A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Birthplace:
London, England
Born:
January 1, 1979
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.
Director:
2008 Becoming Vera
2011 A Long History of Madness
2016 Brown Queers
2017 The Fruit is There to be Eaten
2018 House of Women
2018 The Eternal Return
2021 The Bang Straws
2023 Oberon
2023 Thieves
Director of Photography:
2008 Becoming Vera
2011 A Long History of Madness
2016 Brown Queers
2017 The Fruit is There to be Eaten
2018 House of Women
2018 The Eternal Return
2021 The Bang Straws
2023 Oberon
2023 Thieves
Editor:
2008 Becoming Vera
2011 A Long History of Madness
2016 Brown Queers
2017 The Fruit is There to be Eaten
2018 House of Women
2018 The Eternal Return
2021 The Bang Straws
2023 Oberon
2023 Thieves
Writer:
2008 Becoming Vera
2011 A Long History of Madness
2016 Brown Queers
2017 The Fruit is There to be Eaten
2018 House of Women
2018 The Eternal Return
2021 The Bang Straws
2023 Oberon
2023 Thieves
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.