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The Body of Medusa

I was always aware that there was a hidden aspect of filmmaking that was comparable to the hidden obsessions of people, that what you saw on the screen was a censored or acceptable social image but that something was hidden. I was thinking of what might happen if a movie were run, and as you were watching the numbered countdown leader, all of a sudden you saw something on the screen that you were not expecting to see, not supposed to see, an image that existed on a subliminal level in a lot of movies in the 1940s and 1950s, where there were sexual implications of all sorts without your ever seeing a naked woman in an erotic one-to-one relationship with the camera … [For A Movie] my idea at the time … was that that image of the naked woman was an image normally kept hidden but is there, an implicit part of the movies.

—BRUCE CONNER¹

We are used to thinking critically about cinematic images of women. In particular, feminist film studies has influentially and persistently foregrounded the topic of representation—problematizing how (and whether) women are depicted onscreen. In the aftermath of groundbreaking works such as Claire Johnston’s “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema” (1973), Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape (1974), and Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), feminist film theorists in the mid- to late 1970s began an intensive and productive investigation into questions of gender and representation. The emphasis on representation, inspired by Mulvey’s notion of women’s “to-be-looked-at-ness,” or the overt presentation of women’s bodies as sexually desirable objects, resulted in a reexamination of women onscreen as well as a recuperation of underrecognized female figures within film history.² Although much feminist inquiry has subsequently broadened to consider material, social, economic, and political structures, the field is still centrally concerned with issues of representation. As the editors of a 2018 survey of genealogies of feminist media studies in Feminist Media Histories affirm, the “fundamental questions of feminist media studies [are] … Who represents? and Who is represented?”³

This dominant approach in feminist analysis misses important historical developments that have occurred in sites of film production outside the scope of representation. A feminism oriented toward these other spaces offers an enlarged understanding of the often invisible social forces that shape supposedly “neutral” or “objective” technical processes. Such a feminism might tell us how anxieties about the social status of women are displaced onto the material dimension of film. And while materiality has been recently undergoing intense scrutiny in the humanities, and in film and media studies, the discourse on materiality has emphasized the specific materiality (immaterial or otherwise) of the digital vis-à-vis analog technologies. Despite this interest in materiality, not to mention the profound impact of feminist film analysis in other areas of film studies, gender has never been examined as an intrinsic and key theoretical aspect of film materiality. This is where Girl Head intervenes, and in doing so it constructs an alternative and subterranean history of film materiality as revealed through feminist analysis.

By investigating three sites of film materiality, this book offers a methodological intervention in feminist film analysis—moving inquiry away from representation, which looks at the image onscreen, and toward industrial and institutional processes which, though hidden from view, are no less gendered. I closely attend to spaces of technical film production, and, from there, ask the kinds of speculative questions normally found in textual analysis of films. Theoretical inquiry is grounded in granular archival research: I locate a gendered and bodily materiality across three historically situated sites of film production: the film laboratory, editing practices, and the film archive. In each, the woman’s body plays an important role in the making of the film object, a role not confined to the representation of women. I track this body’s often elusive movements in and through material practices. This will not be a linear history, because those movements often go underground for long stretches and reappear in curious new formations. My objects therefore encompass a wide variety of production contexts and films: inside Hollywood and on the fringes of the avant-garde, and spanning the earliest manifestations of what could be called cinema to their digital upending at the end of the twentieth century. Additionally, I bring in individual films, especially experimental and feminist works, as important interlocutors in discussing the production practices that are the focus of each chapter.

Girl Head departs from the norm of feminist analysis in the objects it examines and the questions it raises. The China Girl, for example, is the kind of figure that falls outside the range of traditional feminist concerns. It is a reference image that has been used in film laboratories since the mid- to late 1920s to calibrate color, density, and ideal appearance for the film image. Although in more limited use today, it is still involved in analog and some digital film refining processes. In a China Girl image, a woman (despite the nomenclature, she is typically white, for reasons I will explain shortly) is posed, in close-up, in front of swatches of black, white, gray, and various reference colors. The China Girl may be an image of a woman, but its designated technical function is not to depict a person. The woman is a model and not an actor, and the filmstrip containing the China Girl is not a portrait or likeness of her. It is really not “about” her at all. Yet her body—the tone of her flesh—is integral to the final image that gets screened for an audience, a commercial output from which the reference image is carefully excluded. The China Girl is a challenge to a scholarly emphasis on representation because it presents a different relationship between the film image and gender than the one such an emphasis presumes. When working within a critical framework oriented toward representation, image and gender conveniently align: images of women produce meaning in films, and as Teresa de Lauretis and feminist film scholars have demonstrated, images of women organize a film’s structure of meaning.⁴ Yet because the China Girl is a type of image that exists solely as part of the technical apparatus of the film laboratory and is largely absent from the realm of representation, it interrupts the assumed congruity of image and gender. Although it does not participate directly in the affective, sensorial, and psychological dynamics of film spectatorship, it nevertheless has a profound effect on the look of every commercially produced film, “touching” everything a viewer sees, even if not in a way that can be readily recognized.

The China Girl is at the heart of this book but at the margins of film—literally, the head or tail leader of a reel. Sometimes called a “girl head,” the China Girl appears within the material construction of film, and not at the level of the projected image (unless by an error in the projection booth, or as part of a deliberately reflexive strategy in experimental film). As I discuss in chapter 1, the China Girl has been an enduring, if mostly imperceptible, figure in film history. On a conceptual level, it exposes the gap between the surface appearance of a film and the complex orchestration of its materiality in terms of gender, labor, and industry. It is the opposite of the women who appear onscreen: it is not a figure in film, but one used for film. In other words, it shows how the functioning of the film laboratory requires for it to be understood only as material, and never a person in the sense of its leading lady counterparts. The anonymity of China Girl models also indicates how the woman’s vanishing into sheer materiality is necessary to the transformation of her into an instrument fundamental to the operation of the film laboratory.

In a lifetime of watching movies, it’s likely that I had glimpsed dozens of such images before I fully recognized what I had been seeing. Any time a projectionist fails to switch over a film reel at the appointed time, allowing the end of the reel to run out, the canny moviegoer can catch a few frames of a China Girl. Whenever this happened, I failed to take notice. Even when I worked as a student projectionist, regularly rewinding reels, checking prints, and repairing broken splices, I never stopped to consider the women whose images passed through my hands.

It was not until I saw Morgan Fisher’s Standard Gauge (1984), that I became aware of the China Girl figure. Fisher’s film is organized as a kind of show-and-tell of various film scraps he had collected working in stock footage libraries and as an editor on low-budget features. Winding strips of 35 mm film over a lightbox, Fisher pauses on several examples of China Girls to comment on them. He explains their function in film laboratories, where they are crucial to calibrating a film’s final appearance, especially the norms for skin tones. Little is known about their provenance: who the models were, and how, in the United States at least, these women came to be called “China Girls.” Though Fisher describes the China Girl as a “figure who in some quarters is emblematic, almost, of film itself,” the smiling women in the film leader remain largely enigmatic.

Curious about the China Girl, and finding little historical information about the figure, I began to speak to laboratory technicians. At DuArt, in New York, shortly before the closing of their film department, Steve Blakely showed me how the China Girl was used in the lab to gauge everything from the composition of chemical baths to the functioning of developing machines. In these many uses, the woman’s face, in its ubiquity and repetition, seemed to disappear from the image. Blakely explained how a technician was trained to look at details in the image rather than the face itself. The owner of this particular face, I learned after some digging, was Lili Young, the then girlfriend (and later wife) of Bob Young, son of one of DuArt’s founders. In the laboratory, Lili had become less a recognizable person than an image and, as a technical tool, only image. In contrast to the many faces that appear onscreen, that of a China Girl disappears twice over: first as a woman kept offscreen, and second as a body transformed into material (numeric values for color, shading, density, and the like) and thereby instrumentalized in the film laboratory.

At this point, a note on terminology. Against the more genteel sound of “China Girl,” “girl head” is bluntly vulgar in its suggestion of flesh and material. It is also a more straightforward term for what it describes. “China Girl,” though more commonly used, embeds a history of misdirection. The term almost carelessly misnames its object, since the China Girl in the Hollywood film industry is almost always white, and rarely Chinese or Asian. There is a long tradition of deliberately miscasting women who are deemed other, whether racialized, sexualized, or more overtly monstrous, and thereby threatening to the implied male hero, artist, filmmaker, or technician. Such miscasting—everyone will have their “favorite” instance—mine is Anne Baxter as Nefretiri in The Ten Commandments (1956)—is a familiar problem of cinematic representation. The term China Girl misleadingly conjures up such a “character,” instead of a crudely functional body, as if to recruit the reference image into the film proper. We should resist narrativizing the China Girl as a kind of secret little movie. Throughout this book, I use the term China Girl for the sake of recognizability, even if girl head more accurately describes the object. I do so under some protest, as China Girl is somehow more sanitizing, romanticizing, and more offensive, all at once. Girl head, meanwhile, lays bare the device, and perhaps for that reason it has not caught on as widely.

It would be easy to cast the China Girl as an emblem of the repressed eroticism of film. There is something inherently pornographic about a woman, conventionally attractive by design, who is elaborately posed but not meant to be so much as glimpsed by a viewer. It is telling that the “Lena,” the equivalent reference image for digital image compression standards, is taken from a 1972 Playboy magazine cover. Such a repressed eroticism is suggested in Bruce Conner’s remarks in the epigraph. Speaking in a post-screening discussion at the 1984 Flaherty Seminar, Conner is responding to a question about the sudden appearance of a woman rolling down her stocking in his found-footage classic A Movie (1958) (fig. 1). Without naming it specifically, Conner describes the way a viewer might encounter a China Girl, an image of a woman who is “kept hidden but is there.” He affirms that this play of a woman’s presence and absence is “an implicit part of the movies,” and this suggests that there is a central libidinal logic that undergirds narrative film. This is a view maintained by many film theorists, including André Bazin: as he wrote in 1957, cinema’s “eroticism is … a basic ingredient … a major, a specific, and even perhaps an essential one.”⁵ There is a prurient tinge to Conner’s remarks: the woman that appears corresponds to “hidden obsessions” and an erotic logic under the Production Code where, because sex could only be implied, it had the effect of being seemingly everywhere. Conner’s China Girl is not coincidentally engaged in a striptease, which, by withholding what is desired, the forbidden element, only increases the desire to see it.⁶

Figure 1. A Movie (Bruce Conner, 1958). Courtesy of Conner Family Trust.

There is another way to read Conner’s remark that a woman’s body, present but concealed, is inherent to film. Apart from the trope of repressed eroticism discussed earlier, the instance of the China Girl alerts us to a deeper structure by which the things we seen in film rest on a foundation of what is unseen. In the case of the China Girl, the hidden element is the medium’s materiality, and, as I contend, a gendered dimension that attends it.

As the China Girl shows, the set of technical and material conditions for the image onscreen already includes explicitly gendered bodies, before anyone even steps in front of the camera. This runs contrary to the expectation set up by representational analysis. The film production process is usually taken to sit safely apart from issues of representation, the gaze, or embodiment. It is an area governed by technicians, engineers, mechanics, clerks, and other professionals that would seem to adhere to objective, rational protocols. The China Girl is a non- or pre-representational image in the sense that the model is not playing a character or scene in any traditional sense of the profilmic. As a result, it imports gender into the film image before representation ever occurs. This book argues that the material aspects of the filmstrip are gendered, even if they do not immediately present that way. The China Girl provides a crucial link between the idealized appearance of bodies onscreen and the laboratory procedures and labor by which this ideal is maintained, namely through the concealment and literal debasement of the woman’s body. Along with the other figures I examine in this book, it demonstrates that the material supports of film are less neutrally functional and more ideologically freighted than they otherwise appear.

Girl Head tracks the materializations of the female body in and through the nonrepresentational spaces of film production. This addresses an important epistemological point raised by Conner: how can we observe, much less learn anything about, the China Girl if it is so difficult to see? To move beyond the spaces of representation, as this book does, is in large part a conceptual intervention. I mentioned previously the limitation of a feminist critique predicated solely on representation, though, to be sure, much important feminist work in film studies addresses matters apart from representation: industry histories, semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxist approaches to filmic mass production and consumption, and cultural studies work on female spectatorship and alternative public spheres.⁷ Among these approaches, there persists a conceptual limitation where it concerns the status of the female body. While these scholars have crucially broadened feminist film studies to include more than merely what is visible onscreen, one effect has been to cede the female body to the domain of the mimetic image as a topic confined to representational approaches. As I discuss shortly, insofar as a nonrepresentational focus of materialist histories of film and media is salutary, such approaches also do not admit of a specifically gendered and bodily materiality. Girl Head, by contrast, maintains a concept of materiality in which sexual and racial differences are intrinsically inscribed. This means that the female body is transformed—sometimes symbolically, sometimes also literally—into material to be used in film production practices. The motivations for and significant costs resulting from this process of materialization are addressed in the experimental and feminist works discussed in each chapter.

In areas both technical and theoretical, this book locates instances of the material exclusion of women’s bodies from the images that appear onscreen. These various girl heads are figures that never disappear entirely, though they require some effort to be fully seen. Appearance, in this sense, is not only a matter of how one looks but the conditions by which an image can be seen. This book aims to restore a fuller picture of what film production beneath the surface appearance of representation has been. The emphasis is necessarily historical: it addresses a twentieth-century moment in which both the film medium and the category of woman were durable if culturally charged concepts in order to question anew the interrelationship between the two. In this way it also looks ahead to possibilities for a renegotiation of this relationship in a contemporary moment in which both terms have been profoundly destabilized, by digital media in the case of film and by queer and posthumanist approaches in the case of woman. In this way the woman’s body is necessarily tethered to the technics of moving-image reproducibility, and throughout the sites of production examined in this book, we will continually encounter it as a nonmimetic, denigrated, and disavowed means of production at the heart of film materiality.