China Girls in the Film Laboratory

In the film laboratory, China Girl reference images used in maintaining ideal appearance are literally marginalized on the ends of the filmstrip. Translated into numeric values, the bodies of China Girl models are instrumentalized for quality control procedures, transformed into industrial material embedded in the photochemistry of film. For this to happen, the woman’s body is first dematerialized and then disappears, a process that correlates to the production of the film image. While the laboratory uses of the China Girl are assumed to be rational and objective, this chapter shows that they are often more ideological than they are taken to be. The chapter concludes with a survey of experimental films that foreground the China Girl, including films that reproduce the marginalization of the figure or, from a feminist perspective, critique the laboratory procedures that determine the terms of the China Girl’s liminal appearance.

Gone Girls of Escamontage

Escamontage designates the coincidence of a subtle cut in film, made without an apparent break in framing, with the disappearance of a woman’s body. This chapter proposes that escamontage constitutes its own form of editing in which concealment is expressed as a formal element and thematic principle. The history of escamontage is conveyed in three key moments: first, its initial articulation in early cinema with Thomas Edison’s The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895); its development in classical Hollywood cinema with Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948); and finally, its realization in contemporary digital filmmaking with David Fincher’s Gone Girl (2014).

Afterword

Reflects on Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck” and its resonance with themes from the present book, Girl Head.

Gradivan Footsteps in the Film Archive

In Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995), the motif of the missing woman appears in the guise of Gradiva, a character from William Jensen’s novella (1903) of the same name. At once a ghostly image and a presence evoked by a few material traces, Gradiva motivates the construction of the archive and, for Derrida, its eventual destruction. Yet in omitting a key part of Jensen’s text, namely the flesh-and-blood woman Zoë, Derrida consigns the archive to a space of haunting. This Gradivan logic, where the body of the living woman is excluded from her chimerical image, adheres in several films that are pointedly about the film archive. Bill Morrison’s The Film of Her (1996) reproduces the melancholic terms of Derrida’s Gradivan theory, while Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996) and Radha May’s When the Towel Drops, Volume 1, Italy (2015) offer feminist critiques of the gendered materiality on which it is predicated.