Girl Head - Genevieve Yue

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to distinguish between any representation or appearance (whether optically, technologically, or artisanally produced) that appears “functionally or effectively but not formally” of the same materiality as what it represents. Virtual images have a materiality and a reality but of a different kind, a second-order materiality, liminally immaterial … the virtuality of the image does not imply direct mimesis, but a transfer—more like metaphor—from one plane of meaning and appearance to another.9

      Among its various traits, Friedberg notes the virtual’s “power of acting without the agency of matter.”10 The virtual is opposed to the material because it lacks physical substance. Friedberg speculates that Gilles Deleuze, in his influential philosophy of cinema, derived his own use of “virtuality” through his reading of the work of Henri Bergson, for whom virtual designates the immaterial quality of memory.11 Meanwhile, the virtual generally looks like the material. It connotes representation as well as substitution, because the physical basis of materiality is absent. It is a “transfer … from one plane of meaning and appearance to another.”12 The virtual transposes the physical world onto the field of representation. A virtual image thereby conjures an absent presence by resembling it in another form.13

      This notion of the virtual alerts us to how film materiality is distinct from other artistic media. In the case of sculpture, our experience of it as a work of art involves its total physical presence. The artwork is identical to the material it is composed of: bronze, marble, wax, and so on. The same is true of painting, music, and dance. In these media, the artwork’s physical composition corresponds to the visual experience of the work: a bronze sculpture is and will appear to the viewer as a bronze cast. Yet with film, the moving image is not material but virtual, as Friedberg indicates. The materiality of the filmstrip does not resemble the image that is projected onscreen. A film reel, in the absence of a projector, is not yet a film. To lay a hand on the material being of, say, Rodin’s Monument to Balzac (1898), just means touching the artwork itself. Meanwhile, the material being of, say, The Wizard of Oz (1939) will not be experienced as the artwork The Wizard of Oz. At most there is an indexical correspondence between the two. To use the language of Peircean semiotics, film material is non-iconic.14 A complex translation is required to turn a film reel into a projected moving image, just as one cannot hold one’s ear up to a vinyl record and hear music.

      Theories of film realism already deploy their own concepts of materiality, and here I wish to distinguish my emphasis on the materiality of the filmstrip from those that are anchored in the mimetic capacities of the cinematographic camera. As I will discuss below, Siegfried Kracauer’s theory of material evidence affirms the potency of the world as recorded by film. He argues that this anchoring in material reality is unique to film and places the viewer in closer proximity than would be possible in other media forms. My focus is different; rather than reality in film (like Kracauer), I take up the reality of film material as it is organized in historically specific forms and processes.

      The distinction between material filmstrip and immaterial image allows me to formulate a complication illustrated in the China Girl example. Though undoubtedly the China Girl is an image, it does not partake of the same visual and spectatorial economy as an image onscreen. Instead, the image of the China Girl model is itself a means of production. It is nonmimetic in that it does not look like anything proper to the film, and it is also nonrepresentational in that the China Girl image possesses no semantic value. It remains tethered to the filmstrip only as a vestige of an earlier photochemical analysis. It is not meant to signify anything beyond its use for quality control procedures, and yet in the unchanging convention of the image of a female face, it cannot help but signify.

      Why is gender foregrounded in this figure’s name and many manifestations? As I discuss in chapter 1, there is nothing that technically requires the China Girl to be a woman. Yet its appearance as such has been remarkably durable, even persisting in largely unaltered form during the tumultuous transition from analog to digital technologies and the transformed material basis of each. Film production cultures are developed and structured according to the broader social attitudes that circulate around them, and their frequently vernacular practices are often passively transmitted and thereby preserved. Film production practices, as they have constituted the specific materiality of film (an unusually malleable and manipulatable material), have been inseparable from gender and the notion of materiality built into our concept of gender.15 Following detailed investigations of the book’s three production sites, each chapter describes how film material is gendered according to the affordances of each site.

      This gendering of film materiality occurs in two steps that can be distinguished in theory. First, I draw an analogy between the material of the woman’s body and the material constitution of the filmstrip. The woman’s image (typically her face) is allied with the immaterial image, then cut off from the material dimension of the filmstrip, related to the physical matter of the woman’s body (her flesh). These separations, or what amounts to a conceptual decapitation, are formulated differently in each chapter, though they all involve a set of opposed pairs: face as distinct from flesh or head as separated from the rest of the body. In each of the book’s areas of film production I locate a persistent axis that divides material-body from virtual-image.

      Second, the material-body once severed is repressed or concealed in the expression of the virtual-image. The gendered material dimension thereby disappears into the projected, immaterial one. Not only is the body-as-material engaged in production processes lopped off in favor of the image of the face produced and screened, but the sublimation of the woman’s body corresponds to the forgetting of the image’s subtending materiality. I show that gender has been structurally immanent in those processes of a film’s construction where it seemed, whether through neglect or omission, to be bracketed.

      Alfred Hitchcock offers an unlikely account of how to locate the body within film production as a technical process. In his extensive 1962 interview with François Truffaut, he recounted (via a female translator, Helen Scott, who herself vanishes from the interview transcript) a scene he had envisioned but never shot for North by Northwest (1959). In this striking scene, the protagonists are in an auto factory, and behind them a car is being assembled. The audience, who is paying attention to the foreground conversation, is shocked to see, just as the car is completed, a body tumble out.

      I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers as they walk along the assembly line. They might, for instance, be talking about one of the foremen. Behind them a car is being assembled, piece by piece. Finally, the car they’ve seen being put together from a simple nut and bolt is complete, with gas and oil, and all ready to drive off the line. The two men look at it and say, “Isn’t it wonderful!” Then they open the door to the car and out drops a corpse!16

      I argue that this missing scene is analogous to the production of a film. Picture a film going through the steps of being constructed and assembled. Just as Hitchcock’s car is built by joining “nut and bolt,” so a film is put together shot by shot. Both the production of the car and this continuous chain of images roll out at an industrially standardized rate. The whole process is a transparent spectacle, laid out in a long take, and the audience marvels as much at the finished product as at the seamless background efficiency of the technical process. Like a magic trick, everything occurs in seemingly full view.

      Then we discover a further trick, a horrible rabbit pulled out of the hat: a body falls out of the car, somehow unseen until now. Somewhere within the pristine efficiency of the industrial process, the body was incorporated without being noticed as part of the official, exhibited process. While we looked on, oblivious, the body was simultaneously produced—introduced as another component of the finished production; hidden—being the one part we never saw bolted on; and left outside—as an industrial accident, a remainder, or just human remains.

      Hitchcock’s unshot scene characterizes the process of film production as a staging of visible and invisible elements. For the purposes of our analogy, if we imagine a woman’s body as the initially hidden and then revealed output of the industrial process, then

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