off the materiality of the female body. For, in the production sites I am investigating, the body that film production is predicated upon, both as something to be utilized as functional material and also concealed as unwanted remainder, has been a woman’s. Rather than an accidental excess, it is an industrial material that was assembled along with the commercial product and simultaneously disassembled or undone—in Hitchcock’s scene, murdered. Thus materialized, the woman’s body is bound up in film’s material infrastructure. But it cannot appear as a component like any other. Instead, it must be concealed. The only way it can even appear is when it crops up out of place, like the momentary flash of China Girl leader visible when a reel is left to run out, unattended.
Methodology
Girl Head examines three sites of film production: the film laboratory, editing practices, and the film archive. I scrutinize each area in close, technical detail, with particular attention given to the orchestration of film production practices as they have developed historically. From there, I shift to a more speculative register to conceptualize the role of gender in the articulation of film materiality at each site. Each chapter concludes with a consideration of experimental and feminist films that critique, reclaim, or otherwise reorganize the logic of film production at its most material level.
I consider film as a material artifact, grounded in and historically shaped by processes of development, printing, projection, and storage. In its emphasis on sites of film production, this project shares much in common with a historical materialist strain of feminist film analysis and production studies. The former dates to the 1970s, with studies by Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe that located interpretive issues of “meaning production in textual analysis” within the “social and historical contexts” of film production, distribution, and exhibition.17 Recent work on media history, by Caetlin Benson-Allott, Michèle Martin, Lisa Nakamura, Lorna Roth, and others has continued this approach, examining new objects (e.g., video or social media) within their institutional and infrastructural contexts.18 The interdisciplinary field of production studies, especially the feminist scholarship of Julie D’Acci, Miranda J. Banks, Brooke Erin Duffy, and Elana Levine, has also taken up technical and historical issues of production—describing “producers, their locations, industries, and products”—in film and media, with methods taken from the social sciences, especially sociology, anthropology, and communications.19
Such studies tend to partition materiality (technical or institutional processes and support) from gender (woman as cultural actor or mediatized subject) and only later reconnect them, if at all. My approach differs in that I locate the gendering of film materiality in the filmstrip itself, as part of its internal negotiations and mediations. I neither begin from nor drive toward the empirical woman of social relations, such as the many female screenwriters, directors, producers, actors, editors, casting directors, costume designers, script-girls, and other film industrial workers that would be central in a historical materialist study. Nor do I take gender to proceed from a separate space to interact with technical apparatuses or infrastructure. Instead, I show how film materiality is itself gendered, meaning that it is inscribed with the character and associations of women at all levels of a film’s construction. The historical development of production practices shows that gender, as expressed through the uses of the woman’s body and yoked to film materiality, was itself appropriated as a means of production.
My approach emphasizes the interaction between the material of film and its social and cultural determinations. This is what distinguishes it from recent feminist scholarship on “new materialism.”20 In departing from social and linguistic determinants, new materialism offers significant queer and feminist potential in recognizing that matter, especially the body, is not only “passive stuff … raw, brute, or inert,” to be molded by culture.21 Rather, “matter, nature, life, production, and reproduction” have a substantial reality apart from discourse and subjective conceptualization.22 While this offers new spaces of inquiry to the body, rather than foreclosing it as a mere discursive construction, it is limiting for an analysis of a material and cultural artifact such as film. I approach cultural understandings of gender as effectively “baked into” the film, being inseparable determinants of film’s materiality. I propose that the filmstrip can be read for instances or clues of this gendered dynamic. Hence, this study proceeds from the imbrication of the social with the technical. Whereas new materialism assigns matter a prior autonomy not subordinated to culture, I affirm that film materiality is necessarily constituted by the cultural sphere. With the China Girl, for instance, the image’s use in quality control procedures to achieve the desired appearance for a film is deeply tied to the figure’s knot of racial and sexual ideologies. The China Girl image’s guise of an attractive white woman cannot be merely technical, nor can the figure be fully understood without considering its technical function in the film laboratory. As a device used to support a technical process, it marshals a sexist ideal of subservient, still, and silent women to ground a technical process. In effect, the China Girl requires women to submit to the authority of a process that seems able to control and contain them. The materiality particular to film therefore cannot fully withdraw into the precultural vitalist flux of new materialism’s definitions. Materiality is, rather, a stage upon which these cultural dynamics are enacted.
As a work about film materiality, Girl Head maintains an additional emphasis on the medium specificities of film as well as digital or “postcinematic” media. Again, contemporary avant-garde and moving-image art is instructive here, offering a crucial perspective on film at a moment of profound transformation, both in terms of its artistic and technological medium specificities. The idea and institution of film are becoming less stable for two reasons. First, in artistic terms, the medium of film is simultaneously being dissolved through digitized reproduction, hybridized in intermedial or mixed media work, and reified as sculptural objects or artifacts in the gallery. Second, film, along with many other technological media such as video, photography, and vinyl audio recordings, is undergoing a massive process of remediation, as all formats are translated, encoded, and broadly recirculated as compressed digital files. Experimental film affords a unique vantage to examine the changing historical configurations of film materiality and the shifting expressions of gender in and through the film object. Such works are not only explicitly critical of the production norms for film, but they also stage the material transformations of the moving image. Each chapter, then, tracks the shifting valences of the film “medium” in multiple configurations: historical, theoretical, and aesthetic.
The Disappearing Female Body
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.