Abstract
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, the bodies of China Girl models are instrumentalized for quality control procedures, transformed into industrial material embedded in the photochemistry of film. For this to happen, the woman’s body is first dematerialized and then disappears, a process that correlates to the production of the film image. While the laboratory uses of the China Girl are assumed to be rational and objective, this chapter shows that they are often more ideological than they are taken to be. The chapter concludes with a survey of experimental films that foreground the China Girl, including films that reproduce the marginalization of the figure or, from a feminist perspective, critique the laboratory procedures that determine the terms of the China Girl’s liminal appearance.
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