Girl Head

Оглавление

Genevieve Yue. Girl Head

Contents

Plates and Figures. Plates

Figures

Introduction

Materiality

Methodology

The Disappearing Female Body

Looking Back

1. China Girls in the Film Laboratory

Control

Test Cards

Color

Obsolescence

The Face of the China Girl

The China Girl in Experimental Film and Video

2. Gone Girls of Escamontage

Tricks of Continuity

Unravelling Rope

Invisible Editing

Cutting Women

3. Gradivan Footsteps in the Film Archive

Tracing Gradiva

Women in the Film Archive

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Notes. Introduction: The Body of Medusa

1. China Girls in the Film Laboratory

2. Gone Girls of Escamontage

3. Gradivan Footsteps in the Film Archive

Afterword

Bibliography

Index

Отрывок из книги

GIRL HEAD

2 China Girl, circa early 1930s

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I analyze this motif to clarify how this vanishing, whether violent excision or mere overlooking, was made possible. In other words, I take the absent woman as a problematic to be dissected and better understood. This is different from other scholarly approaches that are also concerned with disappeared women which either try to fill gaps in the historical record, as with feminist scholarship concerned with restoring women to a history they have been written out of, or to further bury the traces of the woman’s body in the formulation of an aesthetic theory (in art history and film theory). Both approaches, paradoxically, produce additional occlusions, which I take up in my own theoretical inquiry.

The first approach is represented by feminist film historians working in a positivist mode to restore or recuperate women deemed missing from film history. This work follows a longstanding and largely correct view that many female figures have been excluded from the historical record. To redress this exclusion, feminist scholars since the 1970s have embarked on empirical research into women’s contributions to film history and production. Lucy Fischer’s “The Lady Vanishes: Women, Magic and the Movies” (1979) is exemplary in this regard. The essay both interrogates the patriarchal logic by which early trick films involved male magicians performing often gruesome acts on female bodies (“the rhetoric of magic … constitutes a complex drama of male-female relations”23) and revises the history of magic films along feminist lines, reading an envy of female reproductive capabilities into the actions of male magicians and expanding the historical record to include films featuring female magicians.

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