A new kind of alphabet

Longtime collaborators Michelle Williams Gamaker and Krishna Istha in conversation.

Michelle Williams Gamaker is an artist and filmmaker based in London. She is currently working on a project called “Fictional Activism” in which she looks back at classic Hollywood and British studio films to find the imperialism in storytelling. Throughout her practice, she revisits the histories of actors of colour who were marginalised, bringing them into her stories more centrally as brown protagonists. 

Krishna Istha is an artist, theatre-maker, screenwriter, and operates in a variety of roles within the performance realm. They often make form-pushing, multi-genre live works that speak to underrepresented experiences of race, gender and queerness.

Istha appears in all three parts of Gamaker’s Dissolution Trilogy (2017 – 2019), currently on view in the exhibition I Multiply Each Day at Gus Fisher Gallery in Tāmaki Makaurau.

Michelle Williams Gamaker, House of Women (still depicting Krishna Istha’s ‘screentest’), 2017, HDV colour, 14:18 min. Courtesy of the artist

Michelle Williams Gamaker: When a mutual friend of ours, Gregory Vass, connected me to you, I couldn't have known just how influenced I might be by the work you were doing in the queer scene and through performance.

Krishna Istha: You were also looking for a babysitter, that's how we first connected.

Oh yes, you had this wonderful queer babysitting service that we managed to call upon just once, but it was really good. What took off more was not childcare but collaboration. 

I had an expectation that the person I worked with would carry a great deal of the film, but I didn't know at that point it would develop into a trilogy. I initially had a project called Black Matter Earth, and I thought I was going to make a three screen work. Each screen would be a reference to the films by Powell and Pressburger—Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death and Gone to Earth. What I dreamed of was that you, Krishna, would move from screen to screen and each time you moved you would be a herald or shapeshifter, that you would be mutable. I imagined you would be Kanchi [a character from Black Narcissus] in one screen, and then another character from another film and another character from another film. The project ended up becoming an expanded trilogy, the Dissolution Trilogy, because I always do struggle to get the money to produce these things. But it also became clear that I had to walk before I run and just focus on one element.

The first film we worked on together was a single-channel film called House of Women. We asked women and non-binary individuals of South Asian heritage to enter an audition for the role of Kanchi. In the original film, Black Narcissus (1947), Kanchi was played by this white actress called Jean Simmons and the character was silenced (given no lines), over-sexualised and wore brownface, so in completely racist make up. Everything that I asked of the four individuals, including you, was just to be themselves and recite a few lines that directly related to the original script. I wonder what was it like for you to come in to the project?

Michelle Williams Gamaker, Dissolution Trilogy (2017–2019). Installation view, Gus Fisher Gallery, December 2021. Photo: Sam Hartnett

It was really interesting. When we spoke, you were telling me what the film was based on and about the white woman who played it. I remember you saying that lots of people were auditioned but she was the one that was cast in the end. I thought it was really clever that you weren't making a work that was about the film itself, but you were going further back and making a work about the process instead. 

The thing I remember most was that it was very comfortable working with you. You knew how to take our stories because you wrote the script and it was personalised for every single actor. It was based on our lives and our interests. The alphabet that you wrote for each of us was completely different and really spoke to each of us separately. You could relate to the experiences, being of a similar identity or similar experience in the world. I feel like that made a massive difference. At the time, I hadn't done lots of work with other South Asian artists around me and I feel it also made a difference for me to be able to do that.

That's really good to hear. When I met each of you—there was also Taranjit Mander, Arunima Rajkumar and Jasdeep Kaur Kandola—all four of you had varied experiences. I think one of my frustrations, as someone with South Asian heritage, is just how easily we're lumped into one generic experience. I have always felt like a "wannabe Indian." 

My mum is from Sri Lanka and I have been very interested in the history of India. I'm interested in the scale of the place, and in particular, moments where I couldn't quite access Sri Lankan history. Why I'm saying all this in a roundabout way is that even through my interest in a vast continent like India, my experience growing up, of what television and cinema offered in the UK, was a flattened representation of South Asian culture. Sometimes the depictions were racist, comedic or both. 

When I interviewed each of you to prepare the scripts, I wanted to make sure that there was really something about your lives in the work. This was meant to be an audition and you were meant be conveying something of your life, but that couldn't just be two-dimensional. At the crux of this was, how do I bring each of you in and keep the viewer uncertain about what they were looking at. You were basically re-reading lines that you had given me during our conversations ahead of the shoot, so it was like a double thing. Especially your sequence, Krishna, because you give this kind of resume about where you were born. I still have it in my head because I edited it, "I was born in St Petersburg, Florida..." All those lines, they're your lines. 

As you were saying that, I could hear it as well. It's interesting because it's before I started testosterone and I sound so different. Every time I go back and watch the video, which is not very often, I'm like “Woah, I sound so different. This is really strange.” But it was such a great experience for me because it felt like you were happy to evolve the writing to fit to my new identity, which was constantly changing, going back and forth. That was really incredible.

And also exciting. On a more ‘theoretical level,’ I had said to myself that I wanted this mutable protagonist, someone who is a shapeshifter. And how do you do that? Of course you could do it through costume or you could physically swap out one actor for another. That could be cool. But when each year and a bit passed by for the next production, you had visibly changed or transitioned in some way. That was exciting because actually you shaped the whole trilogy. You were, in effect, the winner of the audition. That was more than I could have predicted when I started my work in “Fictional Activism.”

It must have also been hard. I remember you emailing me and saying, "How are you feeling right now? I've got a script, but what would you like to be seen as?" I can imagine it was also hard for you because you would have had to change it and mutate it as I changed.

I was pretty easy with that. I'm glad that I did ask you. We also made a kind of spinoff work called Brown Queers together with Katayoun Jalili and Natasha Lall around 2016, which documents an early phase in what you could call the ‘baby queer’ territory of yourself. I guess the films document where you were at with each point of transition. Do you remember talking about wanting to be one of those YouTubers?

Michelle Williams Gamaker, The Fruit is There to be Eaten (still), 2018, HDV colour, 26:44 min. Courtesy of the artist

"This is my voice five days on testosterone." I never got around to it, but you did it for me in an amazing creative way.

The second part of the trilogy, The Fruit is There to be Eaten, that film strangely hasn't had as much exposure as House of Women or The Eternal Return, but I'm so pleased it’s at Gus Fisher Gallery. I suppose it suffered because it was the one in the middle and it was relatively long at 26 minutes. 

It's probably just totally my addiction to this wonderfully cult British classic [Black Narcissus] that is very queer and very lush and super problematic. It's about nuns who lose their shit in a convent, but they are all over this British agent (who wears really tight shorts). The point is that it's actually Kanchi and her presence as this burgeoning sexual individual, within a supposedly chaste space, that creates tension. And it is [the actor] Sabu [Dastagir], who also appears in the film [as The Young General] (and who you also play in the third film The Eternal Return) who contributes to this tension through the story of this prince and the beggar-maid—Kanchi actually elopes with Sabu. 

The Fruit is There to be Eaten was my attempt to bring you out of the audition and onto the set of Black Narcissus. One of the lines you say is, "It's 2017 now. India secured independence 80 years ago. We shouldn't be here, not you or I." It's this moment of telling the nuns that they're trapped on a film set. I think I am still exploring sets trapped in time. What if a film set from the past appeared today, how would things be different?

Michelle Williams Gamaker, The Fruit is There to be Eaten (still), 2018, HDV colour, 26:44 min. Courtesy of the artist

What do you remember about The Fruit is There to be Eaten? For me it was a bit more of an unwieldy thing because it had that many more actors on set. It had gone from four auditionees and one anonymous reader to about ten extras playing the schoolgirls at the convent, and we had yourself, Charlotte Gallagher and Catherine Lord. What do you remember, because you were basically being asked to now step into the character of Kanchi?

Michelle Williams Gamaker, The Fruit is There to be Eaten (still), 2018, HDV colour, 26:44 min. Courtesy of the artist

It felt like a whirlwind where we were there for maybe a day or two, and then it was done really quickly. The thing I remember that really stayed with me was seeing how, for you, filmmaking felt like performance art making for me. It felt like it was meta and it was based in the past and in the future, but also very much about the exact space and moment we were in. It was exciting for me to watch you do that because I didn't really know that you could make form-pushing work with film. It felt like a completely different world. The other thing I remember—every queer person's dream—I got to make out with a nun.

That's probably my dream. It's really good to hear you say, because I did a fine art degree and I was a performance artist before I was anything else. Film and video art happened because I was becoming increasingly obsessive about how I wanted my audience to see me. Even to the point where I was building these elaborate viewing slots and, at a certain point, I realised I had made an oversized viewfinder. I went from filming myself in front of the camera to working with others because at a certain point I just felt shyer. I'm really interested in people. That's the main thing. I love listening and telling stories, so it felt appropriate to make that switch. Also, I'm not an actor. I definitely thought I could perform, but I wasn't somebody that could really carry lines. But I love thinking about performance. It's so interesting to hear you say all that, because I think it must come a bit from this unconventional way of coming into film. It's not the standard route of learning how to script and shoot. It was all done in an experimental, on the fly way.

Talking about that meta thing, it was through writing the script for The Fruit is There to be Eaten that I realised that there was the possibility that the alphabet that you had recited in House of Women would now come back. But instead of it being edited down it was in its full length. That felt very exciting for me too because I think the meta aspect is not just the breaking of the fourth wall. I wanted to acknowledge that when you make something that is artificial or is a fiction, it doesn't have to be compromised by breaking through the fiction to show some of the making. In The Fruit, we flipped the camera around and you see me and the crew looking at Charlotte Gallagher as she disrobes from her nun's outfit and into civilian clothing. That was an exciting thing because in that moment I was trying to say yeah, we're right behind the camera. We're over here and we're complicit in creating this work.

Michelle Williams Gamaker, The Fruit is There to be Eaten (still), 2018, HDV colour, 26:44 min. Courtesy of the artist

I wondered if you knew what the third part was when you were making the second part?

I didn't. There's two things: there's a kind of workaholism I'm always trying to recover from that keeps driving me to make the next work, but I think I understood that there was still somebody not getting screen time—that was Sabu. Sabu was also part of Black Narcissus, but we'd only focused on the story of Kanchi played by Jean Simmons. We've brought Kanchi back the way that they should be—now they're South Asian and they have a voice, they're political, they're quite formidable. They've told the nuns that they're on a film set. How do we then move forward? That meant taking time to research Sabu. I was just amazed by what I found out about him. I felt really closely connected to him. I think you mentioned that you thought that Sabu looked like your grandfather to some extent. 

I worked out that Sabu was someone who was supposedly "discovered" by anthropologist Robert Flaherty, who's a really interesting guy. He made anthropological films and he was the first person to add dramatic elements to the genre. In his famous film Nanook of the North, the Inuits who he filmed were actually acting their role. Why it's so fascinating for me is the process of asking someone to play their life. 

Flaherty found Sabu in Mysore. He's the son of a mahout, an elephant driver, and he's found apparently in the Maharaja’s stables, which sounds almost apocryphal, but he's just this wonderful, bubbly, lovely child who's clearly a star already. Alexander Korda, the film producer, literally plucks him from Mysore and takes him to England to school him so that he can learn English. 

We haven't even spoken about that smaller work you made for me called Elephant Boy (2016). For a film from 1937, his debut film, Sabu had to learn English to play the role. So he's schooled by this British schoolmaster in the morning and then in the afternoon he’s on a film set. You can only imagine just how intense that was.

Michelle Williams Gamaker, The Eternal Return (still), 2019, HDV colour, 17:03 min. Courtesy of the artist

I think it's the one where it sounds like he's just saying sounds. He doesn't know what he's actually saying and there's sadness behind his eyes. It's really sad watching that video. 

Just to give some context, in 2015 I asked you to play Sabu as essentially a child. I think Sabu couldn't have been more than 12 or so in that film. In the introduction to Elephant Boy (1937), they make Sabu introduce the film, which is really a bizarre format. His English, by the way, is fantastic for someone who has just learnt it. But because it's also a language that he hasn't yet really worked out the nuance of the meaning of the words, it does sound like he's repeating words to us at a speed that is slightly off. 

What I asked you to do is, with an earpiece, repeat back the words being spoken to you. The earpiece was also visible, which I think was important. I wonder how you did it? Maybe you had to switch off thinking about what you were saying and literally repeat what you heard. I think that was the only direction I gave you, was just say what you hear. 

Michelle Williams Gamaker, The Eternal Return (still), 2019, HDV colour, 17:03 min. Courtesy of the artist

It was one of those things where it's obvious that he was just saying what he heard, and I was just saying what he was saying. It was really sad.

It is a sad piece. There’s a YouTube clip that references Sabu's acting. It's essentially taking the piss in some way. It was called “Sabu invents a new form of acting,” but I just found it to be derogatory. He's not inventing a new form of acting, he's being forced by a studio system to become a star. Obviously it will offer him lots of opportunity, but it's the beginning of an uneven relationship with Hollywood and British cinema. 

The Eternal Return is based on the reality of Sabu's life at the end of his career. He died quite young, I think in his late 30s, and he ends up performing in a circus in the UK riding elephants. This is why it was called The Eternal Return. This maybe is the most speculative of all the films I’ve made. I write from a space of frustration for Sabu, empathising or imagining he's hurt by being dropped by the producers. And even though it's no shame to work in the circus, it is a fall from grace. He had to work there because he had two children and a wife to support. He was the main headline act. He is on the programme that you show, that Tom Arnold the circus impresario holds up. I think one of your lines is, "I stuck my head in a lion's mouth and I'm no better than the bag that hangs off Marilyn's shoulders," who is his wife. You also say a line like, "I'm an imperialist puppet." So I think in this script, we really tried to touch the usurping of a brown actor. Sabu, unlike Jean Simmons, does not need to wear make-up. Jean Simmons to a certain extent is also usurped because that was really standard practice to use white bodies to swap out brown bodies.

But she went on to have a career and he did not after he did his films with elephants.

Well, he did have a career, but it was always only within the limits of being allowed to perform in certain ways. So sidekick roles or detrimental, negative roles like the thief in The Thief of Baghdad (1940). There are ways in which his stardom was allowed to flourish, but only within the limits of what whiteness would allow. 

I think the Dissolution Trilogy, if we maybe speak about the three films together, enabled me to really think through what “Fictional Activism” could be if you take characters that you loved in your past and give them an alternative ending, or give them a way to speak back to the power that they find themselves performing within. 

I want to focus now on [my upcoming version of] The Thief of Baghdad. I want to shift “Fictional Activism” into a space of ‘fictional revenge.’ I would like you to share a union on screen with a wonderful performer called Dahong Wang. Dahong is going to play Anna May Wong, who was the focus of my last film, The Bang Straws, and you're going to return as Sabu. Anna May Wong starred in the 1924 version of The Thief of Baghdad and Sabu in the 1940 version. The hope is that Anna May Wong will appear in black and white, if we can get the technology to do it, and you will be in full technicolour. The aim will be to bring Anna into technicolour because she's still stuck in black and white. But there's lots of things. There's going to be murder, there's going to be blood, there's going to be a choreography dance sequence. Basically I want to make musicals. It's not going to be quite a musical, but it's a musical without the songs. 

A musical is quite Bollywood. It makes sense to take these characters stuck in a Hollywood world and move them into a Bollywood world. 

Yeah, absolutely. Basically the plan is to shoot that in the autumn. I think it would be a very interesting moment where it harnesses all the knowledge that I've gained over the past seven or eight years in filmmaking, but also in form-pushing. I think you mentioned that earlier, really playing with the meta aspects of film. That Anna might be black and white and that she's brought slowly into technicolour doesn’t save the characters but gives them the space to ask for some kind of social justice, really. I guess I'm asking for a kind of justice for their characters because they really were limited in what they could do. I need to write that script in the next month or so. That's what's going to happen.

Michelle Williams Gamaker, The Fruit is There to be Eaten (still), 2018, HDV colour, 26:44 min. Courtesy of the artist

Add it to your ever growing list.

Maybe that's a good place to leave it, with this future plan that I really do hope to collaborate with you again. You're an incredible screen writer and performer and you're doing so much. Every time I get to work with you I pinch myself. 

I will always have time for you. Just tell me when. But I can't wait to hear about it either.

How old were you when we shot Casting Kanchi? 

20, maybe 19?

Wow, okay. That's intense. I think in this new film, which is called Thieves, I'm going to bring back Catherine Lord and Charlotte Gallagher and you and Dahong. In fact, many other collaborators if they have the time. I really love working long-term with people and I think there's a sort of commitment to one another that means also that when we slip into making the fiction, we know one another. I really love seeing us grow. It's more a case of the thrill of us being on set again, but hopefully now with a bigger budget behind it. I'm really digging deep now to fundraise. 

I think, on a personal level, the Dissolution Trilogy was made through scraping and self-funding and getting small pots of money. It's been a very important body of work to try to show people what I want to make, but I want also to not have to fight as hard to be able to make those things. If money does come through for this one it would just be lovely to really dedicate everything to you all, and to the set and production, so it's exactly what we want it to be. This is where I'm at. I'm very excited about what we will make and hoping the money comes through.

Fingers crossed.

Michelle Williams Gamaker, The Fruit is There to be Eaten (still), 2018, HDV colour, 26:44 min. Courtesy of the artist

Michelle Williams Gamaker, Dissolution Trilogy (2017–2019). Installation view, Gus Fisher Gallery, December 2021. Photo: Sam Hartnett

Michelle Williams Gamaker, Dissolution Trilogy (2017–2019). Installation view, Gus Fisher Gallery, December 2021. Photo: Sam Hartnett

Thank you to Gus Fisher Gallery and Robbie Handcock for helping facilitate this conversation.

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