The Bang Straws

2021
Country: UK
Duration: 17 mins
|11 Seconds
Colour / B&W,
Sound: Stereo
Ratio: 16:9
Available Format/s: HD Digital file / DCP
Original Format: 16mm film

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The Bang Straws is 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. It is the first instalment of her Critical Affection trilogy. 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. 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, Dahong Wang, a long-term collaborator of Williams Gamaker’s and reconstructs The Good Earth’s innovative analogue Special Effects, including hyper close ups of locusts and a locust swarm made out of tea leaves.

More works by Michelle Williams Gamaker

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