Girl Head. Genevieve Yue

Woman (1996), about the Hollywood archive of a fictional Black lesbian actor, and Radha May’s When the Towel Drops, Vol. 1, Italy (2015), about the censorship clippings from postwar Italian cinema, offer feminist critiques of the gendered materiality on which they are predicated.

      In each of these sites of production, the disappearing female body makes visible different technical and theoretical aspects. At times this body corresponds to the onscreen representation of a vanishing woman—implicitly in Mary, Queen of Scots or explicitly in Gone Girl—so that the hiding of the body is associated with a hidden edit (itself largely hidden within the history of film editing). The excised body serves as a figure for materiality in theoretical accounts or in technical ones. It is itself material incorporated into the production of film, a means of production. We might even speak of the woman’s body in the age of its technical reproducibility, since it is no longer strictly mimetic but a complex and disavowed component of production. Among the technical sites I visit in this book, this body is materialized as a reference image not intended for viewing, as what is spirited away in the earliest splices, and as the fragments upon which the film archive is built. It’s materialization is not an ontological claim, but a historical one. Hence, it is not the case that the woman’s body is essentially or even technically necessary to film production processes—this could well have unfolded differently. But, throughout the record of film as a historical practice, woman-as-material has been closely associated with the film image in both theoretical and technical procedures, in an entanglement that cannot be simply undone.