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Girl Head’s theoretical inquiry is organized around the motif of the disappearing female body, a symptom of the behind-the-scenes technical process where the woman’s body is subtly and symbolically materialized. This body is converted into material for and incorporated into the film production process as a reference image not intended for viewing, as excess footage trimmed out to conceal the evidence of cinematographic trickery, and as the material remnants that motivate the construction of an archive. The motif of the vanishing woman that attends these nonrepresentational disappearances is more than analogy, but a sign of the production processes that are otherwise hidden.

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.

Such a restorative method is predicated on the assumption that women have been largely absent in film history. Jane Gaines traces this widely held view to 1973, when Claire Johnston asserted: “It is probably true to say that despite the enormous emphasis placed on woman as spectacle in the cinema, woman as woman is largely absent.”²⁴ In Gaines’s historiographical analysis, she observes how this principle—the absence of “woman as woman”—has been especially productive for feminist film theorists. For feminist historians, meanwhile, the evidence of the hundreds of women who directed, wrote screenplays, ran studios, edited, acted, and otherwise participated at all levels of the film industry in its early decades came to refute this supposedly fundamental absence.

Although the putative absence of women from film history has been contested for decades by a steady supply of counterevidence, the assertion of their neglected or forgotten presence in various aspects of filmmaking remains a central issue in feminist scholarship. My concern is that this presence is representational in its basis—the same logic of diversity and inclusion we find in the topic of casting and the question of “whose stories” get to be told. In the Feminist Media Histories genealogy mentioned earlier, Maggie Hennefeld warns of the “hazards of historical amnesia,”²⁵ while in the inaugural issue of the same journal, Shelley Stamp cautions against casting women “as interesting marginalia in someone else’s story.”²⁶ Hennefeld calls for feminist histories that offer “new information [with] conceptual invention.” Her proposal is recuperative in intent, and it also flirts with a positivist method in its affirmation of feminist research that “[inserts] these lost or sidetracked histories into the center of cultural discourse and social debate.”²⁷

One example of the “conceptual invention” Hennefeld advocates is Karen Redrobe’s Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism (2003). (I examine Redrobe’s argument in more depth in chapter 2). The book tracks its titular motif across a wide range of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual culture objects, all of which could be considered proto- or para-cinematic, to express how anxieties about gender, sexuality, and “excess” bodies were bound up with fears around film’s reproductive capacities.²⁸ As a study that locates instances of resistance and critique within an oppressive apparatus otherwise oriented toward the death and disappearance of women, its aim of restoring female presence to the historical record is not far from Fischer’s much earlier essay, even if its methods are more nuanced and deeply researched. Redrobe’s vanishing/presence relation is still tied to representation, because she is examining spectacular feats of vanishing, out in the open, as in a magic trick. I am interested, however, in the absconding of bodies that takes place as it were offstage, in the spaces of film material production. The vanishing of the China Girl into its industrial functionality is not advertised on any marquee.

In each of my case studies, the presence of a woman might seem incidental, negligible, or marginal: the split-second appearance of China Girl leader, the early cinema association of women’s bodies with editorial manipulation, and the fables that haunt the dusty corners of the film archive. In fact, the woman might not be registered at all, much less her vanishing. This is largely because the objects of my analysis are found below representation, in technical procedures that would seem to simultaneously rely on and also disavow the materialization of the woman’s body. Gender—and this is the burden of my argument—is not incidental but critical to these sites of production.

If feminist critics have tended to approach the disappearing woman’s body in a positivist sense, in terms of an absence or presence in film history, an important group of aesthetic theorists situate the disappearing woman’s body at the center of art and film production. To be more precise, their theories of art and film production are complicit in that disappearance. The critics in this vein take up the mythological figure of Medusa in art history, a figure that many have used to account for the powers and dangers of the aesthetic. Hal Foster, W. J. T. Mitchell, and especially Siegfried Kracauer emphasize Medusa’s severed and weaponized head—what becomes the gorgoneion—to provide accounts of the dangers and potentially transformative powers of art.²⁹ None mention her discarded body. With this important omission, they miss the violence in the removal of her body and, because of this, perpetuate their own form of exclusion. I turn now to these theories in some detail because they seem to me to enact—at a sophisticated conceptual level—the dialectic of the woman’s body in image production, figuring it as a necessary material substrate that is ultimately negated. As a counterpoint, I show how its absence, and the further denial of its violent remainder, structure their claims.

The myth of Medusa involves two instances of image-making: the sculptures that Medusa’s gaze makes out of mortal men by turning them into stone, and, after Perseus arrives, his proto-cinematographic “framing” of Medusa’s reflected image in his shield. For this reason, Medusa has been frequently made into a figure for the artistic image as such. Specifically, it is the gorgoneion, the head transformed into the image of Medusa’s face with its petrifying glance, that has been a common motif in the visual arts and literature since antiquity (fig. 2). It would therefore be inaccurate to describe this face as only female, or as having a recognizable gender at all. This is no ordinary face, but one that expresses a range of contradictory characteristics: both male and female, young and old, beautiful and ugly, human and monster. As Jean-Pierre Vernant notes, “all the categories in this face overlap in confusion and interfere with one another … [this] calls into question the rigorous distinctions among gods, men, and beasts, as well as those between different cosmic elements and levels.”³⁰ The gorgoneion is a figure of “extreme alterity,” the sign and symbol of all possible otherness.³¹

Medusa thus becomes the occasion for a theory of the unassimilable in art. For Foster this means the Lacanian real in sculpture; for Mitchell, the ever-withdrawing object of ekphrasis; and for Kracauer, the traumatic horrors of history as confronted in film. As with the myth, her body exits their accounts as soon as her head is lopped off. The female body provides a structure to organize the work of unassimilable otherness, relocated from the limp, headless woman—arguably more real, withdrawn, and traumatic—onto the now-independent image function of the gorgoneion. In these interpretations of the Medusa myth, the missing body (qua unassimilable), rather than the ubiquitous gorgoneion, serves as the basis for theoretical accounts of the origins of art. Gender is thereby tethered to the materiality at the origins of the image, as the aporia of that origin.

The severed figure of Medusa in these aesthetic theories is organized along the same conceptual axis I describe for the film image generally. In the aesthetic outcome of the myth, the head of a living woman becomes the gorgoneion: a sheer image whose gender has been sublimated out of view. Her body, meanwhile, comprises the material remains that are cropped out, but nevertheless form the basis for these theoretical structures. The Medusan art theories demonstrate an underlying anxiety of women, couched in a conception of the material-image relationship. In each, Medusa becomes an invented rationale for a representational logic where femininity is a required condition for the aesthetic as such. As mythology become ideology, it is precisely this underlying anxiety concerning the material status of “woman” that animates these aesthetic theories. By foregrounding her genderless head, they are able to distance themselves from the violence visited upon Medusa’s body. Further, in order to maintain this generative power, the woman is reimagined as a gorgon, a monstrous figure who can then be killed, who must be killed, so that the gorgoneion can assume its status as pure image, an object untethered to the woman’s body.

Figure 2. Terracotta antefix with the head of Medusa, sixth century BC. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1927.

Figure 3. Antonio Canova, Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1804–1806). Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1927.

For Foster, the vanquishing of Medusa is nothing less than the foundation of art. He calls the scene of Perseus’s encounter with the gorgon the “ur-painting, an originary model of art,” taking Antonio Canova’s rendering in Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1804–1806) as his primary example (fig. 3).³² In Canova’s sculpture, the hero stands contrapposto, his left hand holding aloft Medusa’s head, to see it directly for the first time. Her body is nowhere to be seen. His shoulders are relaxed, though in his right hand the sword is still slightly raised; this combination of tumescence and release suggests an immediately postcoital moment.³³ The deed is done, and Perseus appears to be admiring his conquest. In this scene, repeated countless times in the history of Western art, Foster sees the genesis for the model of all art: Perseus’s vanquishing of the gorgon is the triumph of art over feminized nature.³⁴

To decapitate Medusa is Perseus’s destiny—Adriana Cavarero reminds us that the name Perseus means “he who cuts”³⁵—and the scene stages, for Foster, the central conflict within art. He adopts Nietzschean terminology to describe how the Apollonian forces associated with order and rationality, aligned with Perseus, conquer the unruly Dionysian forces of nature, assigned to Medusa: “Perseus-Apollo triumphant” stands over “Medusa-Dionysus subdued.”³⁶ Perseus, in his victory, affirms the capability of art to bring order and purpose to nature. Foster associates Medusa with the threatening force of reality, understood in terms of Lacan’s theory of the real. As with the staging of Perseus/Apollo versus Medusa/Dionysus, the symbolic order is opposed to the real, which precedes and exceeds it. Art negates and mediates the real, and so has the effect of taming it.³⁷ Perseus’s mirror screens and screens out—it shows, but also filters—the appearance of Medusa, so that her deadly force is mitigated, if not entirely repressed. The real, meanwhile, invariably threatens. Foster writes: “the uncivilized is not eradicated … because the symbolic order also requires the power of the uncivilized, or the power that is projected there.”³⁸ The gorgoneion loses its gender in the process. It comes into being independent of any original female body, simply as a symbolic object of male conquest: a “prized trophy.”³⁹

Once severed from the body, the Medusan visage becomes a weapon mounted to Athena’s shield, and the emblem of the goddess’s military might. Medusa is no longer nature, but nature repurposed: as art and ornament, and, closely related to it, as an object invested in creating and maintaining civilizational order.⁴⁰ This fulfills what Foster identifies as art’s apotropaic mission: to ward off those irrational forces by appropriating them for a different purpose: “this apotropaic transformation of weapon into shield is fundamental to art, perhaps its originary purpose.”⁴¹ This is manifest in the gorgoneion, a seemingly genderless object (insofar as gender has been sublimated) that is no longer suggestive of the body to which it was once attached. In Canova’s sculpture and Foster’s account, the body has disappeared altogether.

For Foster, the force of the repressed real lingers in the power of the gorgoneion, somehow preserved and harnessed there. There is still more conspicuous evidence of this repression of the bodily remains of Medusa in a completely different sculpture, Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1545). Here the scene is not as sanitized, and the traces of violence have not been as thoroughly scrubbed away. Though Foster makes passing reference to Cellini’s work, he does not comment on its chief difference with Canova’s rendering—namely, the use of Medusa’s headless body as the sculpture’s base (fig. 4). Cellini and Canova offer strikingly divergent depictions of the same scene. While the hero shares the same pose, counterbalanced with the head of Medusa held out by his left hand, sword cocked in the right, the sculptures’ differences are significant. In contrast with the clean, neo-classical base of Canova’s sculpture, Cellini’s mannerist rendering shows the hero standing atop the grotesque remainder of Medusa’s body. Curled rivulets of blood stream out from her open neck, matching the ones dripping from her bodiless head. This is a moment of reflexivity: Michael Cole interprets the blood that is so realistically dripping from Medusa’s severed neck as a figure for the sculpture’s poured bronze.⁴² Though her face is expressionless in death, her body is dynamically convulsed in reaction: her torso twisted, her body curled into a tight ring, and on her left hand, the index finger half-extended, as if to identify and incriminate Perseus for his terrible deed. Canova’s work, by contrast, keeps Perseus’s feet planted on a clean and even floor, and instead of blood pouring from her severed neck, his Medusa shows no neck at all, its chin instead neatly collared by a few coiled snakes. Where in Cellini the head maintains a visceral connection to the body that forms its base, in Canova, the head is already the gorgoneion, the face alone. Foster, we see, has selected as the basis of his aesthetic theory a moment of the myth where the woman’s body has been decisively carted offstage. Cellini’s sculpture posits a counter-narrative, where the underlying material of art keeps its gender.

The literary practice of ekphrasis, as discussed by Mitchell in his reading of Shelley’s poem “On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery” (1819), would seem to be far removed from the dynamic of gender and materiality in film. Yet ekphrasis offers an instructive counterexample for an artistic medium’s distancing and protective functions, which are relevant to the play of repression and sublimation of film vis-à-vis its materiality. Ekphrasis does not replicate the visual in its own terms as does, by comparison, a photograph of a painting. Rather, it sublimates an artistic image into descriptive language, and therefore is a practice of dematerialization. The Medusa myth as read by Mitchell animates issues of aesthetic origin, gender, and materiality. Here the threat posed by Medusa remains in anxious proximity to an ineliminable but also unincorporable presence. Not surprisingly, this problematic turns around the nonrepresentation of a woman’s body.

Figure 4. Benvenuto Cellini, Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1545–1554). Loggia dei Lanzi, Museo Nazionale Del Bargello. Courtesy of Museo Nazionale Del Bargello.

The interpretive question posed by Shelley’s poem is how alive and therefore how dangerous is Medusa’s severed head, and how far the image-making of art, whether in painting or poetry, can effect a sufficient barrier against that danger. Ekphrasis ought to be safe from the problems of figuration that concern Medusa in visual media, yet Shelley’s poem is energized by the doubt that not even literary distance is sufficient. If the general aim of ekphrasis is, as it were, for the image described to come alive, then the case of Medusa gives rise to the opposite impulse: the fear that this may actually happen. Mitchell locates “ekphrastic ambiguity” in the fascination with the woman, which commingle fear of and desire for Medusa. The reader’s fear is stoked by the poem’s structural ambiguity concerning the status of the visual. Though Shelley’s title suggests that it is a description of a specific painting in the Uffizi Gallery (previously attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci, later credited to an anonymous painter of the Flemish school), Mitchell notes that the poem’s speaker seems to be standing not before the painting but the gorgon’s severed head, in the present tense, unmediated (fig. 5). By the logic of the Medusa myth, then, the speaker has cast aside the protective, intervening frame of the artwork, a repetition of Perseus’s shield, exposing himself in imagination directly to the prohibited and petrifying, hence unrepresentable, sight.

The gambit of image-making is the ambiguity of the image both as distancing representation and as what Mitchell sees as explicit in the Medusan subject matter, “the image as a dangerous female other.”⁴³ Like the China Girl, Medusa’s “repressed image” tends to become only image—the otherness of her femininity is strangely without a gendered body.⁴⁴ This is to say that her body—the site of her dangerous femininity, one would think—once again disappears. (At least that other “shattered visage” of Shelley’s, Ozymandias, got to keep his “vast [but] trunkless legs”!) Her head, meanwhile, is transformed by Shelley into a mere object: “it.” Though Mitchell does not remark on it, Shelley’s poem does evoke, if only in misdirection, the body missing from the scene, describing how “from its head as from one body grow, / As [river] grass out of a watery rock, / Hairs which are vipers.” In this simile, the head stands in for the body, but as with Canova, the sublimation of gender has already begun with the act of decapitation.⁴⁵ It is curious, then, that Mitchell regards this painting as a definitive and exemplary “female image” without remarking on the fact that its subject is the absence of a female body, or that Shelley himself works to underline the paradox.⁴⁶

Figure 5. A Flemish painter (previously attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci), Medusa’s Head (ca. 1600), The Uffizi Gallery.

Like Foster and Mitchell, Kracauer uses the Medusa myth to tell a kind of origin story for the aesthetic as encounter or scene. Kracauer sets himself the problem of film’s specificity as a medium in this regard. For him, the mythical scene is analogous to the film-viewing experience: Medusa is the film image, a mediated real presented onscreen, while the film viewer has taken up the role of Perseus:

The moral of the myth is, of course, that we do not, and cannot, see actual horrors because they paralyze us with blinding fear; and that we shall know what they look like only by watching images of them which reproduce their true appearance. These images have nothing in common with the artist’s imaginative rendering of an unseen dread but are in the nature of mirror reflections. Now of all the existing media the cinema alone holds up a mirror to nature. Hence our dependence on it for the reflection of happenings which would petrify us were we to encounter them in real life. The film screen is Athena’s polished shield.⁴⁷

Kracauer, like Foster and Mitchell, ignores Medusa’s body after it is split from her head, and consequently his theory follows a now-predictable trajectory that divides gender and materiality on one hand and image and immateriality on the other. Yet his interpretation of the myth opens up other, productive possibilities for conceptualizing the relationship between gender and materiality for film.

Kracauer’s film theory is materialist. Because film and photography possess a mimetic relationship with the world they register, they are closer to reality than other forms of art-making, and the images they produce thereby constitute a special category of encounter, tantamount to reality itself.⁴⁸ Kracauer bases much of his faith in cinema in its potential for integrating the real—the physical, material world of history—in a way that no other medium can achieve. Kracauer’s understanding of materiality is worth following, even if the materiality he sees in the image, namely, reality, has less to do with the materiality of the image, the filmstrip. The latter is the concern of this book.

Kracauer’s emphasis on film materiality offers two new conceptions of Medusa that allow us to place her outside of the narrow characterization provided so far. First, she is a figure that possesses a whole body. Significantly, Kracauer aligns the film viewer with Perseus not as a victor, but as the hero in the moment before battle: “Perhaps Perseus’ greatest achievement was not to cut off Medusa’s head but to overcome his fears and look at its reflection in the shield.”⁴⁹ By implication, his use of the mirrored shield protects him from the living, fearsome Medusa as a whole body, which Canova and Shelley have already ushered out of sight. Though Medusa’s body is not mentioned in Kracauer’s text, we can assume that it is as yet untouched by Perseus’s blade. Second, her body is comprised of visceral material. In invoking Georges Franju’s slaughterhouse documentary The Blood of the Beasts (1949) as an example of “actual horrors” seen in the Medusan reflection, Kracauer presents an industrial repetition of Medusa’s decapitation: “puddles of blood spread on the floor while horse and cow are killed methodically; a saw dismembers animal bodies still warm with life; and there is the unfathomable shot of the calves’ heads being arranged.”⁵⁰ To be sure, the slaughtered cows are not gendered, but Kracauer has slyly reintroduced the body—still warm and palpable, and not a metaphysical remainder but an industrial factor—into the Medusa myth.⁵¹

Kracauer also offers a new purpose for Medusa, which, more than it displays the aesthetic powers inherent in the artwork, provides therapeutic value. In this way, cinema is “redemptive” as the title of his book suggests. He deploys Medusa’s image to effectively heal an already traumatized spectator: “The mirror reflections of horror are an end in themselves. As such they beckon the spectator to take them in and thus incorporate into his memory the real face of things too dreadful to be beheld in reality.”⁵² By relocating the heroic act from Medusa’s decapitation to viewing her image in the shield, Kracauer unwittingly restores to Medusa her complete body. Even if he does not describe Medusa’s corporeality in terms of a gendered materiality, his theory offers the possibility of doing so. Strikingly, there is no violence necessary to his account. When he identifies the shield that bears Medusa’s image as belonging to Athena, he does not specify whether this is the shield on which the gorgoneion is mounted, or the one the goddess originally gave to Perseus to aid in his quest. This ambiguity is enough to wind back the progression of events in the myth and to end them, as he says, in the “mirror reflections of horror.” The body of the woman is left intact, and it is from this place, in the materialities of film, that I begin my investigation into the vanished female body.