S16mm B&W, colour, 22 mins
Artist: Michelle Williams Gamaker
A 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. German-American actress Luise Rainer won the high-profile lead of O-Lan, the farmer’s wife. To play O-Lan, Rainer wore racist “yellowface”, as so many 20th Century Hollywood and British actors did.
Our intention in this reworking was to create a set of semi-realistic or metaphorical images: a lilliputian miniature world, the probe lens macro world of the locusts… the menace of the casting space.
Despite Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong’s talent and evident desire to play O-Lan, MGM refused her the lead due to the anti-miscegenation Hays Code, offering her the minor role of sex worker Lotus instead, which she refused. The Bang Straws re-casts O-Lan with a Chinese actor and reconstructs The Good Earth’s innovative Special Effects.
The film World Premiered at 65th BFI London Film Festival, October 2021 (receiving a special jury commendation for the Short Film Award), Aesthetica Short Film Festival, York November 2021, where it won Best Experimental Short Film, it was also nominated for the Shirt Film Award at the 25th Internationale Kurzfilmtage, Winterthur, Switzerland, and is in competition for the London Short Film Festival, January 2022 (All BAFTA approved festivals). It will screen at FACT, Liverpool March 2022, The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery. And screenings in 2022-23 include Alchemy Film Festival, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, Prague, Barcelona).
more about the project can be found here: http://www.michellewilliamsgamaker.com/the-bang-straws.html,
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