Michelle Williams Gamaker

Michelle Williams Gamaker

출생 : 1979-01-01, London, England

약력

Michelle Williams Gamaker is a moving image and performance artist. Her work explores the fiction-making machine of 20C British and Hollywood studio films by restaging sequences to reveal cinematic construction, and recasting characters to propose alternative endings that counter their often doom-laden plight. Williams Gamaker’s key focus is the development of ‘fictional activism’: the restoration of marginalised brown characters as central figures, who return in her works as vocal brown protagonists challenging the fictional injustices to which they have been historically consigned. Scriptwriting, workshopping with actors, acquiring film paraphernalia and producing props for the intricate staging of her film sets are all vital elements in the re-enactment of the artificial landscapes that shaped Williams Gamaker’s love of cinema. She recently completed Dissolution, a trilogy of films comprising House of Women (2017),The Fruit is There to be Eaten (2018), and The Eternal Return (2019) in which characters from Powell and Pressburger’s 1947 Black Narcissus unravel as they become aware of their screen and staged realities. Fictional activists are mutable subjects that can be played either by Williams Gamaker herself – such as her alter ego Violet Culbo – or by long-term collaborators who take on multiple personas including that of the Indian-born US film star Sabu – or characters such as Kanchi from Black Narcissus(1947), and O-Lan from The Good Earth(1937). Collaboration is also a crucial element of Williams Gamaker’s work; since 2009 she has worked with American artist Julia Kouneski, revisiting the work of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s psychotherapeutic research as inspiration for interventions with the body, architecture and landscape.

프로필 사진

Michelle Williams Gamaker

참여 작품

The Bang Straws
Director
An aesthetically invigorating reworking of the casting process of Sidney Franklin’s The Good Earth (1937), a film notorious for a white actor’s racist portrayal of a Chinese character.
House of Women
Editor
A group of charismatic young Asian women audition for the recasting of Kanchi from Powell and Pressburger’s 1947 Black Narcissus.
House of Women
Writer
A group of charismatic young Asian women audition for the recasting of Kanchi from Powell and Pressburger’s 1947 Black Narcissus.
House of Women
Director
A group of charismatic young Asian women audition for the recasting of Kanchi from Powell and Pressburger’s 1947 Black Narcissus.
The Eternal Return
Director
The Eternal Return explores the phenomenon of how a performer of colour such as international actor Sabu might be treated and thought of in a way analogous to the animals with whom he appears. In Sabu’s case this was the conflation of his background as mahout son’s with his career as actor that imposed a seemingly inescapable relationship with elephants: the animals recur throughout his filmography. It also highlights how, in spite of his extraordinary fame Sabu was always the sidekick and never the love interest. With the use of a combination of live-action dramatised recreation and British Pathé stock footage re-edited and altered with VFX, The Eternal Return revisits the now-struggling Sabu in 1951 as he supports his family by performing – once more with a troupe of elephants – in Tom Arnold’s Christmas Circus in Haringey Arena.
The Fruit is There to be Eaten
Director
​The Fruit is There To Be Eaten is based on the 1947 film Black Narcissus, by British directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger., set in India. The work echoes the style of the source material in that it is set in India, but replaces painted backdrops with back projection, stock footage and revealed sets to reimagine the relationship between lower-caste dancing girl Kanchi and missionary nun Sister Clodagh. In a schoolroom and in the gardens of a Himalayan convent, Kanchi and Clodagh recognise they are trapped in a film set in 2016. With the colonies a distant memory, Clodagh has lost her role as sister superior. This allows Kanchi to introduce her gods in order to challenge an imposed belief system, and in so doing to break down the civility of the colonies into something more carnal.
Brown Queers
Director
Three awesome portraits of brown queers who take no shit.
Becoming Vera
Director
Between age three and four, Vera Loumpet-Galitzine traverses many landscapes, exploring where she comes from, to come into her own. We follow her to her school and neighbourhood activities in France, Cameroon and Russia. As Vera dances, sings and runs around these visually engaging landscapes, seemingly easily integrated into her rich fantasy world, we attempt to imagine what they look like to her. What does she see, think, or imagine?