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.
Materiality
The material processes of film production would seem to be neutral and apolitical. Against these presumptions, this book aims to demonstrate how an operative concept of gender has been embedded in a history of film materiality. This is to say that film material practices have been understood and manipulated according to social attitudes about gender.
I take materiality to mean the physical, tangible qualities of an object. With film objects, materiality designates the filmstrip plus the conditions and technical basis of production—including the complex institutional support for the shooting, developing, processing, exhibition, and storing of film artifacts. My use of materiality considers how a filmstrip is shaped by production processes that themselves have histories. My focus on production processes, meanwhile, is distinguished from production histories of films, which privilege human agents. A production history might sketch the biographies of the director and lead actors, include behind-the-scenes anecdotes from crew members, and survey trade publications for audience and critical reception. My approach, by contrast, emphasizes material forms and technical and industrial developments. A history of quality control methods in film laboratories does not exclude human agents, but counts the work of engineers, scientists, and laboratory technicians among the industrial conditions, broader cultural attitudes, and other factors that give these practices their particular shape. A production history, on the other hand, is interested in process only insofar as it produced the film in question. By contrast, I use materiality to signal an inquiry into process itself. Furthermore, because these processes are always evolving, what constitutes film materiality is also subject to change. This is especially pronounced in the technological transformations of the moving image brought about by digital cinematography, postproduction, exhibition, and storage. The film object is never stable and instead possesses its own history shaped by cultural, social, and technological factors. As I will show, gender is one such factor, and it is inseparable from the processes that go into the making of a film.
Generally speaking, materiality gets opposed to immateriality. In film studies, the latter frequently manifests in textual analyses that treat films solely as semiotic assemblages, or in methods that privilege cinema’s more evanescent aspects, including the critique of the projection apparatus in Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni and conceptual works that emphasize the immaterial beam of light, as in Anthony McCall’s “solid light sculptures.” In the specific context of media studies, the immaterial is often described as or conflated with the virtual. Anne Friedberg provides a useful genealogy of the latter term, extending it beyond the contemporary association of the term with digital technologies, as with “virtual reality.”8 By tracing its meanings in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century optical research and late nineteenth-century philosophical discourse, she demonstrates how the virtual can represent materiality but not in exact correspondence: