Girl Head. Genevieve Yue
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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.