Girl Head. Genevieve Yue
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the patriarchal logic by which early trick films involved male magicians performing often gruesome acts on female bodies (“the rhetoric of magic … constitutes a complex drama of male-female relations”23) and revises the history of magic films along feminist lines, reading an envy of female reproductive capabilities into the actions of male magicians and expanding the historical record to include films featuring female magicians.
Such a restorative method is predicated on the assumption that women have been largely absent in film history. Jane Gaines traces this widely held view to 1973, when Claire Johnston asserted: “It is probably true to say that despite the enormous emphasis placed on woman as spectacle in the cinema, woman as woman is largely absent.”24 In Gaines’s historiographical analysis, she observes how this principle—the absence of “woman as woman”—has been especially productive for feminist film theorists. For feminist historians, meanwhile, the evidence of the hundreds of women who directed, wrote screenplays, ran studios, edited, acted, and otherwise participated at all levels of the film industry in its early decades came to refute this supposedly fundamental absence.
Although the putative absence of women from film history has been contested for decades by a steady supply of counterevidence, the assertion of their neglected or forgotten presence in various aspects of filmmaking remains a central issue in feminist scholarship. My concern is that this presence is representational in its basis—the same logic of diversity and inclusion we find in the topic of casting and the question of “whose stories” get to be told. In the Feminist Media Histories genealogy mentioned earlier, Maggie Hennefeld warns of the “hazards of historical amnesia,”25 while in the inaugural issue of the same journal, Shelley Stamp cautions against casting women “as interesting marginalia in someone else’s story.”26 Hennefeld calls for feminist histories that offer “new information [with] conceptual invention.” Her proposal is recuperative in intent, and it also flirts with a positivist method in its affirmation of feminist research that “[inserts] these lost or sidetracked histories into the center of cultural discourse and social debate.”27
One example of the “conceptual invention” Hennefeld advocates is Karen Redrobe’s Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism (2003). (I examine Redrobe’s argument in more depth in chapter 2). The book tracks its titular motif across a wide range of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual culture objects, all of which could be considered proto- or para-cinematic, to express how anxieties about gender, sexuality, and “excess” bodies were bound up with fears around film’s reproductive capacities.28 As a study that locates instances of resistance and critique within an oppressive apparatus otherwise oriented toward the death and disappearance of women, its aim of restoring female presence to the historical record is not far from Fischer’s much earlier essay, even if its methods are more nuanced and deeply researched. Redrobe’s vanishing/presence relation is still tied to representation, because she is examining spectacular feats of vanishing, out in the open, as in a magic trick. I am interested, however, in the absconding of bodies that takes place as it were offstage, in the spaces of film material production. The vanishing of the China Girl into its industrial functionality is not advertised on any marquee.
In each of my case studies, the presence of a woman might seem incidental, negligible, or marginal: the split-second appearance of China Girl leader, the early cinema association of women’s bodies with editorial manipulation, and the fables that haunt the dusty corners of the film archive. In fact, the woman might not be registered at all, much less her vanishing. This is largely because the objects of my analysis are found below representation, in technical procedures that would seem to simultaneously rely on and also disavow the materialization of the woman’s body. Gender—and this is the burden of my argument—is not incidental but critical to these sites of production.
If feminist critics have tended to approach the disappearing woman’s body in a positivist sense, in terms of an absence or presence in film history, an important group of aesthetic theorists situate the disappearing woman’s body at the center of art and film production. To be more precise, their theories of art and film production are complicit in that disappearance. The critics in this vein take up the mythological figure of Medusa in art history, a figure that many have used to account for the powers and dangers of the aesthetic. Hal Foster, W. J. T. Mitchell, and especially Siegfried Kracauer emphasize Medusa’s severed and weaponized head—what becomes the gorgoneion—to provide accounts of the dangers and potentially transformative powers of art.29 None mention her discarded body. With this important omission, they miss the violence in the removal of her body and, because of this, perpetuate their own form of exclusion. I turn now to these theories in some detail because they seem to me to enact—at a sophisticated conceptual level—the dialectic of the woman’s body in image production, figuring it as a necessary material substrate that is ultimately negated. As a counterpoint, I show how its absence, and the further denial of its violent remainder, structure their claims.
The myth of Medusa involves two instances of image-making: the sculptures that Medusa’s gaze makes out of mortal men by turning them into stone, and, after Perseus arrives, his proto-cinematographic “framing” of Medusa’s reflected image in his shield. For this reason, Medusa has been frequently made into a figure for the artistic image as such. Specifically, it is the gorgoneion, the head transformed into the image of Medusa’s face with its petrifying glance, that has been a common motif in the visual arts and literature since antiquity (fig. 2). It would therefore be inaccurate to describe this face as only female, or as having a recognizable gender at all. This is no ordinary face, but one that expresses a range of contradictory characteristics: both male and female, young and old, beautiful and ugly, human and monster. As Jean-Pierre Vernant notes, “all the categories in this face overlap in confusion and interfere with one another … [this] calls into question the rigorous distinctions among gods, men, and beasts, as well as those between different cosmic elements and levels.”30 The gorgoneion is a figure of “extreme alterity,” the sign and symbol of all possible otherness.31
Medusa thus becomes the occasion for a theory of the unassimilable in art. For Foster this means the Lacanian real in sculpture; for Mitchell, the ever-withdrawing object of ekphrasis; and for Kracauer, the traumatic horrors of history as confronted in film. As with the myth, her body exits their accounts as soon as her head is lopped off. The female body provides a structure to organize the work of unassimilable otherness, relocated from the limp, headless woman—arguably more real, withdrawn, and traumatic—onto the now-independent image function of the gorgoneion. In these interpretations of the Medusa myth, the missing body (qua unassimilable), rather than the ubiquitous gorgoneion, serves as the basis for theoretical accounts of the origins of art. Gender is thereby tethered to the materiality at the origins of the image, as the aporia of that origin.
The severed figure of Medusa in these aesthetic theories is organized along the same conceptual axis I describe for the film image generally. In the aesthetic outcome of the myth, the head of a living woman becomes the gorgoneion: a sheer image whose gender has been sublimated out of view. Her body, meanwhile, comprises the material remains that are cropped out, but nevertheless form the basis for these theoretical structures. The Medusan art theories demonstrate an underlying anxiety of women, couched in a conception of the material-image relationship. In each, Medusa becomes an invented rationale for a representational logic where femininity is a required condition for the aesthetic as such. As mythology become ideology, it is precisely this underlying anxiety concerning the material status of “woman” that animates these aesthetic theories. By foregrounding her genderless head, they are able to distance themselves from the violence visited upon Medusa’s body. Further, in order to maintain this generative power, the woman is reimagined as a gorgon, a monstrous figure who can then be killed, who must be killed, so that the gorgoneion can assume its status as pure image, an object untethered to the woman’s body.
Figure 2. Terracotta