Figure 5. A Flemish painter (previously attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci), Medusa’s Head (ca. 1600), The Uffizi Gallery.

      Like Foster and Mitchell, Kracauer uses the Medusa myth to tell a kind of origin story for the aesthetic as encounter or scene. Kracauer sets himself the problem of film’s specificity as a medium in this regard. For him, the mythical scene is analogous to the film-viewing experience: Medusa is the film image, a mediated real presented onscreen, while the film viewer has taken up the role of Perseus:

      The moral of the myth is, of course, that we do not, and cannot, see actual horrors because they paralyze us with blinding fear; and that we shall know what they look like only by watching images of them which reproduce their true appearance. These images have nothing in common with the artist’s imaginative rendering of an unseen dread but are in the nature of mirror reflections. Now of all the existing media the cinema alone holds up a mirror to nature. Hence our dependence on it for the reflection of happenings which would petrify us were we to encounter them in real life. The film screen is Athena’s polished shield.⁴⁷

      Kracauer, like Foster and Mitchell, ignores Medusa’s body after it is split from her head, and consequently his theory follows a now-predictable trajectory that divides gender and materiality on one hand and image and immateriality on the other. Yet his interpretation of the myth opens up other, productive possibilities for conceptualizing the relationship between gender and materiality for film.

      Kracauer’s film theory is materialist. Because film and photography possess a mimetic relationship with the world they register, they are closer to reality than other forms of art-making, and the images they produce thereby constitute a special category of encounter, tantamount to reality itself.⁴⁸ Kracauer bases much of his faith in cinema in its potential for integrating the real—the physical, material world of history—in a way that no other medium can achieve. Kracauer’s understanding of materiality is worth following, even if the materiality he sees in the image, namely, reality, has less to do with the materiality of the image, the filmstrip. The latter is the concern of this book.

      Kracauer’s emphasis on film materiality offers two new conceptions of Medusa that allow us to place her outside of the narrow characterization provided so far. First, she is a figure that possesses a whole body. Significantly, Kracauer aligns the film viewer with Perseus not as a victor, but as the hero in the moment before battle: “Perhaps Perseus’ greatest achievement was not to cut off Medusa’s head but to overcome his fears and look at its reflection in the shield.”⁴⁹ By implication, his use of the mirrored shield protects him from the living, fearsome Medusa as a whole body, which Canova and Shelley have already ushered out of sight. Though Medusa’s body is not mentioned in Kracauer’s text, we can assume that it is as yet untouched by Perseus’s blade. Second, her body is comprised of visceral material. In invoking Georges Franju’s slaughterhouse documentary The Blood of the Beasts (1949) as an example of “actual horrors” seen in the Medusan reflection, Kracauer presents an industrial repetition of Medusa’s decapitation: “puddles of blood spread on the floor while horse and cow are killed methodically; a saw dismembers animal bodies still warm with life; and there is the unfathomable shot of the calves’ heads being arranged.”⁵⁰ To be sure, the slaughtered cows are not gendered, but Kracauer has slyly reintroduced the body—still warm and palpable, and not a metaphysical remainder but an industrial factor—into the Medusa myth.⁵¹

      Kracauer also offers a new purpose for Medusa, which, more than it displays the aesthetic powers inherent in the artwork, provides therapeutic value. In this way, cinema is “redemptive” as the title of his book suggests. He deploys Medusa’s image to effectively heal an already traumatized spectator: “The mirror reflections of horror are an end in themselves. As such they beckon the spectator to take them in and thus incorporate into his memory the real face of things too dreadful to be beheld in reality.”⁵² By relocating the heroic act from Medusa’s decapitation to viewing her image in the shield, Kracauer unwittingly restores to Medusa her complete body. Even if he does not describe Medusa’s corporeality in terms of a gendered materiality, his theory offers the possibility of doing so. Strikingly, there is no violence necessary to his account. When he identifies the shield that bears Medusa’s image as belonging to Athena, he does not specify whether this is the shield on which the gorgoneion is mounted, or the one the goddess originally gave to Perseus to aid in his quest. This ambiguity is enough to wind back the progression of events in the myth and to end them, as he says, in the “mirror reflections of horror.” The body of the woman is left intact, and it is from this place, in the materialities of film, that I begin my investigation into the vanished female body.

      Looking Back

      In the previous section, I cautioned against feminist approaches that treat gender as something merely to be restored to the scholarly record as well aesthetic theories that address it as something forever retreating into an ontological remove. I maintain that gender is more than a lack or a structuring absence, and that it can be read in and through the processes that undergird the materiality of film. To this end, I offer in each chapter a reading of experimental moving-image works that offer a critical and feminist reflection on film materiality corresponding to the site of production being examined. I move to avant-garde film for two reasons. The first is its unique position in relation to industrial film production, which allows it room for critical analysis. Experimental film is often made using the same industrial facilities and production procedures as mainstream film, and it is distinct from more conventional filmmaking for the way that it often responds directly to the very cultural and technological conditions of its making. For instance, with the 1960s and 1970s structural and materialist investigations of the film apparatus, a significant number of avant-garde filmmakers interrogated the material basis or essence of the medium. These films offer a unique vantage for examining the film artifact in its nonmimetic capacities. As can be seen in the examination of film leader, subtitling errors, camera run-off, and other 35 mm film scraps in Standard Gauge, experimental film provides a perspective otherwise unavailable to a model of film analysis based on the interpretation of a film’s “textuality” and its representational strategies.

      The second reason is a prominent tradition within avant-garde film of using the filmmaker’s outsider status to critical advantage. This includes the aesthetic freedom in the heroic strain of Maya Deren or Stan Brakhage; anti-capitalist autonomy in the cooperative model used for distribution organizations such as the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York or artist-run film laboratories such as L’Abominable in France; or pointed political critique in the work of Yvonne Rainer, Harun Farocki, or Kevin Jerome Everson. This latter strain is of particular interest to Girl Head, and it includes a sizeable contingent of feminist filmmakers whose films often paralleled the theoretical work occurring in the academy: Chantal Akerman, Carolee Schneemann, Valie Export, Su Friedrich, Marjorie Keller, Bette Gordon, Barbara Hammer, Laura Mulvey, Abigail Child, Peggy Ahwesh, Beatrice Gibson, Laida Lertxundi, Aura Satz, and many others. Hence, each chapter contains readings of experimental works that construct something of a counter-history by exploring the potential for a reflexive, feminist restructuring of film materiality. These indicate multiple trajectories of critique and possibility in view of film material processes and their entanglements with gender: Barbara