Michelle Williams Gamaker: Screening + Q&A, Critical Affection Trilogy-in-progress

Join us for a special screening of the first two parts of Michelle Williams Gamaker’s Critical Affection Trilogy followed by a Q&A with the artist.

£5, booking online required – link below

The Bang Straws (2021) and Thieves (2023) form the first two parts of the  trilogy. Our current exhibition, Strange Evidence, shows the work-in-progress of the third and final instalment.

The Bang Straws (2021, 17mins 11 secs) reworks the casting process of Sidney Franklin’s The Good Earth (1937), a film known for German-American actor Luise Rainer being cast as a Chinese character, O-Lan, wearing racist ‘yellow face’ as many 20th Century Hollywood and British actors did. Despite Chinese-American actor Anna May Wong’s talent and evident desire to play O-Lan, MGM refused her the lead due to the Hays Code's anti-miscegenation Policy. Instead, Anna was offered the minor role of sex worker Lotus instead, which she refused. The Bang Straws re-casts O-Lan with the Chinese actor Dahong Hongxuan Wang, and reconstructs The Good Earth’s special effects.

Thieves (2023, 27min 27 secs) is Williams Gamaker’s first film in Fictional Revenge. The film is a fantasy adventure that retells the 1924 black-and-white and 1940 Technicolor versions of The Thief of Bagdad. Williams Gamaker reimagines the marginalised characters as claiming leading roles in her film, played in the originals by Chinese-American actor Anna May Wong and Indian-born American actor Sabu. Williams Gamaker unites the two as fictional allies to challenge the racial discrimination of the film industry. Told as a movie within a movie, Anna May Wong is found on set by Sabu, but something is wrong: she is in black-and-white while everything else is in Technicolor, and both find themselves trapped in their screen-images. Both must navigate the structural violence on set by joining forces to overthrow the set and those in charge.

The screening will be introduced by Matt’s Gallery Director Robin Klassnik and will be followed by a Q+A with the artist and Deputy Director, Tim Dixon.