Critical Affection Trilogy by Michelle Williams Gamaker + Discussion (12A)

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.

Strange Evidence (2025, 30 mins) focuses on 1930s screen star and Academy Award nominee Merle Oberon, who kept her mixed Sri Lankan, Indian and British heritage secret to protect her industry status, passing as white until her death in 1979. Under the aegis of Alexander Korda’s London Films, as a contracted star she became its resident so-called “exotic” playing stereotypical roles. Together with the Studios, Merle falsified her past claiming she was born in Tasmania to British parents. She also controlled how she was photographed, relying on make-up, lighting, dermabrasion and skin-bleaching procedures, which caused cosmetic poisoning and allergic reactions.

Williams Gamaker’s project sensitively approaches Oberon’s story, exploring self-censorship, racial stigma and trauma, looking with nuance at complex decisions shaped by racial prejudice and restrictive conditions of labour.