GIRL HEAD
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020916856
First edition
for Anne Friedberg
Plates
1 BBC reference image
2 China Girl, circa early 1930s
3 Film still from Le Mépris
4 Kodachrome test strips
5 BKSTS reference leader picture
6 Film still from Film in Which There Appear …
7 Film still from Standard Gauge
8 Film still from Sanctus
9 Film still from China Girl (Fontaine)
10 Film still from Killing Lena
11 Film still from Releasing Human Energies
12 China Girl (Lili Young)
13 China Girl
Figures
1 A Movie (Bruce Conner, 1958)
2 Terracotta antefix with Medusa
3 Canova, Perseus with the Head of Medusa
4 Cellini, Perseus with the Head of Medusa
5 Flemish painter, Medusa’s Head
6 Leeson, Room of One’s Own
7 “The Group” ad, Kodak
8 Densitometer in Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers
9 The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots
10a Film still from Gone Girl: Opening
10b Film still from Gone Girl: Closing
11 Film still from Gone Girl
12 Film still from Transitional Objects
13 Film still from Transitional Objects
14 Freud’s study in Vienna
15 Film still from The Film of Her
16 Film still from The Watermelon Woman
17 Detail of 35mm film from Radha May, When the Towel Drops
18 Installation view of Radha May, When the Towel Drops
GIRL HEAD
I was always aware that there was a hidden aspect of filmmaking that was comparable to the hidden obsessions of people, that what you saw on the screen was a censored or acceptable social image but that something was hidden. I was thinking of what might happen if a movie were run, and as you were watching the numbered countdown leader, all of a sudden you saw something on the screen that you were not expecting to see, not supposed to see, an image that existed on a subliminal level in a lot of movies in the 1940s and 1950s, where there were sexual implications of all sorts without your ever seeing a naked woman in an erotic one-to-one relationship with the camera … [For A Movie] my idea at the time … was that that image of the naked woman was an image normally kept hidden but is there, an implicit part of the movies.
—BRUCE CONNER1
We are used to thinking critically about cinematic images of women. In particular, feminist film studies has influentially and persistently foregrounded the topic of representation—problematizing how (and whether) women are depicted onscreen. In the aftermath of groundbreaking works such as Claire Johnston’s “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema” (1973), Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape (1974), and Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), feminist film theorists in the mid- to late 1970s began an intensive and productive investigation into questions of gender and representation. The emphasis on representation, inspired by Mulvey’s notion of women’s “to-be-looked-at-ness,” or the overt presentation of women’s bodies as sexually desirable objects, resulted in a reexamination of women onscreen as well as a recuperation of underrecognized female figures within film history.2 Although much feminist inquiry has subsequently broadened to consider material, social, economic, and political structures, the field is still centrally concerned with issues of representation. As the editors of a 2018 survey of genealogies of feminist media studies in Feminist Media Histories affirm, the “fundamental questions of feminist media studies [are] … Who represents? and Who is represented?”3
This dominant approach in feminist analysis misses important historical developments that have occurred in sites of film production outside the scope of representation. A feminism oriented toward these
