Hidden Materialities

Abstract

Hidden Materialities Michele Pierson (bio) Genevieve Yue. Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. 185 pages. $110.00 cloth. $32.00 paperback. While it is important to place Genevieve Yue’s Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality within a history of feminist scholarship that has been less concerned with matters of cinematic representation than with investigation of the circumstances in which films get made and circulated, this book also strikes out in exciting new directions. Feminist film and media scholars working in the burgeoning field of production studies have expanded on early studies of women’s roles in the film and television industries by turning their attention to both production at the margins of these industries and alternative production communities. Yue makes an important distinction between these studies and her own interest in film production when she writes that “I neither begin from nor drive toward the empirical woman of social relations, such as the many female screenwriters, directors, producers, actors, editors, casting directors, costume designers, script-girls, and other film industrial workers that would be central in a historical materialist study” (14). Yue’s eye is instead on women’s hidden roles in film production processes, technical processes that have tended thus far to escape feminist notice. Take “Girl Head” in the book’s title. We learn that this is another term for “China Girl,” a reference image found from [End Page 109] the mid to late 1920s onward in commercially produced films. For most of the twentieth century a China Girl image, invariably featuring an attractive white woman, was used by laboratory technicians to calibrate color, tonal density, and the overall aesthetic appearance of a film. For “every leading lady, there is,” Yue observes, “a corresponding leader lady laboring behind the scenes” (59). The central argument and provocation of Girl Head is that cultural understandings of gender are “baked into” film production practices and processes at every stage in the life of a film (14). Most feminist studies of media production tend, as Yue puts it, “to partition materiality (technical or institutional processes and support) from gender (woman as cultural actor or mediatized subject), and only later reconnect them, if at all” (14). The China Girl is a technical image, an aide to quality control in the making and duplicating of 35mm and 16mm film prints. There is nothing about this process, however, that mandates that the reference image be a woman. In Girl Head, then, materiality refers first to objects and processes (and we are given to understand that digital film production is as much a material practice and process in these terms as analog film production). Second, materiality is theorized in relationship to the virtual (and here Yue draws on Anne Friedberg’s thinking about the virtual in The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft).1 The virtual refers to the realm of image and appearance. Representation and appearance are related in this theoretical framework but not coextensive. Rather than starting with representation, Girl Head begins by inquiring into the nature of appearance. In Yue’s words, “Appearance, in this sense, is not only a matter of how one looks but the conditions by which an image can be seen. This book aims to restore a fuller picture of what film production beneath the surface appearance of representation has been” (8). Each of this book’s three case studies is organized around investigation of the relationship between materiality and appearance. Each takes a particular production matrix as its focus: the practice of using images of women as reference images in the film laboratory, editing practices that blur the distinction between special or visual effects and editing, and the historical and theoretical premises for the constitution of the film archive. The first two case studies focus on material processes that determine the look and feel of a film but also go undetected by viewers. In all three, a woman’s body is revealed to have been suppressed—sometimes through “violent excision” and sometimes just by being overlooked or forgotten. The balance between historical research and theoretical speculation shifts from one case study to the next. The first offers an [End Page 110...