Body
Girl Head’s theoretical inquiry is organized around the motif of the disappearing female body, a symptom of the behind-the-scenes technical process where the woman’s body is subtly and symbolically materialized. This body is converted into material for and incorporated into the film production process as a reference image not intended for viewing, as excess footage trimmed out to conceal the evidence of cinematographic trickery, and as the material remnants that motivate the construction of an archive. The motif of the vanishing woman that attends these nonrepresentational disappearances is more than analogy, but a sign of the production processes that are otherwise hidden.
I analyze this motif to clarify how this vanishing, whether violent excision or mere overlooking, was made possible. In other words, I take the absent woman as a problematic to be dissected and better understood. This is different from other scholarly approaches that are also concerned with disappeared women which either try to fill gaps in the historical record, as with feminist scholarship concerned with restoring women to a history they have been written out of, or to further bury the traces of the woman’s body in the formulation of an aesthetic theory (in art history and film theory). Both approaches, paradoxically, produce additional occlusions, which I take up in my own theoretical inquiry.
The first approach is represented by feminist film historians working in a positivist mode to restore or recuperate women deemed missing from film history. This work follows a longstanding and largely correct view that many female figures have been excluded from the historical record. To redress this exclusion, feminist scholars since the 1970s have embarked on empirical research into women’s contributions to film history and production. Lucy Fischer’s “The Lady Vanishes: Women, Magic and the Movies” (1979) is exemplary in this regard. The essay both interrogates 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
