same name.
https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/where-begin-with-powell-pressburger
House of Women recasts the role, auditioning only Indian ex-pat or first-generation British Asian women and non-binary individuals living in London. Unlike in the original role, for House of Women the re-cast Kanchi of the 21st Century speaks. Shot on 16mm film, the four candidates, Jasdeep Kandola, Arunima Rajkumar, Tina Mander and Krishna Istha, introduce themselves to an anonymous reader (voiced by Kelly Hunter) and recite a personalised alphabet including references to the history of photography and gender politics.
https://www.mattflix.video/williams-gamaker-trilogy-1
http://www.michellewilliamsgamaker.com/the-bang-straws.html The bang Straws considers the violent mechanisms of 20th century studio films and takes Anna May Wong as its starting point to revisit the casting discrimination that she experienced.
https://jupiterwoods.com/research/research-and-development-projects/herstories-feminisms/the-bang-straws
https://www.sitegallery.org/event/site-salons-alison-j-carr-and-michelle-williams-gamaker/
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