that determine the terms of the China Girl’s liminal appearance.
Next, in chapter 2, I examine how in film editing, the act of excising the woman’s body as part of a technical procedure attends a longstanding, alternate history of surreptitious film editing. What I call escamontage, a portmanteau of escamonter (French for concealment or trick) and montage (the practice of constructing meaning through the assembly of discrete film fragments), is a formal practice whereby cuts are made without any apparent break in the framing. In distinction to classical editing style, which maintains a continuity of action across breaks in framing, escamontage pairs continuity of action with continuity of framing. I trace escamontage, and its accompaniment by a representational practice where the typically female body is the medium on which spectacular effects are performed, in three moments: the first, the development of the practice in Thomas Edison’s The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895); the second, its elaboration in classical Hollywood cinema with Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), and the third, its enmeshment with digital visual effects in David Fincher’s Gone Girl (2013). Against a historiographical understanding of invisible editing as a development of classical film style, and the tendency to relegate these barely noticeable cuts to the field of visual effects or to a history of “trick” films, I argue that escamontage constitutes its own lineage of invisible editing. I conclude with a reading of Jennifer Montgomery’s Transitional Objects (1999), a video that draws on the association of women with cutting by using the image of a woman being violently cut as the basis for a new editing practice.
In chapter 3, I engage with Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995), in which the motif of the missing woman appears in the guise of Gradiva, a character from William Jensen’s novella (1903) of the same name. At once a ghostly image and a presence evoked by a few, nonbodily, material traces, Gradiva motivates the construction of the archive, and, for Derrida, its eventual destruction. In omitting a key part of Jensen’s text, namely the moment when Gradiva’s “original,” the flesh-and-blood woman Zoë, appears, Derrida consigns the archive to a space of memory and haunting. This same Gradivan logic, where the body of the (living) woman is excluded from her chimerical image, adheres in several films that are pointedly about the film archive. Bill Morrison’s The Film of Her (1996), about the Library of Congress’s Paper Print Collection, reproduces the melancholic terms of Derrida’s Gradivan theory. Meanwhile, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996), about the Hollywood archive of a fictional Black lesbian actor, and Radha May’s When the Towel Drops, Vol. 1, Italy (2015), about the censorship clippings from postwar Italian cinema, offer feminist critiques of the gendered materiality on which they are predicated.
In each of these sites of production, the disappearing female body makes visible different technical and theoretical aspects. At times this body corresponds to the onscreen representation of a vanishing woman—implicitly in Mary, Queen of Scots or explicitly in Gone Girl—so that the hiding of the body is associated with a hidden edit (itself largely hidden within the history of film editing). The excised body serves as a figure for materiality in theoretical accounts or in technical ones. It is itself material incorporated into the production of film, a means of production. We might even speak of the woman’s body in the age of its technical reproducibility, since it is no longer strictly mimetic but a complex and disavowed component of production. Among the technical sites I visit in this book, this body is materialized as a reference image not intended for viewing, as what is spirited away in the earliest splices, and as the fragments upon which the film archive is built. It’s materialization is not an ontological claim, but a historical one. Hence, it is not the case that the woman’s body is essentially or even technically necessary to film production processes—this could well have unfolded differently. But, throughout the record of film as a historical practice, woman-as-material has been closely associated with the film image in both theoretical and technical procedures, in an entanglement that cannot be simply undone.
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