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In late 2014 Michelle Williams Gamaker held auditions for the role of Kanchi, a character first imagined as a young orphan by Rumer Godden in her 1939 novel ‘Black Narcissus’ set in West Bengal. In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1947 adaption, the role of Kanchi was played by white British actor Jean Simmons. The film documents the travails of an iron-pressed order of Anglican sisters after they set up shop in a monastery perched precariously on the ‘edge of the world’ only to be unravelled by a mysterious libidinal energy that rolls off the Himalayan peaks around them. Powell and Pressburger’s breathtaking landscape (which earned cinematographer Jack Cardiff an Oscar) is framed as simultaneously closer to God and oddly profane, one of many orientalist tropes in the film that combine to bring the sisters to ruin. Kanchi is another: the panstick makeup worn by Simmons to artificially darken her skin was a common practice in big-budget studio productions between the 1930s and 1950s because it allowed filmmakers to circumnavigate plot material that would otherwise be prohibited under the Hays Code. Self-imposed by many studios on American and later British co-productions, the Code was a censorious rulebook that outlawed, amongst other things, the depiction of romantic interracial relationships on screen and by doing so promulgated a widespread culture of casting discrimination. In ‘Black Narcissus’, Kanchi is a silent-screen actor set loose amongst a cast of sharp-tongued co-stars, reliant entirely on the expressiveness of her body. This exposes her to a slew of colonial tropes: temptress; unremorseful thief; recalcitrant-youth-spared-punishment. The convent’s failure as a maternalistic enterprise turned out to be a potent metaphor for an empire made untenable by anticolonial resistance movements and the postwar realignment of dominant global powers. The year of the film’s release coincided with India’s independence and partition, bringing to a close three centuries of British colonial rule on the Indian subcontinent.
Michelle Williams Gamaker’s film ‘House of Women’ (2017) is a mise-en-abyme: actors play actors trying out for the role of Kanchi in an unspecified new adaption. They are directed to stare unblinkingly into the camera. “Why are you here?” an anonymous screen-reader asks the candidates. One actor is asked about growing up in Handsworth, Birmingham, the site of multiple social uprisings since the early 1980s. Black Audio Film Collective’s ‘Handsworth Songs’ (1986), a call-and-response between Birmingham and London, folds out into the frame sounded by its ghosts. A film studies syllabus – though never didactic – edges out around the narrator’s questions. “Do you know why we say shoot when we take photographs?” The disembodied voice points to the coeval development of photography and big-game safari, of Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographic gun: “Loading, stalking, aiming, cocking, even the snapshot. … Out hunting, prized animals were shot at with a rifle and with a camera. So majestic creatures were mounted on walls only to be mounted again in frames”. The film’s return to the provisional site of the audition tape comes via what could be, rather than what could have been for ‘Black Narcissus’. The subjunctive prizes the film’s urtext open, making it endlessly adaptable: no more film histories decreed as products of their time.
The relationship between Williams Gamaker’s short films and their original source material is far from faithful. ‘House of Women’ is a forensic study of the trap door of cinematic fantasy and its human history, of actors ensnared by roles the artist calls ‘poisoned chalices’. For the South Asian actor Sabu or the Chinese American mega-star Anna May Wong, their silver-screen personas were inextricable from these delimitations. Both Sabu and Wong are important figures for Williams Gamaker who has imbricated their life stories in various ways across her short films and exhibition practice. As a document of an audition, ‘House of Women’ fixates on fiction’s architecture of fabulation. Across the artist’s ‘Dissolution Trilogy’ comprising ‘House of Women’, ‘The Fruit is There To Be Eaten’ (2018) and ‘The Eternal Return’ (2019), other spaces emerge including the colour test and the film set. A later work, ‘The Bang Straws’ (2021), draws from Sidney Franklin’s production of ‘The Good Earth’ (1937). Williams Gamaker cast Dahong Wang to play Anna May Wong auditioning for O-Lan, a role that was previously given to the American-German actress Luise Rainer in one of Hollywood’s most notorious cases of casting discrimination. ‘The Bang Straws’ dredges up an imagined screen test, returning us to the scene of the crime and to stations of uneven power dynamics in which many cameras roam and yet industry abuses are pushed out of sight. “They want my body, but they don’t want me?” Wang asks incredulously after she is told she may only be needed as a body double. Williams Gamaker asks us to treat these environments as character studies as much as any of the cast.
Made in this way, reparations can only ever be gestural. More willfully, Williams Gamaker’s fabulations on the injustices of cinematic production engage in the possibility of repairing our belief in fiction, a process negotiated by recasting the working lives of actors who were historically subject to the structural violence of the studio system. In becoming brown protagonists, these stars speak back to the burden of bit-parts and stereotypes. Although rumours swirled that Wong was to play O-Lan, one of the lead parts, she was instead offered the role of a ‘song girl’ and sex worker named Lotus, which she turned down, claiming it an ‘unsympathetic role’ in light of the film’s all-American casting. One of Williams Gamaker’s angled interventions into these studio legacies is to reimagine the actors’ worlds free from an inner sense of conflict. In ‘The Fruit is There To Be Eaten’, Krishna Istha, an actor who auditions in ‘House of Women’ for the role of Kanchi, openly challenges the relevance of the sisters’ colonial indoctrination, veiled somewhat innocuously in the fauna and flora of the British Isles. Later, Kanchi and Sister Clodagh share a kiss, Clodagh having divested herself of her fantasy of a spiritual mission in her own anachronistic transformation to the filmic present of 2017. This intimacy absents the amorphous sexual chemistry between the wayward Sister Ruth and the maverick Mr Dean in Powell and Pressburger’s ‘Black Narcissus’ for a queerer set of pleasures on mutual ground. This is not a replacement narrative but a recentring of sexualities so often reduced to illicit whispers.
While Williams Gamaker is a fastidious researcher, she is an unreliable narrator. For instance, one version of the artist’s interest in Sabu’s life concerns biographical recovery: ‘The Eternal Return’ offers viewers a window into Sabu’s discontents during the later stages of his career when, having outgrown the studio image of perpetual boyhood played out in titles like ‘The Drum’ (1938) and ‘Jungle Book’ (1942), he is forced to perform in circuses to support his family. But rather than focusing attention on Sabu’s fateful ‘discovery’ by the anthropologist filmmaker Robert Flaherty as a 12-year-old, the son of a mahout in Mysore, the artist encourages the apocryphal. In ‘Thieves’ (2023), Williams Gamaker trades what she has termed ‘fictional activism’ for ‘fictional revenge’ in a come-uppance plot schemed by Sabu and Wong against ‘The Thief of Bagdad’s Michael Powell and screenwriter Lotta Woods, who co-directed and co-wrote the 1924 and 1940 versions respectively. ‘Thieves’ demonstrates how the artist’s films are as much immersed in the culture and cult of cinema she obsessively gathers – its memorabilia and fandom – as the original scripts and biographies of cast members. In ‘Thieves’, the ubiquitous promotional image that depicted Sabu riding a flying carpet is reimagined as a time travelling device whereby the carpet enables Sabu to throw off his sidekick status and transit freely between the 1924 and 1940 films. This cursed object brings together a monochrome Wong and Technicolor Sabu first in hurt and later in synchrony as the workers of the set unite to form a gherao and encircle the powers that be.[1]
To court fabulation is not to suggest idols like Sabu or Wong require the filmmaker’s aid. Wong, whose career began in silent cinema, was a perceptive chameleon. When studio executives projected onto her a racial flexibility and supplicatory femme fatalism, she spoke candidly about these limitations; and when mentors advised downplaying her Americanness, she cultivated an air of exotic mystery to critical effect which is clear in the copious photographs of Wong spawned by this persona. Better yet, while performing a repertoire of vaudeville, cabaret and dramatic monologues across Europe she incorporates bon mots about her experiences of Hollywood, fusing the worlds of fantasy and reportage.[2] In ‘Thieves’, Wong doesn’t step forward in any chronological sense of a rising career trajectory, but rather steps out of the frame entirely. In this, Williams Gamaker’s use of fantasy guides us to understand a truth about Wong – that she was a shapeshifter.
The short film has a specific staccato temporality that not only suspends narrative conventions but alters our perception of time-space conjugation. It is a form that is used dexterously by Williams Gamaker to plant us in heterotopias between the actors’ respective realities and fever dreams. Istha, playing an older Sabu in ‘The Eternal Return’, watches an energetic Sabu on a television screen. ‘I have played so many roles’ he says avuncularly to his younger self. While it is a common practice for auteurs to work with the same actors, Williams Gamaker writes to the reality of her actors’ lives, and this seems true of this scene of Sabu crossing the fourth wall to speak to Sabu/Istha. Across the artist’s recurring cast: Catherine Lord, Krishna Istha, Charlotte Gallagher, Dahong Wang, Mark Gillis, many cross gender, race and ethnicity, not to claim new identities that denaturalise ‘stable’ identity categories per Hall, but to expose the ideologically constructed work of exaggerated iconographies. [3] For Josephine D. Lee, the exaggeration of ethnic and racial signifiers found in stereotypes are a form of ‘violent dismemberment’. [4] In ‘Thieves’, Williams Gamaker has used prosthetics carefully to debase this very practice and to propose a cinema that is permitted to touch us so we may sharpen our ethics against these wounds. As Cherise Smith writes, the task of artists critically embodying these complex signs is not without injurious consequence ‘for it threatens to reinforce iconographies already in place’. However, its work may also be ‘worthwhile’ for how it calls to its audiences to witness this address. [5]
What this body of work asks of the viewer is to consider the kinship of cinema and violence. This discomforting proximity brings us to the film camera’s inheritance from a photography developed under the colonial aegis of nineteenth-century ethnography and anthropology. So parallel are these histories that when we ‘speak of “shooting” with a camera’, Teju Cole writes, we acknowledge the intimacy of this kinship. [6] Cinema is replete with stories of infliction in the name of art. It is a question that Williams Gamaker has eked out into a miraculous set of triumvirate short films, from the ‘Dissolution Trilogy’ to the artist’s conceptualisation of fictional activism that spreads domically over this serial revisitation of British-American studio films from the so-called Golden Era. Adaptions, as Linda Hutcheon reminds us, open up a space between an original work and its subsequent remakes, in which characters like Kanchi are ‘transported’. [7] For Catherine Lord, an actor and academic who has appeared in several of the artist’s films, this portage is crucial to seeing how the films enter a third space, not as homage or pastiche, but as critical accounting. [8]
More recently Williams Gamaker has moved fictional revenge into a new stage of reckoning, kneading again that question of the relationship of cinema to violence. The artist will revisit Merle Oberon’s extraordinary career, an actor who exercised great discretion around her Anglo-Indian heritage for fear of discrimination. Amongst the many images of Oberon, there is one of Merle gently cupping her face, the chiaroscuro shadows casting Brancusi-esque distortions of a face without a body. Such investments in the complex legacies of cinema and its stars are undertaken from a deep-rooted place of ‘critical affection’ that began with Williams Gamaker’s ambivalent identifications with actors like Sabu as a teenager and grew into a fascination with the stagecraft of fantasy cinema, its glamour and boldness of fashioning painted worlds in miniature that has led the artist to conceive of elaborate visions for her own sets. Affection is not scholastic and its passions may be onerous, recalling Oscar Wilde’s notion that ‘every disciple takes something away from his master’, but here it is to infuse admiration with an accountability: “To love something in someone’s work we have to hope there’s space for critique because it should make the love more robust”. [9]
[1] ‘Thieves’, alongside ‘The Bang Straws’ (2021) and the forthcoming ‘Strange Evidence’ (2025) will form part of a new trilogy entitled ‘critical affection’.
[2] Karen J. Leong, ‘The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong and the Transformation of American Orientalism’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 87–88.
[3] Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’ [1998], in ‘Selected Writings on Race and Difference’, edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), pp. 246–256 (p. 250).
[4] Josephine D. Lee, ‘Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage’ (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1997), p. 89.
[5] Cherise Smith, ‘Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper and Anna Deavere Smith’ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 20–21.
[6] Teju Cole, ‘When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And When It Still Is.), The New York Times Magazine, 6 February 2019:
[7] Linda Hutcheon, ‘A Theory of Adaptation’ (New York: New York University Press, 2012), p. 11.
[8] C.M. (Catherine) Lord, ‘Serial Nuns: Michelle Williams Gamaker’s The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten as Serial and Trans- Serial’, M/C Journal, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2018). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1370 (accessed 12 April 2024).
[9] Oscar Wilde, ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H’. (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1921), p. 120; Amie Corry and Michelle Williams Gamaker, ‘Michelle Williams Gamaker’, ‘Burlington Contemporary’, 24 May 2023: https://contemporary.burlington.org.uk/articles/articles/michelle-williams-gamaker (accessed 12 April 2024).
Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo is a researcher, curator and associate lecturer in the History of Art at University College London. They specialise in histories of performance art, photography and time-based media, and their social contexts. They hold a particular interest in the visual politics of twentieth-century queer and trans worldbuilding, ecocritical methods and decolonial ecologies, and critical returns to the archive. Gabe was a curator at the 8th Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2022 and co-curated the exhibition Currency: Photography Beyond Capture at Deichtorhallen Hamburg–Halle für aktuelle Kunst (with Koyo Kouoh, Rasha Salti and Oluremi C. Onabanjo), 2022. Previous curatorial projects include Dig Where You Stand for the 57th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, 2018–2019.
