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 Hammer, Michelle Silva, Cécile Fontaine, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, Jamie Allen, and Mark Toscano (see chapter 1), Jennifer Montgomery (chapter 2), and Cheryl Dunye and Radha May (chapter 3).
To offer a preview of this approach, I read Lynn Hershman Leeson’s multimedia installation Room of One’s Own (1990–1993) as an alternative origin story for the art of film. In dialogue with Foster, Mitchell, and Kracauer, Leeson offers a compelling feminist restaging of the Medusa scene, and she brings to the surface what was repressed in their accounts, namely the violence inherent in the viewer’s look. In this work, film begins not by the beheading and brandishing of the gorgoneion, but in the fascination and capturing of Perseus’s gaze.
The work is set up as a small peephole box that, through a small periscope, reveals a miniature bedroom, like that of a dollhouse (fig. 6). It is a woman’s room, as the title’s reference to Virginia Woolf indicates, with a four-poster bed, a television, and, in various iterations, a telephone and clothing on the floor. It is also a filmmaker’s room, as suggested by the tiny director’s chair that is sometimes there.
The scene is Medusan. The viewer is positioned as Perseus, the one privileged with the look, and he (as a stand-in for any viewer) enters the woman’s lair apparently undetected, through a viewfinder. He looks into the small, deep space. Directly in front of him, he sees a video projected onto the back wall of the bedroom. Depending on when in the loop he enters, he might hear a voice calling out, “Don’t look at me.” This recalls the prohibitions against looking at Medusa, and like the many heroes that have come before him, he looks further. He pans from the bed on one side to the television on the other. To his surprise, the viewer finds his own eye peering back at him in the monitor, isolated and enlarged.
A Room of One’s Own models a strange kind of cinema, one in which the roles of observer and observed have been reversed. Its structure is rooted in cinema: the darkened chamber of the box was designed with Edison’s kinetoscope viewer in mind, and, among the videos projected on the back wall, we see a woman pointing a gun at the camera in the manner of the iconic shot from The Great Train Robbery (1903).53 Leeson’s device leads the viewer to expect the physical body of the woman who inhabits this tiny room and frustrates this expectation by replacing it with the live video-feed image of the viewer’s own eye in extreme close-up. Instead of Kracauer’s vision of a courageous Perseus daring to confront the Medusan images onscreen, here the viewer is the one that is hailed, and implicitly viewed, by an unseen woman. She is no longer there to be looked at—insofar as she is invisible—and instead, through her admonition against looking at her, she can presumably see the viewer searching for her. Meanwhile, he is caught in his own gaze, staring at an uncanny, isolated eye that seems to belong to another.
Figure 6. Lynn Hershman Leeson, Room of One’s Own (1990–1993). Image copyright Lynn Hershman Leeson. Courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York City.
Leeson’s miniature cinema inherits many of the conventions of the mythical scene. In endowing this Medusa, herself a filmmaker, with the power to look, she dismantles the screen of projection. With this critical insight, Leeson reconstructs the terms of gender and materiality upon which aesthetic theories about Medusa have relied. The woman’s body is still absent, but in this case it has explicitly disappeared, since it is not there as the viewer might expect. Unlike the body in Foster, Mitchell, and Kracauer’s accounts, this is an absence that is meant to be noted as something that has purposefully gone missing on its own accord. Furthermore, its replacement by the trapping of the viewer’s own gaze places and literally frames looking at the center of the work: no longer is it about what the viewer is privileged to see, as in Bruce Conner’s suggestion of a striptease, but the limits of his looking. By catching the viewer’s gaze and making it the object of analysis, A Room of One’s Own exposes his naked desire to see and effectively control the image. Medusa’s body has once again disappeared, because Perseus failed to capture her.
This book problematizes many cinematic gazes, including those of spectators, critics, and filmmakers, in order to better track the motif of the disappearing female body. As A Room of One’s Own demonstrates, such gazes are inadequately equipped for seeing where or how the woman vanishes; the tendency is to get trapped in themselves. Girl Head, then, looks askance at sites of material production to search for traces of the disappeared female body, whether materialized as a means of production, or dematerialized as it enters the realm of pure image. All the while, I attend to the historical specificity of these film production practices by noting the inseparable social attitudes that underlie their development, namely the anxieties concerning women’s social and sexual status. Each chapter addresses a different site of production:
First, in chapter 1, I show how in the film laboratory, China Girl reference images used in maintaining ideal appearance are literally marginalized on the ends of the filmstrip. Translated into numeric values for color, density, and especially the calibration of skin tones, their bodies are instrumentalized for quality control procedures. These women are rendered as so much industrial material embedded in the photochemistry of film. In order for this to happen, the woman’s body is dematerialized and disappears, a process that correlates to the production of the film image. While the laboratory uses of the China Girl
