Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality by Genevieve Yue (review)

By the time I reached the midpoint of Genevieve Yue's ambitious and original first book, Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality, I'd begun making a list of all the rolled heads. There was Mary Stuart's, tumbling off the executioner's block in Edison Studios' The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895); there were numerous heads of the Medusa, her severed neck impossibly smooth in Antonio Canova's nineteenth-century statue but a gory trail of tendons and blood in Benvenuto Cellini's sixteenth-century one. Lined up neatly on the page of my notebook, with bullet points like a row of spikes, these heads are significant for what they stand in for or exclude, namely, the women's bodies, chopped off and whisked away. In Edison's film, in fact, the Queen of Scots loses her body several times over. She's played by a male actor in a wig and a dress, whose substituting body is itself substituted by a dummy before the blade falls; even in the footage spliced out in service of this stop-motion illusion—some fourteen feet of film, as Yue notes—Mary's body is nowhere to be found.¹

In Girl Head, Yue piles up women's heads as, she argues, film does. Just as Medusa's head becomes the gorgoneion, her face petrified by the reflection of Perseus's shield, so, too, does film transform the matter of the body, specifically the female body, into an image cut from life. Separating head from body or face from flesh, this "conceptual decapitation," as Yue writes in the introduction, involves a willful forgetting of the materiality of film and its production processes.² The material substrata of film—whether analog or digital—and the embodied labor of the film set, laboratory, editing suite, and archive are excised in its projection as a "virtual image," an image that "conjures an absent presence by resembling it in another form."³ But the physical matter, bodily or otherwise, that conditions film in its virtuality is also concealed within it, like a corpse stuffed in a trunk. In classic feminist accounts of narrative cinema, such as Mary Ann Doane's 1982 essay "Film and the Masquerade," the absence of the objects that appear on the screen interact with film's "illusory sensory plenitude" to produce the "absolute and irrecoverable distance" necessary for a fetishistic gaze.⁴ In this view, cinema duplicates the measure of separation essential to the actions of the voyeur, actions that must always leave open the possibility of disavowal: I wasn't looking at you or It wasn't me looking at you. Yue's critical move is to turn away from issues of representation and the structure of the gaze—to leave the voyeurs where they are, fiddling alone in half-grown bushes—and instead to interpret film's absent-present bodies as figures for the gendered logic of film materiality itself. Feminist scholars have generally assumed the neutrality of film's technical procedures and practices, but Yue maintains that these procedures—and the concepts of materiality that undergird them—have been "understood and manipulated according to social attitudes about gender."⁵ Inseparable from the cultural sphere that produces it, film's materiality, she argues, "is itself gendered, meaning that it is inscribed with the character and associations of women at all levels of a film's construction."⁶

Yue argues that film production chops off heads and hides the bodies of its victims, women whose flesh is associated with the material of the filmstrip and is necessary to, but occluded in, the expression of film as virtual image. Across three key sites, which she examines in virtuosic technical detail and with deep theoretical insight, Yue tracks how film production is predicated on female bodies "as something to be utilized as functional material and also concealed as unwanted remainder."⁷ In the film laboratory—the location of...