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Medusan optics: film, feminism, and the forbidden image

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Medusan optics: film, feminism, and the forbidden image

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MEDUSAN OPTICS:
FILM, FEMINISM, AND THE FORBIDDEN IMAGE

by

Genevieve Yue

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA-TELEVISION)

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Genevieve Yue
ii

In memory of Anne Friedberg
iii
Acknowledgments

This project would not have been possible without the numerous individuals and
institutions that so generously lent me their resources, expertise, and support. For my
research on the China girl, I am indebted to Steve Blakely, Susan Gallo, Lili Young,
Andy Young, Bob Smith, and Irwin Young at DuArt; Janos Pilenyi, Daniel DeVincent,
Adam Wangerin, Gina Carducci, and Ullie at Cineric; Vince Roth at Fotokem; Gail
Duncan at Kodak; Peter Symes at the Society of Motion Pictures & Television Engineers;
Ben Tucker and Paolo Usai at the George Eastman House; Ross Lipman and Trisha
Lendo at the UCLA Film and Television Archive; Liz Coffey and Haden Guest at the
Harvard Film Archive; Tim White and Andy Lampert at Anthology Film Archives;
David Corley at DSC Labs; and Dan Streible at New York University. My research was
enriched by films and insights from Phil Solomon, Michelle Silva, Morgan Fisher,
Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, Timoleon Wilkins, Jennifer Montgomery, Mark
Toscano, and Peggy Ahwesh. I thank Sara Saljoughi and Verena Mund for inviting me to
speak about China girls for the Interdisciplinary Graduate Group in Moving Image
Studies, University of Minnesota, in February 2012, and Jane Rhodes and Kathie Scott
for giving me the opportunity to present my work at the American Studies Colloquium,
Macalester College, in March 2012. My research further benefitted from the assistance of
Kim Tomadjoglou, Rosemary Hanes at the Library of Congress, and especially Leonard
DeGraaf and Karen Sloat-Olsen at the Thomas Edison National Historic Park.
I thank the University of Southern California’s Visual Studies Graduate
Certificate Program for funding summer research in 2010 and 2011. I received wonderful
iv
research and collegial support from NYU’s Center for Religion and Media during the
summer of 2011, particularly from Angela Zito and Adam Becker. The academic year
2011–2012 was supported by the Grayson and Judith Manning Endowed Fellowship at
the University of Southern California and the Consortium for Faculty Diversity Pre-
Doctoral Fellowship at Macalester College. Mac provided me with unparalleled scholarly
resources and I am grateful to Kathy Murray, Jane Rhodes, Leola Johnson, Clay
Steinman, John Kim, Martha LeDuc, and research assistants Yasmin Evans-Totoe and
Melissa Larson. The students in my seminar on gender, sexuality, and film helped me
navigate the project’s most snaky, medusan pathways.
I owe special thanks to my committee at USC, including Anne McKnight,
Richard Meyer, and especially Kara Keeling and David James, who have guided,
prodded, encouraged, and inspired me throughout this project. Linda Overholt, Kim
Greene, Alicia Cornish, and Bill Whittington gave countless hours of moral and practical
support for which I am especially grateful.
This project began as little more than a hunch, teased into a paper written for
Akira Mizuta Lippit’s film theory seminar during my first semester of graduate school,
and for the rest of my doctoral career it was cultivated, shaped, and refined under his
gentle and always patient care. Without him, quite simply, I would be lost. Among those
colleagues, mentors, and friends who have taught me not only how to think and write, but
how to see, I thank Tom Levin, Sandra Kogut, P. Adams Sitney, Greil Marcus, Tom
Gunning, James Cahill, Michael Koresky, Fiona Spring, Cameron Leggett, Yma Ray
Leggett, Allen Glass, Laida Lertxundi, David Gatten, Janie Geiser, Lewis Klahr, and
v
Anne Friedberg, in whose memory this dissertation is dedicated. And to Beatrice and
Vincent Yue, Patrick Yue, Molly McGarry, Heather Lukes, Emily Perez, Erica Levin,
Patty Ahn, Tim Holland, Nathan Schneider, Anjuli Raza Kolb, Walter Johnston,
Benjamin Young, Chase Smith, Taylor Black, Cole Akers, Sarah Kessler, Karen
Tongson, Brandon Best, Ann Neumann, and, yes, my little Tender Button—the rest, the
uncreated, belongs to you.
vi
Table of Contents

Dedication iI

Acknowledgments iiI

List of Figures vii

Abstract x

Introduction: The Fragment of an Uncreated Creature 1

Chapter One: The China Girl 52

Chapter Two: Troublesome Heads 119

Chapter Three: Hair Horror 161

Chapter Four: Sliced-Eye Vision 213

Conclusion: Eyes Without a Face 272

Bibliography 281
vii
List of Figures

Figure 1 Coin showing a gorgon, 411–356 BC, Greece 9

Figure 2 Relief plaque from the Heraion at Samos,
second half of the 7th century BCE 10

Figure 3 Caravaggio, Head of Medusa (c1598) 11

Figure 4 Antonio Canova, Perseus with the Head of Medusa
(1804–06) 12

Figure 5 Chris Burden, Medusa’s Head (1990) 12

Figure 6 A Flemish painter (previously attributed to Leonardo
Da Vinci), Medusa’s Head (ca. 1600) 14

Figure 7 Stills from Percy Jackson & the Olympians:
The Lightening Thief (dir. Chris Columbus, 2010) 17

Figure 8 René Magritte, La reproduction interdite (1937) 29

Figure 9 Transactions, SMPTE No. 17 (1–4 October 1923) 63

Figure 10 Test strips with handwriting by Leopold Godowsky
and Leopold Mannes, ca. early 1930s 70

Figure 11 BKSTS Reference Leader Picture in negative, 1970 72

Figure 12 BBC Test Card 61, 1978 74

Figure 13 Kodak LAD, ca. 1978 75

Figure 14 Kodak LAD currently in use, arranged on a lightbox 75

Figure 15 Puppet China girl, date and origin unknown 79

Figure 16 Lili Young, China girl at DuArt, ca. 1968 80

Figure 17 China girl, early 1930s 88

Figure 18 Mannequin as China girl, date and origin unknown 90

viii
Figure 19 Still from Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering,
Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc.
(dir. George Landow, 1965) 95

Figure 20 Still from Standard Gauge (dir. Morgan Fisher, 1984) 98

Figure 21 Christopher Williams, Kodak Three Point Reflection
Guide © 1968 Eastman Kodak Company, 1968
(Meiko smiling), Vancouver, B.C., 5 April 2005 100

Figure 22 Bruce Conner, Untitled (1954–1961) verso 101

Figure 23 Still from China Girls (dir. Michelle Silva, 2006) 103

Figure 24 Still from Sanctus (dir. Barbara Hammer, 1990) 106

Figure 25 Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, A Sourceful of
Secrets (2002), projection performance 107

Figure 26 Still from The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots
(dir. Alfred Clarke and Thomas Edison, 1895) 120

Figure 27 Benvenuto Cellini, Perseus with the
Head of Medusa (1545–54) 122

Figure 28 Still from Kayne West, “Monster”
(dir. Jake Nava, 2011) music video 123

Figure 29 Death mask of Mary Stuart at the Mary, Queen of Scots
House and Visitor Centre, Jedburgh, Scotland 134

Figure 30 Stills from Gold Diggers of 1935
(dir. Busby Berkeley, 1935) 147–148

Figure 31 Diane Arbus, The Headless Woman (1961) 151

Figure 32 Still from Ringu (dir. Nakata Hideo, 1998) 163

Figure 33 Still from Ringu 174

Figure 34 Hong Chun Zhang: a. Recording (2005)
and b. Power (2005) 183

Figure 35 Still from The Ring (dir. Gore Verbinski, 2002) 195
ix
Figure 36 Still from Ringu 202

Figure 37 Stills from Un chien andalou
(dir. Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, 1929) 215

Figure 38 Gabriel von Max, Der Anatom (1869) 226

Figure 39 Still from Un chien andalou 228

Figure 40 Mothlight (dir. Stan Brakhage, 1963) 229

Figure 41 Apollonius the son of Nestor, Belvedere Torso,
reproduction (2
nd
century BCE) 238

Figure 42 Menophantos, Aphrodite of Menophantos
(1
st
century BCE) 248

Figure 43 Dissected female figure engraved by Gaetano Petrioli
(after Pietro Berrettini da Cortona) (1741) 250

Figure 44 Stills from The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes
(dir. Stan Brakhage, 1971) 253

Figure 45 Hans Bellmer, La Poupée (The Doll) (1935) 258

Figure 46 Still from Transitional Objects
(dir. Jennifer Montgomery, 1999) 259

Figure 47 Still from Transitional Objects 261

Figure 48 Still from The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes 263

Figure 49 Eyes without a Face (dir. Georges Franju, 1959) 273

Figure 50 Memory box, ca. 1830 274

Figure 51 Alfredo Jaar, The Eyes of Gutete Emrita (1996) 276

x
Abstract

Medusan Optics:
Film, Feminism, and the Forbidden Image

by
Genevieve Yue
Doctor of Philosophy in Critical Studies
School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, 2012
Professor Akira Mizuta Lippit, Chair

This dissertation uses the Greek mythological figure of Medusa, the snake-haired gorgon
who possesses the power of turning anyone who looks upon her into stone, as a
theoretical lens for probing issues of power, gender and sexuality, visuality, and
movement in the cinema. Following Siegfried Kracauer’s medusan model for
understanding the spatial and visual organization of film, I argue that “medusan optics,”
which comprise instances of prohibited or perilous looking with the violence enacted on
female bodies, are intrinsically and insistently cinematic. Medusan optics describe not
only the fear and fascination that accompany images of women in cinema, but also the
selective exclusions that invisibly structure relations of gender, desire, and power in
cinematic representation, and, in doing so, the gendered politics of representation as such.
I examine various configurations of medusan optics through a series of case
studies informed by feminist theory, psychoanalysis, classical film theory, and art
historical discourse. These include the “China girl” test images critical to industrial film
xi
laboratory processes of calibrating density and color, though these anonymous women
are rarely glimpsed onscreen; scenes of beheading and dismemberment and the rhetoric
of trick cinematography in early cinema; the iconography of hair and its relation to media
in contemporary Asian horror cinema; and, in the last chapter, the limits of metaphor and
of aesthetic distance that occur when confronted with the image and the materiality of the
incised female body as portrayed in Surrealist art and experimental film. I conclude by
asserting that, even in the midst of images of destruction and horror, medusan optics bear
the potential for iconopoesis, the creation of new images, and specifically the
recuperation of figures that have been excluded from cinema’s gendered structure of
representation.
1

It is a trunkless head, and on its feature
Death has met life, but there is life in death,
The blood is frozen—but unconquered Nature
Seems struggling to the last—without a breath
The fragment of an uncreated creature.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley
1

2
Introduction: The Fragment of an Uncreated Creature

If the woman looks, the spectacle provokes, castration is in the air, the Medusa’s head is not far off…

—Stephen Heath
2

Greek mythology enjoyed a moment of revival during the heyday of feminist scholarship
in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s. Largely predicated as a response to Freudian
psychoanalysis’s emphasis on the Oedipus myth as an explanation of the childhood
origins of (heterosexual male) sexuality, feminist writing both refuted the centrality of
Greek mythology as the foundation of Western metaphysics and mined it for alternative
models for exploring female subjectivity. Vando Zajko and Miriam Leonard’s edited
volume Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought (2006) notes that
“Feminism’s identification with myth can be understood as a desire to reclaim the
underprivileged term in the gendered opposition between rationality and the mythical.”
3

Against the centrality of the Oedipus myth in the writings of Sigmund Freud, Jacques
Lacan, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, feminist interventions critiqued the way
myth has been used as both a social archetype and a developmental model of the psyche,
as well as a support to validate certain, though of course radically divergent,
philosophical procedures.
The feminist turn to myth could be said to have began with the 1975 publication
of Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa,” a vociferous response to Sigmund
Freud’s “The Medusa’s Head” (1922) which posits the Medusa, an analogue for female
3
genitalia, as the origin of castration anxiety. In a manner of speaking, or rather of writing,
Cixous turns the myth of the gorgon on its monstrous head: Medusa, she argues, is not a
horrifying sight (the dread of female sexuality) nor an abyss (death), but rather a
construction that men have used to link the two terms together. Men’s reluctance to look
at Medusa indicates, for Cixous, the figure’s significance as a symbol, and specifically an
image, of “feminine resistance.”
4
She is “a stance in her own right,” a figure whose
misdiagnosis by psychoanalysis precisely enables her to counter the “phallologocentric
sublation” produced by Freud’s text. Cixous calls for women, via Medusa, to restore a
sense of their bodies and agency that psychoanalysis denies or dismisses; she calls for the
restoration of Medusa’s own look, not only an image shrouded by the fears of men, but
Medusa’s power of looking, back at others and at herself. “You only have to look at the
Medusa straight on to see her.”
5

Recognizing the revisionist potentials and alternative spaces opened by revisiting
myth, Zajko and Leonard are nevertheless aware that feminist scholarship, too, runs the
risk of producing its own exclusions and occlusions. Myths, as feminist writers observed,
have long been used to legitimize and focalize certain discourses as the expense of others.
For Zajko and Leonard, Cixous’s essay on Medusa is particularly significant for the way
it exposes this exclusionary tendency of mythological discourse. Also, owing to the
capacious and sometimes contradictory nature of mythology, it opens a space for counter
readings and the recuperation of marginal female figures. In this way, Medusa is not only
“the object of anxiety par excellence,” as Lacan describes her,
6
but the emblem of women
that have been ignored, denigrated, and quite literally overlooked.
4
They continue: “Cixous’ use of the Medusa exemplifies the way that mythical
figures tend to transcend the restrictions of their particular textual incarnations.”
7
As a
signifier, moreover, Medusa changes according to the contexts in which her
representation emerges. She cannot be exclusively claimed by psychoanalysis, the
patriarchal structure of Western culture, or even the history and culture of ancient Greece,
but reproduces, reappears, and relocates herself in far-flung and often surprising contexts,
from political pamphlets of the French Revolution and designer branding by Versace to
early trick films and contemporary Japanese manga. “[Medusa] also shows how the
potency of particular receptions transform the mythical figure so that her subsequent and
previous identities are profoundly altered.”
8
Each manifestation of Medusa builds on and
departs from previous ones, clearing the field for future appearances. There is, as Zajko
and Leonard observe, a “doubleness of myth—its complicity with colonialism and its
capacity to provide a space beyond it.”
9
Medusa is the subjugated body of
phallologocentric power, the terrain on which its meanings are made: the “dark
continent” of Freudian psychoanalysis.
10
Because of this, she is also the one who can
most strenuously resist it.
More recent scholarship in feminist theory has shifted away from the objects and
methods of the late seventies to include a broader range of perspectives, including queer
theory, postcolonial theory, class, and race and ethnicity studies. In terms of feminist film
theory, the field has correspondingly expanded to include a range of media practices
largely informed by the interdisciplinary fields of cultural studies and visual studies. In
the wake of Laura Mulvey’s seminal “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” a variety
5
of critiques, refinements, and extensions theorizing the male gaze have emerged, and
their accumulation suggests the shape and scope of feminist film scholarship over the
past forty years. In 2004, Signs published a special issue addressing the legacy of feminist
film theory, and in their introduction Kathleen McHugh and Vivian Sobchack assert that
the essays they solicited, notably from scholars whose work was influential in that first
flush of feminist film writing, “demonstrate how feminist ‘new historicism’ has
interrogated and challenged the construction of traditional historical narratives, how
cultural theory has reframed questions of gender and representation, and how feminist
film theory now addresses an ever-expanding media culture.”
11

Among the scholars published in the issue, Linda Williams’s “Why I Did Not
Want To Write This Essay” stands out for its title’s declaration of resistance to film
feminism’s somewhat outdated conventions; these assumptions, Williams contends, tend
to focus too narrowly and simplistically on women as intransigent, ahistorical victims of
an all-too-easily identifiable patriarchal villain (armed, of course, with the tools of
psychoanalysis). She cites the popularity of Tom Gunning’s theory of “a cinema of
attractions” in providing a different model for accounting for the history of cinema, one
not necessarily based on gender. “Women’s bodies,” she remarks, “are not always the
root of spectacle in moving images.”
12

Yet Gunning’s exploration of spectacle is not incompatible with an approach
motivated by questions of sexual difference. As Williams also observes, feminist film
inquiry is far from exhausted in relation to broader cultural trends, and it has indeed
adapted to new and provocative questions of identity, performance, the body, and the
6
sphere of the political both within the academy and the women’s movement in general. A
reticulated film feminism means opening new spaces and probing new subjects of
inquiry, addressing not only gender, but the very idea of the excluded other as constituted
through various and culturally specific forms of difference.
13

Turning to the focus of this study, then, what kinds of questions does Medusa
offer for cinema? And why a medusan optics? Why now? It should be noted that this
project looks not at the myth per se, however compelling its historical or cultural
specificities. I do not intend to produce a cultural history of the Medusa myth, or survey
media manifestations of the Medusa figure itself, plentiful though they are. Rather, I
deploy the Medusa myth as a lens, an optic, through which we can view gender, vision,
and the production of images, especially as each term is constructed in relation to the
others. Each, moreover, is invested with almost mystical power, from the fascinum of the
evil eye as described by Lacan to the curiositas of spectacle discussed by Gunning.
14
a
Medusan optics conjures the dangers and desires critical to the myth, tracing the power of
the irresistable look, the forbidden image of a woman who in some ways constitutes but
also stands apart from her own image, the destructive look that generates images anew. In
each instance of cinematic production, certainly, the historical and cultural manifestations
of their medusan optics will be distinct, departing from prior forms as they set up the
possibilities for future expressions. Here, at the moment of cinema’s passing, or at least
its transmogrification into digital forms, we might do the archaeological work of
collecting film fragments before their material and apparatical traces all but vanish.
7
Medusa’s remains are scattered: a head cut off, mounted on a shield, used as a
weapon, reproduced ad infinitum, and a body discarded, forgotten, and, without a face,
made anonymous. The view through a medusan optics must be similarly fragmented and
multiple, tracing not a single narrative but a tangle of serpentine locks. This project seeks
not to complete the impossible task of viewing the entirety of cinematic history through
the lens of a medusan optic, but highlights singular and often disjointed moments in
which the conjunction of women and their contested images are most fraught, and,
perhaps, most revelatory. If the restoration of Medusa’s wholeness is impossible—she is
given to us as an incomplete figure, and indeed, that is how she derives her formidable
power—then we should try to uncover her hidden remains, and look for her in places
obscured by magic tricks, cuts, and other cinematic concealments. More than anything,
we should dare to enter those dark spaces where we’ve been told not to look.

How Do We Look at Medusa?

Medusa demands to be looked at differently. As the snake-haired gorgon of Greek
mythology, she possesses the power of turning anyone who looks upon her into stone, but
her look, or what she looks like, is impossible to see. Blinding and deadly, hers is a death
that arrives through the eyes; where Medusa is concerned, the end of life becomes the end
of sight, each the limit of the other. Because of this, her look can only be imagined. Like
Perseus, the demi-god who slays Medusa with the aid of a reflective shield, painters,
8
poets and philosophers have approached her only indirectly, conjuring her in
heterogeneous and often contradictory forms. In literary and pictorial accounts dating
back to the seventh century BCE, Medusa is at once young and old, beautiful and
grotesque, human and animal, monster and maiden, ambiguously hermaphroditic, and
most troubling of all, dead and alive. Though the renditions of Medusa undoubtedly vary
and multiply, especially in the modern era, her signifiers of feminine monstrosity and her
petrifying gaze have remained constant. Part of her endurance may stem from the
paradox of representation she embodies: how to figure something that cannot, or must
not, be seen? Moreover, what does it mean that this forbidden, deadly image takes the
form of a woman?
The terrible power of Medusa’s look has figured as a central, even originary myth
for many arts.
15
For Hal Foster, the story of Perseus’s encounter with Medusa poses the
challenge of the real in relation to the representation that first captures and then
appropriates it. In using his shield to deflect the gorgon’s deadly gaze, Perseus
demonstrates the apparent triumph of art over nature, the Apollonian (here allied with
Perseus) over the Dionysian (here allied with Medusa), or representation over the real.
Perseus, through the mirror view, is able to see Medusa without looking directly upon
her. With the deadly force of her gaze averted, the hero—a hero rendered by this very
act—is able to cut off her head and present it to the goddess Athena, who then mounts it
onto her shield. Transformed into a weapon and moreover an emblem of Athena’s power,
Medusa’s head from that point forward becomes the gorgoneion, the head alone. For
Foster, this is the “ur-painting, an originary model of art,” the primal scene of art’s
9
taming of chaotic nature.
16
Art thus bears an “apotropaic transformation,” the turning of
“weapon into shield that is fundamental to art.”
17
In staging this scene of Medusa’s
vanquishing, however, a trace of the gorgon remains, even if only an image. The triumph
of art over nature is thereby tenuous, riddled with the anxiety that the “real” Medusa lurks
behind every representation of her, not purged but merely concealed, hidden from sight.

Figure 1 Coin showing a gorgon, 411–356 BC, Greece

As the myth stages a scene of indirect representation, it also remains insistently
visual. In antiquity, Medusa was a pervasive image used to ward off misfortune in both
private and public manifestations of visual material culture. As Jean-Pierre Vernant
notes, both the full-figured Medusa and particularly the gorgoneoin adorned the facades
10
of temples, shields, ordinary household objects, and coinage from the archaic period on.
(Figures 1 and 2) By the middle of the seventh century B.C.E, her image was
characterized by two dominant iconographies: a frontal stare and a monstrous visage,
often with gaping mouth, lolling tongue, and a penetrating glower.
18
Within the fine arts,
painters and sculptors also took frequently to the mythological subject, with examples
ranging from Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s Medusa (1596-98) and Antonio
Canova’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1804-06), described by Foster, to Chris
Burden’s massive, industrial globe Medusa’s Head (1990). (Figures 3–5)

Figure 2 Relief plaque from the Heraion at Samos, second half of the 7th century BCE

A strong literary tradition of describing the Medusa also persists, from the
classical accounts of Lucan, Ovid, and Hesiod, the Renaissance poetry of Petrarch and
11
Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare’s plays, and the Romantic writings of Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Percy
Bysshe Shelley.
19
While literature, being of a different ontological order, bears a
necessarily indirect relationship to the visual, the threat of Medusa’s petrifying powers
still remains. With ekphrasis, the practice of representing the visual in textual terms, the
issue of indirect representation is especially urgent. Though ekphrasis cannot make a
claim to verisimilitude strictly speaking, it nevertheless strives for a mirroring of the
visual reality before it, seeking some direct correspondence, however paradoxical, of the
visual in nonvisual terms.

Figure 3 Caravaggio, Head of Medusa (c1598)
12

Figure 4 Antonio Canova, Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1804–06)

Figure 5 Chris Burden, Medusa’s Head (1990)
13
W.J.T. Mitchell takes up Shelley’s “On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the
Florentine Gallery” (1819) as a privileged example for expressing the contradictory
anxiety and desire that comprise ekphrastic ambiguity. Though the title claims the poem
to be a representation of a painting, the language of the poem suggests that the narrator is
standing directly before the gorgon. (Figure 6) The view is twice removed and doubly
impossible, for it is at once a fictive image constructed by Da Vinci (indeed, the
painting’s attribution to Da Vinci was revealed to be false, and it is now credited to an
anonymous painter of the Flemish school), an imagined scene of a mythological subject,
but also, if we accept the logic of the myth, a sight that cannot be seen, or an image that
causes immediate death. Yet these layers of impossibility reaffirm the operation of
ekphrasis as a necessary distancing through representation. The mirroring function of
Perseus’s shield, both reflective and protective, mimics the process of ekphrasis: a means
of representing something that recognizes itself as an approximation, an incomplete
representation. Shelley’s poem conveys the contradictory aims of ekphrasis to render an
image present, but to also keep its visual excesses safely contained. Stressing the
centrality of these issues of representation inherent in the Medusa myth, Mitchell writes:
“If ekphrastic poetry has a ‘primal scene,’ this is it….Medusa is the image that turns the
tables on the spectator and turns the spectator into an image…”
20

Shelley’s poem conveys the contradictory aims of ekphrasis to render an image
present, but to also keep its visual excesses safely contained. His words, however,
maintain an ambiguity that keeps alive the anxiety of ekphrasis. The poem begins:

14

Figure 6 A Flemish painter (previously attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci),
Medusa’s Head (ca. 1600)

It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,
Upon the cloudy mountain-peak supine;
Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;
Its horror and its beauty are divine.
Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie
Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine,
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,
The agonies of anguish and of death.
21

Written as if standing not in front of Leonardo’s painting but Medusa herself, the speaker
assumes an impossible—impossible because there would be writing after this
encounter—but still threatened, and by implied contact, a threatening position. Mitchell
notes the pun in the first line: “It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky…” Medusa, here more
a monstrous “it” than the “grace[ful]” woman conveyed in the second stanza, lies in
repose but also might tell falsehoods. The invocation of speech and of Medusa’s voice
troubles the ekphrastic project, transforming “the mute ekphrastic object” into something
that can already speak on its own, which, in effect, does not need ekphrasis.
22
If Medusa
15
speaks, transgressing the limits of the visual, her contact in the textual domain of
ekphrasis becomes disturbingly direct. And though the pun on “lieth” equally invokes a
sleeping Medusa, the ambiguity of the word and its refusal to convey one image over
another—in the painting, the mouth on the severed head of Medusa is open—renders
ekphrasis only a limited and perhaps ineffective container for her self-presentational
force. Furthermore, as Mitchell notes, ekphrasis is often a gendered practice, pitting a
mute, feminized object against a speaking, and sometimes ventriloquizing, male subject.
Ekphrasis in ancient and modern Greek means expression, and often evokes the face;
here it is the woman’s face, the “trunkless” head of Medusa, that anchors the “primal
scene” of Shelley’s ekphrastic poetry.
The visual domain may in some ways silence Medusa, but here the stakes of
representation are all the more perilous. While literature is capable of portraying the
narrative aspect of the myth, it indirectness, which works in favor of ekphrasis, is also
what fails other forms of writing. Because representation is crucial to the understanding
of the myth, the horror of looking at Medusa, even in approximation, can only confronted
in and through visual media. The look of Medusa cannot be merely described; it must
threaten exposure, to be seen, or to see in its own right.
The myth of Medusa, at its core, is about looking, or the limits of visual
perception. In this regard, Foster notes a compelling discrepancy between written and
visual accounts of the myth: “although often depicted in art, her [Medusa’s] eyes are
never described in literature; in some sense her entire visage—its horrific confusion—is
her gaze.”
23
Homer tellingly describes it as “the blank-eyed face of the Gorgon,” and
16
beyond the ambiguity concerning the face of a woman who can never be seen is the
imprecision concerning the agency of her look.
24
Owing to the capaciousness of myth,
Medusa is at times a petrifying image, and other times she is endowed with the power of
looking back. Whether she actively looks, or whether it is her passive look that freezes,
cannot be known, for the sight of Medusa also presents the limits of the beholder’s
vision.
25
Vernant calls the gorgo “death in the eyes,” a death that arrives via the eyes.
26

Where Medusa is concerned, blindness is coterminous with death.
While the fate of the gorgoneion, the decapitated head mounted on Athena’s
shield and turned into a weapon, would suggest that the sight of Medusa’s face is enough
to unleash her powerful effect, the myth, which involves immortal beings, magical gifts,
as well as Medusa’s head of writhing snakes, cannot be held to a definitive separation of
image and gaze. Following Claude Lévi-Strauss’s formulation of myth as “a logical
model capable of overcoming a contradiction,” all of the plural accounts of Medusa are,
in a sense, true.
27
She is passive and active, a sleeping victim and a monstrous destroyer
of men, an image to be looked at and a woman who looks. Her ambiguous look marks a
threshold of life, either that of her victims or her own, as in the case of Perseus’s triumph.
Her look becomes a final sight, the last thing one sees and the last act of seeing, both a
limit and a cause. Locked in this frozen, freezing moment, the ambiguity of Medusa’s
look extends to her viewer. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the “horrific confusion”
she unleashes is the degree to which the viewer is also drawn into this tangled visual
field, no longer just a viewer but also, like Medusa herself, an image, a death, a face
disfigured and a body dismembered.
17

Figure 7 Stills from Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightening Thief (dir. Chris Columbus,
2010): Percy defeats Medusa with the reflective back of an iPod

18
Medusa-image

Despite a number of recent publications on Medusa, including Marjorie Garber and
Nancy J. Vickers’ wide-ranging interdisciplinary anthology and Zajko and Leonard’s
volume of feminist essays about myth, as well as a recent spate of Hollywood films that
feature either Medusa or classical themes, there has been little scholarly attention given to
Medusa’s relation to cinema.
28
While the field of film and media studies has in recent
years expanded to include a broader range of theoretical methods and objects under the
rubric of visual studies, the issues of power, gender, and looking raised by the myth of
Medusa have remained largely untapped. (Figure 7)
There are a few notable exceptions, however, including Siegfried Kracauer’s “The
Head of Medusa,” which uses the myth not only as a model for understanding
representation, but the experience of cinema as a whole. The brief passage occurs as part
of the epilogue to Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, a postwar
continuation of Kracauer’s work examining film’s relation to historical reality. In this
study, Kracauer asserts that cinema offers a means of experiencing, or in his term
“redeeming,” reality because it provides a distanced view away from the “actual horrors”
of modern life.
29
Though in his earlier writings he stressed film and photography’s
capacity to render an “optical unconscious,” to use the phrasing of his Frankfurt school
contemporary Walter Benjamin, here Kracauer leans not toward an archival totality, but
emphasizes instead cinema’s capacity to delimit the overwhelming plenitude of lived
reality. Writing as a survivor of the Second World War, the traumas to which he refers
19
are undoubtedly those he witnessed firsthand, yet as many have observed (and with some
chagrin), Theory of Film contains few references to the Nazi party or the war itself.
Though Kracauer mentions Hitler by name in a previous text, From Caligari to Hitler
(1947), here he is surprisingly reticent, seemingly more concerned with issues of style
and genre than the kind of politico-psychological probing he sought in his earlier work.
Yet “The Head of Medusa” offers some insight into Kracauer’s method; it stands out not
only for being one of the few, and perhaps only classical references in Kracauer’s body of
work, but also for the broader issue of deflected horror articulated throughout, and
symptomatically manifested in, Theory of Film. Through its mode of distanciation and
filtration, as well as its emphasis on incomplete representation, Medusa is more than a
model of film theory, but a metaphor for reckoning with our own traumatized experience
of the world. As Medusa symbolizes “actual horrors…[that] paralyze us with blinding
fear,” it is only through the deflected view provided in the shield/screen that such realities
can be approached.
30

For Kracauer, the myth contains a moral imperative to look. He speculates:
“Perhaps Perseus’ greatest achievement was not to cut off Medusa’s head but to
overcome his fears and look at its reflection in the shield. And was it not precisely this
feat which permitted him to behead the monster?”
31
This look at history, enabled in and
by the cinema, a view that only the cinema can provide, prompts our reckoning with, and
reintegration into, it. In this way, cinema offers two critical engagements with reality:
first, it makes possible a new and distanced mode of viewing the world, and more
importantly, through its abreaction, it also restores us to a way of acting in the world, of
20
reencountering the world. In Kracauer’s view, film spectators are already petrified, but
through the viewing of a mediated Medusa, consciousness and a vital mobility can be
restored. Indeed, this is a visceral or at least insistently material experience, one that
grabs the viewer “with skin and hair,” as one of Theory of Film’s chapters is titled.
32

Cinema is a means of producing an historical consciousness and, through its mode of
allegorical or aestheticized detachment, it enables us to return to the world as full and
complete subjects. Like Perseus, we become heroes by facing and slaying the beast. We
dare to look. Absent from Kracauer’s account is the leakiness of the real that Foster
describes in the scene of Medusa’s decapitation, or that Mitchell views as lurking within
ekphrasis; for him, cinema is the idealized place where we might redeem and rejoin a
world from which we have been separated.
Teresa de Laurentis also applies the Medusa myth to the image onscreen, though
she views the gorgeneion in gendered terms, Medusa’s head put in service of Perseus’s
aims:

not only does that shield protect Perseus from Medusa’s evil look, but later on,
after her death (in his further adventures), it serves as frame and surface on which
her head is pinned to petrify his enemies. It is thus, pinned up on the shield of
Athena, that the slain Medusa continues to perform her deadly task within the
institutions of law and war…and cinema (I would add), for which Cocteau (not I)
devised the well-known definition, ‘death at work.’
33

Medusa’s image is only a metaphor, an object—a gorgoneion—used to stand in for or to
vanquish something else. Like all women, “Medusa and the Sphinx, like the other ancient
monsters, have survived inscribed in hero narratives, in someone else’s story, not their
21
own; so they are figures or markers of positions—places and topoi—through which the
hero and his story move to their destination and to accomplish meaning…”
34
De
Laurentis invokes myth to suggest the underlying function of women in narrative, which,
as she contends, remains largely unchanged from antiquity to contemporary cinema. In
her view, the great dramas of heroes from Oedipus to Scotty in Vertigo (dir. Alfred
Hitchcock, 1955) resolve their crises “by either the massive destruction or the
territorialization of women,” crimes that are justified through the mythologization of
monstrous women like Medusa.
35
For de Laurentis, cinema is allied with institutions that
derive their power by exploiting sexual difference.
I would suggest, however, that Medusa is more than a metaphor for film theory,
but offers a means to critically examine cinema’s paradigms of image creation, looking,
and gender. As the examples given by Foster and Mitchell demonstrate, the myth’s
economy of looking is not limited to cinema alone, but its scene of visual encounter,
predicated on a dynamics of motion and stillness and generative of other kinds of looks in
moving image culture, as well as the spatial organization of viewer, image, and screen,
are perhaps more immediate and pervasive in this realm than in other forms of
representation. If we follow Kracauer’s formulation of the shield-as-screen, then Perseus
stepping toward Medusa becomes a kind of cinematographer, recording a tracking shot,
and positioning viewers on the side of the camera, with Medusa, the feminized object of
fear and fascination, glimpsed as the unapproachable other. The risk Perseus takes, of
course, is of not looking past the borders of the screen. The myth, like cinema, directs our
attention to images we’re permitted to see, and it also indicates those that are off-limits
22
(or, in Perseus’s case, off-screen). As a figure, a face, an image and a force, Medusa
reveals the cinema as a contingent structure of representation, both for those bound
within its frame and the suggested presence of those beyond it. Through its constitutive
arrangement of cuts and its calibration of shades and colors, cinema is also a system of
exclusion, and the plural forms of Medusa offer a means of looking differently at its
underlying structure of gender, desire, and power. By paying particular attention to
Medusa’s body, literally overlooked in favor of her hypertrophied head, we might begin
to locate the seams of former excisions.
Like Kracauer, Deleuze seizes on cinema’s capacity to provide new modes of
experiencing the world, but he argues that cinema is more than a relation to reality, or a
means of restoring historical consciousness, but a reality in its own right. “With the
cinema,” he argues, “it is the world which becomes its own image, and not an image
which becomes world.”
36
Deleuze looks to the radical possibilities of cinema beyond its
referential relation to reality to construct new realities, new worlds, and new ways of
thinking. In his two volumes on cinema, he offers not a theory of film but a way of
thinking through cinema for the experiential possibilities it creates. In particular, he
contends that cinema, especially in the time-images that appeared in the postwar films of
Alain Resnais, Andrei Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Robert Bresson, realized
an image of pure duration as Henri Bergson had articulated nearly a century prior, a mode
of time that, unlike the infinitely divisible instants of modern conceptions of time, he
conceived as continuous and ever-evolving. While Bergson himself had been suspicious
of the cinema for producing what he regarded as false images of time, Deleuze locates
23
other evidence of cinematic thinking in Bergson’s work—particularly in Matter and
Memory (1896)’s investigation of human perception, images, and the temporality of
memory—and, taking up the critical terms of that Bergson, the Bergson who, in essence,
desired a cinema that in his own time had not yet been realized.
Like the time-image’s manifestation of pure duration, which had been unavailable
to both ordinary human perception and the quantifying instruments of science, cinema
has the power to call into being things that are usually unavailable to sight. The time-
image, for example, emerged out of “aberrant movement” that appeared in the
conventional narrative form of the movement-image.
37
As moments of rupture and
perceptual confusion, or as Deleuze describes, breakdowns in cinema’s “sensory-motor
schema,” aberrant movements produced glimpses of time independent of its function in
the orderly arrangement of movement.
38
Just as the movement-image harbors the
conditions for the time-image, the movement-image can also point to the world beyond
its parameters, the “out-of-field [that] refers to what is neither seen nor understood, but is
nevertheless perfectly present.”
39
And while the time-image later dispenses with the out-
of-field, being open to all contingencies and possibilities of becoming, the notion of an
out-of-field remains productive for thinking the ways cinema can invoke unseen,
mysterious forces that cannot yet be fully comprehended. Thus within the basic or
underdetermined form of the movement-image, the cinema’s capacity to generate new
forms of experience and thinking is already present, needing only subjects—filmmakers,
philosophers, and spectators—to think their possibilities. Even in unintended moments of
24
aberration, cinema is capable of unleashing another kind of desire to yet-unimaginable
becomings.
Deleuze’s delineation of movement-image and time-image invite us to consider
the possibility of a Medusa-image, an unleashing of petrifying medusan effects in
cinema, and a type of image—organizing time, movement, and beyond Deleuze’s range
of concerns, the positioning of spectators in relation to images onscreen—that can only
exist in the cinema. What might a Medusa-image look like, and how might it function?
What would it reveal about the underlying structure of cinema and its representations?
As Deleuze bases his analysis of cinema in terms of time, the Medusa-image,
likewise, can be examined from a temporal perspective. The Medusa myth, like all
myths, already contains heterogeneous temporalities. The first and most common
temporal mode at work is narrative-historical: most accounts, from Homer, Hesiod and
Ovid, tend to present the myth as a linear narrative, and are generally told from the
perspective of Perseus’s heroic mission: the assignation of the quest, his accumulation of
divine gifts, the defeat of Medusa, and finally, the transferring of Medusa’s head to the
front of Athena’s shield. In these accounts, emphasis is placed on different moments
within the narrative. Sometimes the encounter with Medusa is the primary event, and
other times it is one of many obstacles that Perseus overcomes. In most cases, however,
the story is told from Perseus’s point of view, a linear hero myth that drives toward the
foundation of civilized order and can therefore be considered “historical.” The encounter
with the monstrous Medusa made Perseus a hero, and, with the transformation of gorgon
to gorgoneion, it also allowed Athena to enact her “civilizational function.”
40

25
The second temporal mode can be considered mythical-eternal, as it solely
concerns Medusa’s petrifying visage. In this version, the emphasis is placed on Medusa
and the repeated act of her deadly encounter. The temporality of the mythical-eternal is
non-linear, non-teleological; it does not progress, and no definitive change ever occurs.
Medusa, the mortal gorgon sister, is always present, her cave filled with hapless stony
victims. Here Perseus is nowhere to be found: no hero conquered, and none was
vanquished, for the still figures that make up Medusa’s perverse sculpture garden are
always left unnamed. The Medusa of the mythical-eternal mode is primarily an idea, a
threat, a terrible power known and feared. This Medusa is always looking.
The two temporal modes, narrative-historical and mythical-eternal, coincide at the
moment Perseus looks at Medusa through the reflection in his shield. Though it is
uncertain whether it is the mere sight of Medusa that causes death or an effect of her
active looking, Perseus, in this instance, risks the sight that would otherwise turn him to
stone. What exactly does the mirror show? As Perseus holds the mirror in front of him, it
provides a rear view, like that of a car, of Medusa, who is positioned behind him. He uses
this rear view to advances toward her by walking backward. The rear view, additionally,
captures a reflexive image of Perseus looking. In the image formed in the rear view, both
viewer and the one viewed, Perseus and Medusa, are collapsed onto the same surface.
Moreover, the mirror surface they share allows Medusa the possibility of looking back.
The mirror forms a particular kind of image, one that depicts both Perseus and
Medusa, and also shows them (or at least Perseus) looking. As a reflected image, it is also
a specific kind of sight, one that enables other sights, and also enables these acts of seeing
26
to be seen. The mirror produces an image, a sight, of seeing itself. It screens—shows, but
also filters—the deadly look of Medusa, and also makes it possible for her look to be
seen.
41
This image in the mirror is what constitutes the Medusa-image: it is an image that
engenders looking. Before Perseus makes his deadly cut and the time of history resumes,
this moment, which is rife with what could happen, brings together on the surface of the
screen the man who looks and the woman who also, possibly looks back. Reaffirming but
also mixing gendered patterns of looking, the mirror registers this convergence of looks
and their apprehension or, perhaps, recognition, as/in an image.
Kracauer describes Perseus’s shield as a metaphor for the cinema screen, both a
reflective mirror and a protective surface, and the linking of Perseus’s shield with the
cinema screen is suggestive for the possibilities of thinking the Medusa-image in
Deleuzian terms. As Deleuze contends, the cinema makes possible certain images or
experiences of time that are not otherwise accessible. His discussion of the crystal-image,
a moment of pure and infinitely expansive duration, invokes the Medusa-image’s
structure of mirroring:

In Bergsonian terms, the real object is reflected in a mirror-image as in the virtual
object which, from its side and simultaneously, envelops or reflects the real: there
is ‘coalescence’ between the two. There is a formation of an image with two
sides, actual and virtual. It is as if an image in a mirror, a photo or a postcard
came to life, assumed independence and passed into the actual, even if this meant
that the actual image returned into the mirror and resumed its place in the postcard
or photo, following a double movement of liberation and capture.
42

The mirroring that occurs in the crystal-image provides a means of exchange whereby the
actual, or what is placed before the mirror, trades places with the virtual, which in
27
Deleuze’s formulation opens to all the possibilities of becoming. The crystal-image, an
infinitely expansive structure, produces a mise-en-abîme of ceaseless and simultaneous
alternations between the image of what something is and all that it might become.
The time of the crystal-image is similarly split, pasts and presents locked in
virtual imaginings of each other. “Thus the image has to be present and past, still present
and already past, at once and at the same time…The present is the actual image, and its
contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror.”
43
If cinema’s greatest
possibility, for Deleuze, is to present an image of pure time, the crystal-image is where
this is most forcefully realized. “Time has to split at the same time as it sets itself out or
unrolls itself: it splits in two dissymmetrical jets, one of which makes all the present pass
on, while the other preserves all the past. Time consists of this split, and it is this, it is
time, that we see in the crystal.”
44
Here we see another correlation with the Medusa-
image, the meeting of narrative-historical time with mythical-eternal time. Put another
way, the eternal presentness of mythical-eternal time, the moment when Medusa looks,
opens into the various pasts and futures of Perseus’s narrative-historical time.
Building off the recursive structure of the crystal-image, how does the Medusa-
image differ from the crystal-image? As it inhabits the temporality of the crystal-image
and all its possibilities of becoming, the Medusa-image, an image that makes possible
seeing, adds to the crystal-image an emphasis on vision and its generative force. Not only
do pasts and presents exchange in actual and virtual manifestations, but the Medusa-
image also unleashes the power of vision, of seeing oneself (Perseus, if we presume
28
identification with him) and another (Medusa), though the distinction between the two
quickly dissolves.
For Vernant, the “crossing of gazes” between Medusa and Perseus suggests a
transitive identification through the mirror.
45
“When you stare at Gorgo,” he argues, “she
turns you into a mirror where, by transforming you into stone, she gazes at her own
terrible face and recognizes herself in the double, the phantom you become the moment
you meet her eye.”
46
This reveals for Vernant “the truth about your own face,” a
‘sympathy’ shared and means of passing from one to the other.”
47
Yet the Medusa-image
exceeds Vernant’s formulation as well. It establishes a communion not only between
Perseus and Medusa, between a self and another, but also the possibility of seeing other
beings, other becomings, through and beyond them. While it is important that Perseus be
able to recognize himself in the monster, the Medusa-image must also be open to other
possibilities. It is not enough to say that Perseus, in looking at Medusa, returns to an
image of himself; the Medusa-image demands the possibility of radical otherness, other
sights. In gendered terms, the woman must be more than a mirror that returns the image
of a man back to himself; in raising the possibility of a woman who looks at others and at
herself, the Medusa-image also indicates the kinds of sights and identifications she
makes, even if these are yet unimaginable, like the image of Medusa herself.

29
Imago

Looking into the mirror, we encounter the problem of its surface. While it suggests a
depth as concretely detailed as the world we inhabit, the image that floats on its surface is
immaterial and moreover unstable. What one person sees, from one angle, differs from
that of another. Mirror images exist in the proverbial eye of the beholder; they provide a
reassuring gaze to feed narcissistic indulgence or wary looks to fuel paranoid fantasy. No
two people can ever see the exact same image; what we see is ours alone, vanished the
moment we try to indicate it to others.

Figure 8 René Magritte, La reproduction interdite (1937)

30
This is the paradox revealed in René Magritte’s La Reproduction interdite (1937):
to look at someone who is regarding himself in the mirror means never seeing what he
sees, or the way he sees it. (Figure 8) The mirror in Magritte’s painting is a ruse. Against
the laws of physics, it reveals, impossibly, the view of the man’s back. That is to say, the
view it offers is that of our own, the view of the viewer. Effectively, this reveals our
perspective as that of the mirror. Positioned outside the space of the painting, the mirror
reflects our view, a rear view that denies an image of the man’s face. It shows us what we
can’t see, revealing our desire to view the man’s face—a forbidden image, as the title
indicates—and our frustration in doing so. In this way Magritte’s painting highlights the
mirror as something that reflects but ultimately does not see. Bereft of the ability to see or
to direct vision, mirrors are blind instruments, their images always elusive.
Mirror images, moreover, threaten aberrant movement. Unlike photographs,
mirror images are not fixed but possess the capacity, like cinema, to move. In horror
films, it is a common trope for mirror images of the self, after an initial test of
verisimilitude or resemblance, to move autonomously, dissembling monstrously, or for
another figure to appear suddenly.
48
Movement, in these cases, suggests the life of
uncanny doubles or phantom others, detectable only on or in the surface of the mirror.
Despite the apparent transparency of mirrors, in function as well as material construction,
their surfaces are opaque, obscuring the depth below. Horror and fantastic narratives
capitalize on this contradiction, using the mirror both as an instrument of revelation and
one of concealed menace. In Ringu (dir. Nakata Hideo, 1997), which I discuss in Chapter
3, Asakawa sees a ghostly figure reflected in the glass of a television monitor before her,
31
quickly turns around but sees nothing. Asakawa’s screen, like Perseus’s shield and
countless horror films, shows an image, a being, or possibly even a world, that is not
otherwise apparent.
The possibility of other worlds revealed or opened by the mirror has attended
popular beliefs since antiquity. Prior to the mirror’s glass or polished metal form, the
reflecting pool possessed and in some ways best expressed this quality. “Before [Plato,]
the reflection was an animated and living form,” Sabine Melchior-Bonnet writes, “a
double luring Narcissus from the bottom of a pool.”
49
The reflective surface in the myth
of Narcissus concealed an unknown depth within the water. Indeed, as the myth
describes, the pull of his reflection led to his death by drowning. His folly was one we are
all susceptible to: mistaking the mirror’s surface for all that lies beneath. “At the same
time both present and elsewhere, the perceived image has an unsettling ubiquity and
depth, located at an uncertain distance.”
50
The mirror’s spatial ambiguity opens onto the
suggestion of other impossible views, from the supernatural, as horror films so readily
exploit, to the divination of the future, as the practice of catoptromancy indicates.
The mirror’s uncertain depth is further complicated by ancient theories of optics.
51

Until the 11
th
century, vision was regarded as a force, scanning, translating, or even
remaking the natural world into a field of images. In Euclidian theory, later taken up by
Ptolemy, vision is the product of an active eye that shot out rectilinear rays to read an
object and retrieve its shape and color. Democritus and Lucretius adopted a model
whereby images arise from objects as projections gathered together by the eye. In
32
Timaeus, Plato argues a compromise position in which the rays emitted from the eye
intersect with those generated by the sun, and images are formed out of those meetings.
52

Mirrors upheld these ancient theories, as when Aristotle contended in De
Insomnis that a reflective surface could strongly affect a person who looked upon it. For
him, the converse was also true. Citing as evidence the claim that a menstruating woman
when looking into a mirror clouds its surface, he asserts:

[A]s the eye [in seeing] is affected [by the object seen], so also it produces a
certain effect upon it…the cause of this lies in the fact that in the act of sight there
occurs not only a passion in the sense organ acted on by the polished surface, but
the organ, as an agent, also produces an action, as is proper to a brilliant object.
For sight is the property of an organ possessing brilliance and colour. The eyes,
therefore, have their proper action as have other parts of the body.
53

With the surface of the mirror physically altered by the force of one’s look (and notably
this effect was most powerfully produced by a woman), the ancient conception of vision
as a force was reaffirmed. Melchior-Bonnet writes: “Whatever they believed, the ancients
were certain of one thing: the image originates from physical contact, from an imprint
made from the eye to the object, through rays or forms…”
54
The very act of looking,
then, was a kind of poesis, a making of a virtual world identical in appearance, if not in
behavior or physical characteristics, as the actual one. “For the Greeks, the world of
images had a tangible existence by reproducing and resembling the real; this realm was a
precise imitation of the actual one, although of an inferior and altogether different
nature.”
55

33
As a facsimile, however, the image in the mirror is of course immaterial and by
extension, unstable, even untrustworthy. It is both an instrument that mimicked
appearances with great precision—perhaps the mirror’s greatest test in verisimilitude has
been its role in gauging the distinction between life or death, as when King Lear holds a
mirror to Cordelia’s unbreathing mouth—and a device that can deform and deceive those
validations. Medieval categorizations of vision distinguished between pictura, or the
reflection on the retina, and imago, the image seen in the mirror, and psychoanalysis later
used the latter term to describe the subconscious, subjective imagining of another. Imago
is a creation, a fabrication, both similar to and different from the reality it mimics. It thus
bears a privileged relation to art-making and may explain, in part, why the myth of
Medusa has been so enduring a model for the production of art. For Jean de Meung, the
mirror image is “the reflection of art: not merely an art of illusion that less successfully
simulates the beauty of nature, but an art capable of inventing forms and of rediscovering
the process of creation.”
56
Noting the darker tendencies of this aberrant creation, Jorge
Luis Borges confesses a fear of mirrors: “I feared sometimes that they would begin to
veer off from reality; other times, that I would see my face in them disfigured by strange
misfortunes.”
57

Medusa is both a mirror and an image-maker. As Vernant contends, she makes
mirrors out of her victims, seeing herself in the frozen faces of fear that she creates. Craig
Owens extends this argument and casts Medusa as an image-maker, a kind of camera that
makes still pictures, or sculptures, out of anyone who looks at her.
58
Yet her gaze, though
it renders an undeniable, even hyperbolic force, is paradoxically absent. Like a mirror or
34
the lens of a camera, she does not properly see; instead, her power is wielded as a kind of
weapon by someone else. If we accept the argument, and indeed the ambiguity, of
Medusa’s passive look and her active gaze, then these dual instruments, the mirror and
the camera, become all the more potent metaphors.
59
As a mirror, Medusa reflects only
what others see. Her eyes are functionally blind.
As a camera, she is ultimately wielded by Perseus, the photographer who
“captured” Medusa first with his own mirror, the shield he wields. Her imago is a copy of
Medusa’s look, identical but for the force of vision she exerts. With her image is drained
of its power, Perseus can now approach her, turning her image-making effect on itself by
means of his shield, and ultimately freezing her with the deadly swipe of his blade.
Perseus’s mirror separates Medusa from her image like a portrait; it neutralizes the force
of her look by turning her into a silent, still image: death’s head, or, more specifically, a
“girl head” (Chapter 1). Medusa is thereby defeated—trapped in the mirror and slain,
repurposed from eternal-mythical time into the narrative-historical time of Perseus,
which, of course, is the story from his perspective.

The Cut

Another implication of Kracauer’s theorization of Medusa is that the screen brackets the
real, cutting it out of frame and parsing its duration into a defined beginning and end.
This extends the logic of the screen’s distancing effect: where the real is overwhelming in
35
its limitless presence, the frame has a taming effect, segmenting, ordering, and
representing “actual horrors” in manageable forms. This, in effect, is the work of the
“cut,” the process of montage by which a film is assembled in discreet sequences of
shots, but also, of course, Perseus’s “cut,” the decapitation of Medusa. In certain forms of
cinema, however, the logic of continuity editing demands that cuts be concealed. In
traditional narrative filmmaking, shots are cut along an action or a movement so as to
appear seamless, effectively hiding the cut through a process of suture.
60

In his discussion of Caravaggio’s Head of Medusa, Louis Marin describes the
moment when Perseus’s use of the shield to turn the gaze of Medusa on herself, the
myth’s “moment of sight.”
61
In Marin’s view, Medusa’s deadly power is the active force
of her looking; therefore, if she looks at herself, she also turns herself to stone. He
describes this as “automorphosis” which, in the mirror, coincides with a “moment of self-
representation”: “The moment of self-representation and automorphosis is captured in the
instant of representation, the moment when the object is exposed to sight.”
62
Here,
Perseus doesn’t look at all, but holds out the shield to trap her gaze and redirect its force
back onto itself. It is, as Marin describes, a “ruse,” a clever trick Perseus employs to
entrap Medusa with her own gaze.
Marin argues that as a painting, Caravaggio’s Head of Medusa performs a similar
ruse. Playing with the convex surface of the wooden disc, a shape that resembles a shield,
Caravaggio paints selective trompe l’oeil effects so that “the head of Medusa is
simultaneously inside the represented space and outside the space of representation. It is
inside and outside, but also neither inside nor outside… The head is a reflected image,
36
and thus the product of a representation, but it is also a simulacrum and a double; as such,
it is representation itself.”
63
Painting against the convex surface as if it were flat,
Caravaggio renders, on one hand, his image of Medusa as a representation. Yet on the
other hand, he paints also on the surface of the disc as if it were the actual shield of
Perseus, or possibly Athena. Particularly, and standing in contrast to the rest of the
painting’s details, Medusa’s blood is painted as if it were dribbling down the front of the
shield. Caravaggio painted the decorative edge of the work as well. By presenting both
registers of depth at once, Caravaggio exposes the ruse of realist painting and
representation in general. While representation claims a certain fidelity to the real, it is, as
Caravaggio demonstrates, entirely the effect, the ruse, of an illusion.
The dual modes of representation Caravaggio employs recalls another Greek
myth, that of Zeuxis and Parrhasius. In a competition to see who was the better painter,
Zeuxis and Parrhasius both produced images of striking verisimilitude. When Zeuxis
unveiled his painting of grapes, its likeness attracted a group of birds that flew down to
eat them. Parrhasius, however, trumped his competitor by painting a veil over his image,
fooling his fellow artist with a trompe-l’oeil. For Lacan, the myth represents a “triumph
of the gaze over the eye,” as Zeuxis’s realism in depicting the natural world was
surpassed by Parrhasius’s realist mimicry, which is to say exposure, of representation
itself.
64
The trompe-l’oeil effect of the veil reveals the desire of the gaze because it
“incites [Zeuxis] to ask what is behind it.”
65
Where the eye, like the birds drawn to
Zeuxis’s grapes, apprehends the image as a representation, its deception by the trompe-
l’oeil veil exposes the desire of the gaze to maintain a separation between reality and its
37
representation, or also, possibly, its interest in shattering their distinction. The exposure
of the gaze, of desire in this example—paradoxically accomplished by a veiling-over of
an image—demonstrates how desire always lurks within and shapes vision.
As Lacan’s reading of the myth of Zeuxis and Parrhasius indicates, realism is
always bound up with illusion, the capacity to fool the eye at some level, whether as an
explicit aesthetic style or a more surreptitious form of deception. Illusion, however, is not
realism’s opposite. Realism always harbors the potential for illusion, and for illusion to
succeed, it must take place on the ground of realism, of plausibility. Moreover, both
success and failure, as Zeuxis and Parrhasius’s examples reveal, are constituted in large
part by the workings of the eye as directed by the hidden dynamics of desire. And with
Medusa, despite the many prohibitions against looking, the scotomatic perils imminent to
the eye, we are nevertheless driven by our desire to see her. In the attempt to figure
something that resists representation, the hunger of the gaze exceeds and overwhelms the
eye.
Within this clever game of realist illusion that Caravaggio plays, Marin notes that
the painting is also pervaded by a nagging “rift.”
66
In depicting an image of Medusa
locked in her own gaze but also already decapitated, Caravaggio had to leave out “the
blow,” Perseus’s cut. The painting shows the before and after of Perseus’s intervention,
but omits his central gesture. Rather, it “leaps” over the cut, producing another ruse that
renders Perseus an invisible actor. Medusa here is presented as simultaneously looking
and already slain, a layering of both narrative-historical and mythological-eternal time.
This missing blow is indicative of a problem for representational painting as well, as it
38
corresponds to the painter’s dilemma in painting images as real as life. To show the
painter’s hand, so to speak, means that the painting fails as an illusion; it is not real
enough. Yet to paint too realistically means denying the presence of the painter’s hand,
the blow. Marin argues that the temporal rift in Head of Medusa leaves open a space for
the apprehension of the missing blow of Perseus, and by extension, the hidden hand of
the painter of realist representations. “Such is the moment of the Head of Medusa, which
in its very presence represents the moment of the leap and blow. Or rather, this painting
mobilizes the story of the Gorgon to represent the rift in this leap.”
67

To the untrained eye, however, Caravaggio’s rift is rather surreptitious. The
collapsed moments of before and after, while not exactly registered on a single plane, still
take place on the same convex surface, and just as the trompe l’oeil effects produce a
confusion between painted illusion and real shield, the same obscurity persists in the
work’s mixed temporalities. Like the substitution splice in Thomas Edison’s The
Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (1895), which I discuss in Chapter 2, or the logic of
film editing in general, cuts and “blows” can be easily hidden in plain sight. Could it be
that Caravaggio’s “counter-ruse” succeeds too well?
68
Marin’s observation of the rift,
moreover, depends on his specific reading of the myth: Medusa the monster whose active
looking causes instant death, and Perseus the cunning hero who, like Odysseus, succeeds
through trickery as much as physical prowess.
69
Yet myth, far from being pinned to a
single version, always leaves room, or rifts, for variance, including nonchronological
time that collapses notions of before and after. Mythological-eternal time can always
intrude on narrative-historical time, just as Medusa-images can spring up unannounced in
39
cinema’s any-time-whatevers. Ironically, Caravaggio’s counter-ruse, his hidden cut, is
concealed by the inherent heterogeneity of his mythological subject. In cinema, where
cuts are seamlessly sutured over, the Medusa-image, binding its viewer in its mirrored
structure of crossed or matched gazes, also performs its own sleight-of-hand, its hidden
exclusions.
There is, however, another rift in Caravaggio’s painting: Medusa’s averted gaze.
Her face, wrenched in horror, looks down and to her right, prompting the question, what
does Medusa see? Though Marin argues that her turned-away look works to “shield” the
viewer from having to look at her directly, it also frustrates his claims of Medusa’s
automorphosis, or her gaze turned back on itself, for she does not look at herself. Instead
she looks away, or to use the language of cinema, she looks off-screen, to the out-of-
field. Through her eyes, her look, Medusa signals a space unavailable to the viewer, but
in the suggestion of a beyond, she compels us, once again, to consider what we are not
being shown, or what is not permitted to see. As the Medusa-image locks together the
gazes of Perseus and Medusa in the mirror, it also creates the possibility for Medusa to
look differently, to not just look back but look away, and call into being something not
yet imaginable. The Medusa-image, as stated previously, is an image that engenders
looking: it is about seeing, but it also indicates to us the limits of that sight, the places
where we haven’t yet looked. Medusa, as the woman that cannot be seen, points the way
to those images and beings that have been obscured through these gendered regimes of
(not) looking.
40
The moment Medusa’s head is cut off, her gaze is released and travels widely as
the gorgoneion, the head which is not only tacked onto Athena’s shield and imprinted on
Greek and Roman coinage, but, as we have seen, also appears in the work of numerous
writers and artists as an allegory for terrible or forbidden sights, and has in the modern
era been mobilized to produce the work of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and feminism.
Her body, meanwhile, disappears. As Luce Irigaray contends, “The moment the look
dominates, the body loses its materiality.”
70
But is her body really gone, or simply out of
sight? In some accounts, Medusa’s severed neck produces the twin births of Pegasus and
Chrysador, while her blood retains the capability of bestowing either life or death. Yet
her postpartum body presumably lies still, left in the cave after all the other actors in the
myth have gone. We discover a woman who has been excluded from her own story,
mutilated, dismembered, and forgotten. Headless, she becomes anonymous, faceless, and
permanently silenced. In “Castration or Decapitation?” Cixous argues that silence is a
form of female decapitation, a means of stripping away a woman’s subjectivity and
agency. Silencing women, whether by literal or figural decapitation, is the means by
which male authority is asserted and propagated. Cixous writes: “Women have no choice
other than to be decapitated, and in any case the moral is that if they don’t actually lose
their heads by the sword, they only keep them on condition that they lose them—lose
them, that is, to complete silence, turned into automatons.”
71
Against a tradition that has
only taken Medusa at her look, what would it mean to restore her voice, or, in a sense, her
view?
41
In his discussion of the “death’s head,” the human skull motif that pervades
seventeenth century German Trauerspiel, or “mourning play,” Benjamin notes that the
head works to allegorize “everything about history that, from the very beginning, has
been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful.”
72
The death’s head in literature and painting has
long figured as a memento mori, and in Benjamin’s formulation it is not only death that
needs to be allegorized and remembered, but all that history would rather discard and
forget. Allegory, he argues, is a mode of expression, one that brings us closer to an
experience of history and its weathered remnants, its scattered bones: “Whereas in the
symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed
in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies
hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape.”
73

For Adam Lowenstein, the death’s head is capable of doing the work of allegory
as it represents “the body emptied of all meaning” and can hence be continuously filled
and transformed.
74
As an image, he argues, the signification of the death’s head fluctuates
“in the allegorical moment between being and appearance, between subject and object,
between life and death.” It offers itself as a vessel for a shifting representation to be
continually born and reborn in the image.
Yet Medusa’s severed head and “empty” body function differently in that
whatever meaning originally resided there was violently removed precisely to uphold and
extend allegorical narratives. Denied its individual identity, Medusa’s body had been
purposefully voided, and, with the removal of the head, rendered generic so that it could
be used for allegorical ends. Against the allegorical function of the death’s head, then, we
42
might begin to think Medusa as an acephalic woman, taking after Bataille’s valorization
of the acephalic man and the ways in which a new, “headless allegory,” a mode of
allegory that turns on the head of allegory itself, might be constructed: a vision of
allegory to counteract the work of allegory, or myth used to explode myth.
75

If cinema is a privileged space for exploring the visuality of the Medusa myth, it
must also be examined for the ways it has been complicit in disappearing Medusa’s body.
To the extent that cinema offers new modes of experience and sight, like the Medusa-
image, we must recognize also that cinema is equally capable of producing exclusions,
and that all films present potential sites of concealed deceptions.

Acephalous Woman

Medusa’s body lays scattered, in pieces, forgotten. In the Shelley poem discussed
previously, there is another fragment, a missing stanza that forms the epigraph to this
project. The verse was lost for many years, its existence unknown until it was published
as part of Neville Rogers’s commentary on the poem in 1961. There is no clear indication
of where the stanza would have fit into the poem, whether appended at the end or inserted
somewhere in the middle. Instead, it floats, being both of and detached from the poem.
Against the ekphrastic anxiety produced by the rest of the poem, Rosie Thomas takes the
fragment’s ambiguous last line as an invitation to read Shelley’s entire poem differently.
Who might this Medusa be, “[t]he fragment of an uncreated creature”?
76
For all the
43
myth’s many creations, the cut of Perseus elided with Caravaggio’s brushstroke in
Marin’s account, or the multifarious forms of the gorgoneion, the line suggests that
Medusa is yet unformed, destined, at some future point, to be made whole again, and be
created anew in that moment. What forms might she take, and who might she become?
What new bodies might take root beneath her “trunkless head”? And how might we
perceive them?
Medusa’s body reveals cinema as a system of exclusions, of female bodies cut
and cut out of film. While it would appear that this study applies most readily to the
horror genre and related manifestations of monstrous women, the pervasiveness of this
system demands a certain critical pressure be put on the notion of genre itself, as genres
and their representational codes are politicized activities that need to be interrogated for
the social and cultural procedures they mask. Kara Keeling observes, “cinema is a
political activity that cannot be divorced from its potential role in effecting social and
cultural transformations.”
77
More than questions of representation are at stake; the
technical and ideological construction of generic codes must be examined as well, for
genres also reaffirm and extend the work of cinema’s exclusionary tactics. The work,
moreover, demands a flexibility in looking across genres and beyond them, to the more
marginal spaces of commercial narrative cinema, such as auxiliary industrial practices
and the discursive field offered by experimental film. In these alternate areas we might
locate manifestations, or more likely traces, of women who have been violently cut out of
cinema.
44
I begin my study by investigating the pervasiveness of the China girl, a test image
used to affirm technical and ideological constructions of the image in Hollywood film
laboratories. This first chapter takes the China girl figure as both object and image that,
as a woman not meant to be seen, reveals a normally overlooked though no less central
aspect of industrial film production, namely the film laboratory. In the second chapter, I
examine cinema’s early spectacularization of female bodies and the ways in which tricks,
particularly hidden splices, produced the beginnings of durable film genres and gender
expectations. In the third chapter, I look at another kind of “China girl” by examining the
monstrous teenage girls in contemporary Asian horror, whose fearsome, Medusa-like
faces are intrinsically tied to the media that enable their representation. The fourth and
final chapter returns to the medusan risks associated with looking, as I turn to a set of
experimental films that, in their discomfiting proximity between allegorical and actual
incisions into women’s bodies, reproduce many of mainstream cinema’s anxieties around
Medusa’s gaze. While Medusa certainly is not limited to cinema as a set of material
properties, I argue that she is inseparable from a cinematic mode of representation, a form
both material in its apparatus and immaterial in the projection of its images.
In fixing a medusan optic on these various manifestations of cinematic practice,
this looking differently allows us to locate the traces of Medusa across a broad range of
film production, flung to the margins and buried in the center. My approach is, by
necessity of the figures it tracks, partial and fragmentary: at times it adopts snake-like
movements, slithering past recurrent motifs—mirror images, sudden stares, shields, and
frozen screams—and at others it takes the cautious, surreptitious footwork of Perseus,
45
who moves backwards in order to step forward. In searching behind the “spectacle of the
female head,” I aim moreover to explore the Medusa-image’s dazzling possibility of
looking, beyond Medusa herself to others not yet conceivable. Following Deleuze’s
methodology and understanding of the cinema, those things that would appear as
limitations also contain the possibility for new becomings. As Keeling argues, reading
Spivak’s double sense of representation as both political representation and art and
philosophical representation, “the politics of representation is primarily a politics of
visibility.”
78
Reconstituting the fragments of Medusa’s body, then, means restoring her,
in albeit partial and incomplete ways, to cinema’s sight, and creating the possibility for
the making of new images.
46

Introduction References

1
Percy Bysshe Shelley, lost stanza for “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery,”
cited in Sophie Thomas, Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (New York and
London: Routledge, 2008), 168.

2
Stephen Heath, “Difference,” Screen 19 no. 3 (Autumn 1978), 92.

3
Vando Zajko and Miriam Leonard, “Introduction,” in Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and
Feminist Thought, eds. Vando Zajko and Miriam Leonard (Oxford University Press, 2006), 10.

4
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in The Medusa Reader, eds. Marjorie Garber and Nancy J.
Vickers (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 131.

5
Ibid.

6
Jacques Lacan observes: “The phenomenology of the dream of Irma’s injection…leads to the apparition
of the terrifying anxiety-provoking image, to this real Medusa’s head, to the revelation of this something
which properly speaking is unnamable, the back of the throat, the complex, unlocatable form, which also
makes it into the primitive object par excellence, the abyss of the feminine organ from which all life
emerges, this gulf of the mouth, in which everything is swallowed up, and no less the image of death in
which everything comes to an end.” The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory
and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, trans. S. Tomaselli (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991),
163–164 (emphasis original). See Chapter 4 for a discussion of Freud’s dream.

7
Zajko and Leonard, “Introduction,” 14.

8
Ibid.

9
Ibid., 13.

10
On Freud’s reference to women as the “dark continent for psychology,” Mary Ann Doane notes, “In
Freud, a metonymic chain is constructed that links infantile sexuality, female sexuality, and racial
otherness. Woman is the 'dark continent'...” “Technology’s Body: Cinematic Vision in Modernity,” in A
Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, ed. Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2002), 530–551, citation on 542.

11
Kathleen McHugh and Vivian Sobchack, “Introduction,” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in
Society 30 no. 1, “Beyond the Gaze: Recent Approaches to Film Feminism” (Autumn 2004), 1205–1207,
citation on 1206. The title of the special issue indicates the indebtedness feminist film studies have had to
Mulvey’s and subsequent texts.

12
Linda Williams, “Why I Did Not Want To Write This Essay,” Signs 30 no. 1, 1264–1271, citation on
1268.

13
Recent work in this vein include projects that revisit and expand cinema histories like Anne Friedberg’s
Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and The
Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science, edited by Lisa Cartwright, Constance Penley,
47

and Paula A. Triechler (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Tracing a history of “the virtual
mobilized gaze” as a mode of spectatorship introduced in the late 19
th
century, Friedberg contends that
cinema is more than a mere text but a nexus of gendered social practices, and the act of looking was
increasingly implicated in a consumerist logic that has particular impact for women. As a result, the
cinematic apparatus, broadly speaking, produced a new kind of subjectivity that dramatically altered one’s
physiological, psychical, and social relation to and existence in the world. The Visible Woman similarly
extends the question of the woman’s image to a broader scope and history of visual culture, as it considers
the function of the woman’s image in the fields of epidemiology, reproductive health, and genetic research.
Rosalind Galt’s Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (New York: Columbia University Press,
2011) and Karen Beckman’s Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2003) reframe questions central to feminist discourse within film studies and across disciplinary
boundaries. Galt examines the category of the pretty, a combination of feminine, decorative, and oriental
traits, as it operates in cinema from early film to contemporary international art cinema. Her focus on an
aesthetic strategy produces a set of compelling connections across diverse genres, historical periods, and
national contexts. See Chapters 1 and 4 for discussions of Galt’s work. Beckman, meanwhile, tracks the
motif of the vanishing woman in case studies ranging from magic and population studies, psychoanalysis
and mythology, spiritualism and photography, romance plot and propaganda, Hollywood cinema and
astrology, and in doing so she connects feminist inquiry to technology, as well as issues of violence,
representation, and the work of cinema in culture. See Chapter 2 for a discussion of Beckman’s work.
I am indebted to Kara Keeling’s deft reading of Gilles Deleuze in relation to the image of the
black femme in popular African-American cinema in The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme,
and the Image of Common Sense (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007). Her intervention
goes beyond a superficial critique (or the mere problematization) of representations of race, gender, and
sexuality to examine the cultural and economic mechanisms at work in producing them or making them
possible, as well as the spectator’s complicity (via affective labor) in reaffirming them. Within these
structures of common sense, Keeling specifically examines moments and figures like the black femme, of
potential rupture. Such examples offer, on one hand, a surplus value from which the same common sense
can be renewed, but also, on the other, the possibility for them to be transformed or modified. Keeling’s
methods and sensibility inform this entire dissertation.

14
Lacan writes: “The evil eye is the fascinum, it is that which as the effect of arresting movement and,
literally, of killing life.” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan, Book IX, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: Norton, 1988), 118 (emphasis original). See
Chapter 3 for a fuller consideration of the fascinum. Gunning cites Augustine’s use of the term curiositas,
or “the lust of the eyes,” which, “in contrast to visual voluptas (pleasure)…avoids the beautiful and goes
after its exact opposite ‘simply because of the lust to find out and to know.’” “An Aesthetic of
Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator” (1989), in Film Theory and Criticism, 6
th

edition, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 862–876,
citation on 871.

15
At the moment of her beheading, two beings spring from Medusa’s neck: Chrysador and Pegasus, the
latter being associated with the Muses. This is why Medusa, in antiquity, is often associated with the arts.

16
Hal Foster, “Medusa and the Real,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 44 (Autumn 2003), 181–190,
citation on 183.

17
Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 260.

18
See Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Death in the Eyes: Gorgo, Figure of the Other,” in The Medusa Reader, 210–
222, esp. 211–212.

19
See Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers, “Introduction,” in The Medusa Reader, 1–7.
48

20
W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 172.

21
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery,” cited in
Mitchell, Picture Theory, 171–172.

22
Mitchell, Picture Theory, 173.

23
Foster, “Medusa and the Real,” Note 29, 186.

24
Homer, The Illiad, Book 11 line 36; in The Medusa Reader, 10.

25
Laura Mulvey underscores the gendered implications of the female’s petrifying power of looking: “[A]s
soon as the fetishistic representation of the female image threatens to break the spell of illusion, and the
erotic image on the screen appears directly (without mediation) to the spectator, the fact of fetishization,
concealing as it does castration fear, freezes the look, fixates the spectator, and prevents him from
achieving any distance from the image in front of him.” “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in
Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986), 198–209, citation on 209.

26
Vernant, “Death in the Eyes,” 210.

27
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic
Books, 1963), 202–212.

28
See The Medusa Reader and Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought. Jackson &
The Olympians: The Lightning Thief (dir. Chris Columbus, 2010), based on a series of children’s books,
depicts an “updated” Medusa caught in the reflective surface of an iPod, while Clash of the Titans (dir.
Louis Leterrier, 2010), a remake of the 1981 film, and its sequel Wrath of the Titans (dir. Jonathan
Liebesman, 2012), are central to the current trend in large-scale, 3-D fantasy blockbuster films.

29
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1997), 105.

30
Kracauer, Theory of Film, 305.

31
Ibid., 306.

32
See Miriam Hansen, “‘With Skin and Hair’: Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Marseille 1940,” Critical
Inquiry 19 no. 3 (Spring 1993), 437–469.

33
Teresa de Laurentis, “Oedipus Interruptus,” in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (New
York: New York University Press, 1999), 83–96, citation on 84.

34
Ibid., 83.

35
Ibid., 93.

36
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1986] 2001), 57.

37
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, [1989] 2001), 41.
49

38
Ibid., 40.

39
Deleuze, Cinema 1, 16.

40
Hal Foster, “Medusa and the Real,” 181. Foster later expands this notion in Prosthetic Gods. Another
example of Athena’s “civilizational function” can be seen in Aeschylus’s Oresteia. While the Furies
unleashed their primitive rage over Orestes’s sin of matricide, Athena cooled their tempers and transformed
them into the Eumenides, thus establishing, through the intervention of deus ex machina, a system of
democratic, dispassionate justice.

41
Foster reads a Medusan logic in Lacan’s formulation of the image screen, or the surface, often that of a
painting or a work of art, on which the look of the viewer meets a malevolent and threatening gaze, the
gaze of Medusa. Art tames (Lacan uses the French dompter in The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis) the gaze, and renders it approachable for the viewer. For Foster, however, this is only a
deferral or deflection of the gaze’s scotomizing power. See Foster, Prosthetic Gods, 272–286.

42
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 68.

43
Ibid., 79.

44
Ibid., 81.

45
Vernant, Mortals and Immortals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 137–138; cited in Foster,
“Medusa and the Real,” 182. Foster notes that while the English translation of Vernant’s text is
“exchange,” he underscores the original French term, croisement, or crossing, that Vernant uses.

46
Vernant, “Death in the Eyes,” 222.

47
Ibid., 222 and 226.

48
The “Mirror Scare” supercut by Rich Juzwiak, a montage of moments in commercial horror films,
including Hollywood and many J-horror films, demonstrates the frequency of this trope with its many
mirrors capturing surprise visitors, phantom images, and errant doubles, accessed 18 June 2011,
http://fourfour.typepad.com/fourfour/2010/02/mirror-scare-a-supercut.html.

49
Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. Katharine H. Jewett (New York: Routledge,
1994), 102.

50
Ibid., 101.

51
See Ibid., 102–105.

52
The meeting of eye and sun presages Georges Bataille’s later theorization of vision. In “Rotten Sun,” he
notes two tendencies in apprehending the sun: the first, which is done without looking directly at the sun,
idealizes and elevates the sun’s form. He describes this as “abstract.” The second gazes upon the sun
directly, and produces the opposite effect of the first: horror, downward movement, and decomposition.
With “The Jesuve,” the sun is also implicated in sight when he remarks, “a blind sun or a blinding sun, it
hardly matters.” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl, Theory and
History of Literature, vol. 14 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 74.
53
Aristotle, On Dreams, trans. J.I. Beare, accessed 20 June 2011,
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/dreams/.

50

54
Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror, 103.

55
Ibid.

56
Jean de Meung cited in Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror, 116.

57
Jorge Luis Borges, “Covered Mirrors,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin,
1998), 297–298, citation on 297.

58
Owens argues: “The myth’s central episode is almost proto-photographic; it seems to describe that split-
second in which vision bends back upon itself to produce its own imprint.” “Barbara Kruger and the
Medusa Effect,” in The Medusa Reader, 203–209, citation 205.

59
The coincident of mirrors and cameras is not accidental; early photographic cameras, of course, were
based on camera obscuras where images that were bounced off of a more or less complex network of
mirrors were cast onto a surface in a darkened space. Mirrors carried a view of a bright exterior to a dark
interior. The experiments of Nicéphore Niépce, for example, worked with camera obscuras to “fix” their
images onto a stable surface.

60
See Kaja Silverman, “Suture,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986), 219–235.

61
Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 106.

62
Ibid., 138.

63
Ibid., 121 (emphasis added).

64
Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts,104.

65
Marin, To Destroy Painting, 112.

66
Ibid., 129.

67
Ibid., 139.

68
Ibid., 149.

69
In the case of the Odyssey, it is interesting to note that in the Book 9 confrontation with Polyphemus,
Odysseus defeats the Cyclops by blinding him, in yet another example of the significance of visuality in
Greek mythology. He also tricks Polyphemus, whose name means “very famous,” by calling himself Outis,
a diminutive version of Odysseus, but also the word for “nobody” or “no man.” Odysseus and his men
escape Polyphemus’s cave by hiding among a herd of sheep, and when the blinded Polyphemus discovers
their absence, his pleas to his fellow cyclopses are ignored, for, as he cries, “nobody” (or “no man”) has
injured him.

70
Luce Irigaray, interview in Les Femmes, la pornographie et l’erotisme, 1978; cited in Anne Friedberg,
Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 32.

71
Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” Signs 7 no. 1 (Autumn 1981), 42–43 (emphasis original).
See also Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, “Introduction,” in Off with her Head!: The Denial of Women’s Identity
51

in Myth, Religion, and Culture, ed. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz and Wendy Doniger (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995), 1–13.

72
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1985),
166. Cited in Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the
Modern Horror Film (Columbia University Press, 2005), 12.

73
Ibid.

74
Lowenstein cites Benjamin’s argument in The Origin of German Tragic Drama that the death’s head is an
allegorical sign. Lowenstein, Shocking Representation. 13 (emphasis original). As Hansen notes, Kracauer
also used the death’s head as an epigraph to Theory of Film (German-English summary) and an unrealized
closing chapter for the volume. In November 1940, in notes towards a book on film aesthetics, Kracauer
writes: “The face counts for nothing in film unless it includes the death’s-head beneath.” Cited in Hansen,
“‘With Skin and Hair,’” 447.

75
Allan Stoekl, “Introduction,” Visions of Excess, xiv.

76
Shelley, cited in Thomas, Romanticism and Visuality, 168.

77
Keeling, The Witch’s Flight, 48.

78
Ibid., 143.

52
Chapter One: The China Girl

It was not a very exciting thing to do, you know. Just sit and be very still. Expressionless. They
were trying to have consistent lighting and flesh tone. They just wanted my flesh tone. It wasn’t
hard to do…there’s not much to tell you. It was like being in a long still shot, forever.

—Lili Young
1

In 2005, Julie Buck and Karin Segal exhibited “Girls on Film,” a series of 70
photographs blown up from “China girl” frames the two artists and archivists had
collected while working at the Harvard Film Archive. The show gave visibility to an
unusual type of technical image used in film laboratories, and Buck and Segal hoped that
former China girl models might come forward and identify themselves, as China girls
were never credited for their roles. Few did, however. As Buck explained, “We wanted to
free these women, but we realize they're still trapped in their images.”
2
Their own
willingness or reluctance to come forward notwithstanding, the industrial conditions of
anonymity have already sealed off access to these women. My first encounter with a
China girl confirmed this tendency. While visiting Cineric, a film restoration lab in New
York, I was introduced to Ullie, a woman who was photographed as the lab’s China girl
in the 1990s. She was the only woman working at Cineric at the time, when she was and
remains a restoration specialist. Ullie, who wouldn’t give me her last name, was polite
but taciturn. When I asked her about seeing her own image become the lab’s China girl,
the batches of film henceforth known as “Ullies,” she brushed away the question.
“There’s nothing to tell,” she told me, then paused for a moment. Sometimes, she said,
clients would notice her image on a strip of film they were working on. “Isn’t that…?”
53
they’d ask, and in recounting the story, Ullie smiled enigmatically. That was as much of
an answer as she gave.
Like Medusa, the China girl is a woman, an object, an image that is not meant to
be seen, at least not in a direct manner. Variably called the China doll, girl head, or any
number of lab-specific nicknames like Ullie, Marcie, Shirley, and Lili, she is largely
unknown outside of highly specialized sectors of the film industry, namely those that
handle and scrutinize celluloid prints. The image has been used since the early-to-mid
1920s to calibrate color and density for film images, in particular ideal appearances for
skin tone. In any given reel of a commercially-produced 16-milimeter or 35-milimeter
film, three to six China girl frames are typically cut into the Academy leader, normally
between the 10 and the 3 in the countdown. They are used in every country that has or
has had a robust commercial film industry, including the United States, France, Germany,
Italy, China, Korea, Japan, and India. Despite the China girl’s ubiquity behind the scenes,
however, her apparition onscreen is exceedingly rare. She is not frequently glimpsed; not
only would a projectionist have to fail to switch over reels at the correct time, but the
short duration of her fugitive appearance would be just as easy to miss, lost in the blink of
an eye.
The China girl figures as an aporia within film historiography as well. Though
many within the industry, particularly those who physically handle celluloid, express
familiarity or even longtime fascination regarding the China girl, there is not, to my
knowledge, a confirmed written account that describes the first usage of a China girl nor
the origins of the name. Varying accounts have explained the term as relating to China
54
dolls, or porcelain, a material that was either used in actuality or a quality aspired to
among models in their appearance or dress. Some have suggested that Asian women
posed as the first China girls, though in the wealth of China girl images that crop up in
film archives, I have yet to find evidence to back up this claim. A more likely origin is
the orientalist connotation of the term, expressed in the mandarin-collared clothing,
make-up, and pulled-back hairstyles of the women, which privileges a woman’s
subordinate, submissive behavior, qualities that would be useful for the technological
function the image serves. The image’s history is largely vernacular, existing as a kind of
shadow history to those of film stocks and the development of standardization methods
for the film industry. The China girl serves as a mute, subservient, female foil against the
male-dominated accomplishments in photochemistry, engineering, and industrial
expansion, particularly in the first half-century of film’s existence. Hence the blankness
of the China girl’s expression also applies to her own history. Where it concerns the
China girl, it seems, “there’s nothing to tell.” She is Medusan in the sense that she is a
woman valued for her face alone, and while she does not possess the monstrous powers
of petrification, the China girl nevertheless bears the qualities of a modern-day
gorgoneion, a figure that must be concealed for the film’s narrative logic to be sustained.
Her face lends itself not to an individual identity but to a generic marker that is legible
only in relation to other types of images, either copies of herself that circulate within a
film lab, or the images against which she is measured. Like the descriptions of the
Medusa in antiquity, which, as Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux observes, are rarely described
in appearance, only in its horrible effects, the face of the China girl is underdetermined.
3

55
Yet are her eyes “blank” like the gorgon ones Homer describes in The Aeneid, or is it
more a matter of the way we look, perceiving in a Cixousian sense, her distinct
countenance, removed from the supporting role it provides for another’s (Perseus’s)
story?
4

The China Girl as Object

Laboratory Control

The China girl is an image of a woman positioned next to color swatches and patches of
white, gray, and black. In Western nations, the China girl is almost always female, young,
attractive, and white. She is used in film laboratories to calibrate the desired exposure and
color balance of film reels, and thus serves as an essential part of the quality control
process. The China girl also is instrumental in checking the functionality of developing
and printing machines, the evaluation of negative or intermediate film, and the rating of
print stocks.
5

Since the late 1920s and early 1930s and continuing in limited use today, nearly
every film that has been commercially produced on motion picture stock contains a China
girl. As John Pytlak, a former Kodak engineer who pioneered the Laboratory Aim
Density system used in analyzing China girl test strips, described, “she has probably been
in more movies than any other actress in the world.”
6
The practice of quality control
56
associated with the China girl has remained largely unchanged since its inception, despite
the introduction of technological tools that have refined the process. When an exposed
reel of film is printed, a corresponding strip of China girls, usually 4–6 frames, will
accompany the film through its development process. These China girls will then be
compared to “master” China girls that have already been developed to see that the
process happened as expected. China girls are then used in the process of color timing,
where the China girl acts as a kind of shorthand for the rest of the film: if the color
timings read for the China girl attached to the filmstrip match the values that have already
been determined, then the timer knows that the rest of the film strip will be the same. In
the final printing of the film reels, China girls are used again to make sure printing is
consistent across the various reels of a feature-length film, each time tested against a
master or control China girl.
In general, individual laboratories would film their own China girls, sometimes
hiring models or convincing their female lab technicians to pose. Quality control
technicians would shoot a roll of film, either 16 or 35mm, and duplicate it many times
over.
7
The images would then be stored in a freezer to preserve its chemical composition,
with individual frames periodically snipped to be used as test images. A given China girl
could linger in a laboratory for many years, even decades, stored in a freezer like a
corpse. They were absorbed into the workplace culture, given nicknames, and their
images appeared everywhere, not only on every filmstrip but hanging from walls,
lightboxes, or sometimes blown up and appreciated on their own.
57
There are several industrial conditions that support the contention that the practice
was first introduced in early to mid 1920s and became widespread by the end of the
decade. During the first several decades of cinema, the motion picture industry was
expanding tremendously and every stage of production was becoming more standardized.
The motion picture laboratory also grew significantly in both output and research. Since
the start of the film industry at the turn of the century, the Eastman Kodak company,
owing to its robust business in still photography, was responsible for supplying the vast
majority of raw stocks to film producers, producing both camera negative and motion
picture positive film. Through an emphasis on technological innovation and canny
business alliances, Eastman Kodak secured its monopoly of film manufacturing, and, to a
large extent, developing and printing. It benefitted, for example, from the formation of
the Motion Pictures Patents Company in 1909, signing on as the sole provider for the
nine film producers that made up the Trust: Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Essanay, Selig,
Lubin, Kalem, Star, and Pathé.
8
Eastman Kodak expanded its reach in 1911 when it
agreed to sell to independent film producers as well. Following the dissolution of the
Trust in 1917, Eastman Kodak shored up its stake in the burgeoning film industry by
exercising control over much of the processing and developing of its film.
On 9 July 1920, Eastman Kodak announced that it was buying up several large
laboratories in the New York metropolitan area, where the bulk of film development
occurred. “[T]he time has now arrived,” the statement read, “when, in order to protect its
own interest, it is necessary that it should go into the printing and developing of motion-
picture films for the trade generally.”
9
Unsurprisingly, film laboratories and their
58
industrial partners, among them the trade organization Associated Film Laboratories,
Inc., balked at Eastman Kodak’s declaration stating, “These resolutions were reported to
be pungent and fiery and to have impugned the good faith of the film manufacturers, and
to have charged them with planning to absorb the entire laboratory business as an adjunct
of the film-making industry.”
10

Many of those who reacted most vehemently to Eastman Kodak’s news had
relocated to Los Angeles in the teens, in part for better filming conditions and, as
independents, the opportunity to escape the reach of the Trust. In 1921, The Los Angeles
Times reported that 80% of shooting occurred in Hollywood, though 90% of processing
and developing work still occurred in New York at an estimated 15 million feet of film
processed every week, or what amounted to a $20 million industry annually.
11
The same
article waxed optimistic about the construction of the Standard Film Laboratories in
Hollywood, which, the author suggested, “adds an important industrial unit to the
manufacturing element in Los Angeles, and foreshadows the transfer to this city of the
bulk of the developing and printing of films now done in New York.”
12
As the locus of
film production shifted to Hollywood and major studios built their own laboratories,
smaller film laboratories more peripheral to the industry were formed in New York and
other American cities. DuArt, for example, the country’s oldest continuously-run lab, was
founded in 1922 in New York.
13
The Association of Cinema Laboratories (ACL), a union
initially comprised of roughly thirty unaffiliated film laboratories, was founded in 1953
to address the “considerable variety in the ways we prepare films for printing, in our
method of handling, even in the words we used to do business.”
14

59
In the early 1920s, however, Eastman Kodak still dominated the industry in the
manufacture of raw stock and its processing. While several anti-trust suits had been filed
against the company, including a 1915 case in the U.S. District Court accusing the
company of a monopoly of photographic goods, it nevertheless fended off its competitors
with trade alliances like the MPPC and a technologically superior product bolstered by
the work of the Kodak Research Laboratories, established in 1912 under the guidance of
Dr. Charles Edward Kenneth Mees. The Kodak Research Laboratories, headquartered at
Kodak Park in Rochester, New York, experimented with and set many of the industry’s
technical specifications pertaining to the manufacturing, developing, and printing of film.
The Society for Motion Picture Engineers, founded in 1916 to establish a set of standards
for the industry, was closely involved with the work occurring in Rochester. In the first
issue of SMPE (later the Society for Motion Picture and Television Engineers, or
SMPTE), C. Francis Jenkins declared, “It is our duty… as engineers, to wisely direct this
standardization, to secure best standards of equipment, quality, performance,
nomenclature, and, unconsciously, perhaps, a code of ethics.”
15
Jenkins cautioned against
allowing the pursuit of commercial gain to influence technological development, but as
the early years of the organization show, the researchers at Eastman Kodak were also the
ones who contributed most frequently to SMPE. In other words, those who stood to profit
the most from industry standardization were also those positioned at the forefront of
development and research. It is not surprising that as the strength of major film studios
grew, Eastman Kodak became all the more intent on controlling their stake of the
industry.
60
One of Kodak’s researchers in the photographic chemistry department, John
Crabtree, outlined key functional and technical milestones in “The Motion-Picture
Laboratory,” published in the Journal of the SMPTE in 1955. Function and technological
innovation, of course, correlate strongly, particularly with regard to economic incentive.
Crabtree notes twelve functional milestones significant to the development of the film
laboratory. Those that pertain to the broader culture of film laboratories include: “1. The
establishment of the laboratory as a separate unit apart from camera operation (1900)….
7 and 8. The production and printing of sound film and the associated sensitometric
functions associated with those changes (1928)…. 10. color film processing in non-
specialized laboratories (1950)…. 11. The technological adaptations required for a
burgeoning television industry.”
16
For each, laboratories devised new methods of
developing, processing, and printing that were widely disseminated through organizations
such as SMPTE and the ACL. Each required more exacting standards for quality control,
and to this end film laboratories began to use various types of test images, including the
China girl, to measure their results.
The growing demands of the film industry, additionally, accounted for more
efficient printing and developing processes that could be executed on a mass scale. For
example, in the first two decades of filmmaking, laboratories made film positives by
printing original camera negative on fine-grain stock. These negatives, however, were
prone to wearing out, and making duplicate negatives from positives often meant
deteriorating image quality. In 1928 Kodak introduced a 35mm motion-picture
duplicating film that could more accurately make multiple prints from the same
61
negative.
17
The introduction and growing popularity of multiple-reel films in the teens
also exposed the variation in density and exposure between different batch-printed reels.
Increasingly sophisticated film audiences, too, insisted on higher quality prints.
While few in the public had any grasp of the darkroom processes of the film industry,
18

the language of film criticism during the first decades of cinema reflects a growing
awareness of and attentiveness to photography. A 1915 review of Charlie Chaplin’s The
Tramp in The New York Dramatic Mirror, for example, remarks, “The photography at
times might have been a little clearer, and there were instances where working a little
closer to the camera would have brought the comedy of his [Chaplin’s] expressions out
better.”
19

With regard to standardization in the laboratory, the field of sensitometry, or the
reading of tone, density, color, and other related values of the filmstrip, was paramount.
In Motion Picture Laboratory Practice, a 1934 Eastman Kodak manual widely
considered to be the industry standard, Crabtree and Glen Matthews assert, “The
improvement in processing machines, emulsions, developers, and the like have all played
an important part in the improvement of picture quality during the past few years. And
yet, when all of these have been taken into account, the fact remains that sensitometric
control has been a primary factor in the general improvement of picture quality, since it
has revealed certain deficiencies in processing technique, the importance of which has
not been thoroughly recognized…”
20
A little over a decade earlier, in 1922, Crabtree had
presented to the SMPE a paper entitled “A New Sensitometer for the Determination of
Exposure in Positive Printing.” In it, he and L.A. Jones suggest the utility of a
62
mechanized system for ensuring consistent exposure. At that time, judgments in printing
quality were entirely dependent on the human eye: “Admitting the remarkable ability of
the trained timer,” they write, “errors in estimating the effective printing density of a
negative are to be expected on account of the inherent nature of the human eye.”
21
Later
they conclude: “For these reasons it seems desirable, if possible, to develop a method for
the determination of exposure from which the personal equation is entirely eliminated.”
22

Mees concurred, and in the discussion transcripts that follow the transcript of their
communiqué, he throws the full weight of Eastman Kodak’s research capabilities behind
these sensitometric efforts. After observing the significance of sensitometers in creating a
standard method of measuring image density and tone, he notes, “We shall be glad in our
laboratory to assist the Standards Committee in any work with machines showing what
the changes are in those that are made.”
23
The following year, in 1923, John Capstaff and
N.B. Green, also Kodak researchers, announced the successful fabrication of a
densitometer, the instrument to register sensitometric data by measuring the amount of
light blocked by the silver grains in a filmstrip.
24
(Figure 9)
In Capstaff and Green’s article, the authors do not mention reference images to be
used by the densitometer save a footnoted reference to “bar photometers for
densitometric work reference.”
25
Bar photometers, in use since the early nineteenth
century, were used to measure light readings as determined by incremental distances
from a candlelight source.
26
Such methods of step printing, often employing devices
called scene testers, were associated with densitometric measurements, though they did
not necessarily involve a control test image as part of the process.
27

63

Figure 9 Transactions, SMPTE No. 17 (1–4 October 1923)

Though the invention of motion picture densitometers and scene testers occurred
in the early twenties, it was only with the adoption of sensitometry for sound in the latter
part of the decade that these instruments became widely used. Crabtree writes:

After sensitometry had proved its worth in the control of variable-density sound
tracks, the next step was to apply it to the control processing of picture negatives
and prints…. Provided with a sensitometer and densitometer and other refined
instrumental aids, the laboratory was able to measure not only variations in the
activity of the developer and variations in the degree of uniformity of processing
resulting from changes in temperature and degree of agitation, but likewise
variations in uniformity of the photographic characteristics of the film emulsions.
This had the beneficial effect of compelling the film manufacturers to improve the
64
uniformity of their product, the lack of which it was previously possible to blame
on the laboratory.
28

Quality control practices were refined in the laboratory led to changes in the manufacture
of film, namely what was produced by Eastman Kodak. The relay between film
laboratories and industrial research in the twenties led to a loose but more or less standard
adoption of a system of developing, printing, and quality control, including the use of
China girl test images.

Test Cards

Until the late twenties, lab technicians and timers generally relied on the human eye to
judge the quality of a print. In Motion Picture Laboratory Practice, Crabtree and
Matthews echo Crabtree’s and Jones’s article on the implied fallibility of the human eye:

Until a few years ago nearly all negative film, as well as a great deal of positive,
was developed on racks, and the photographic quality of both was controlled by
visual judgment. Usually, the supervisor of the laboratory, or those designated by
him, examined the developed negative or print, and dictated the changes that were
to be made to obtain the result judged to be proper for that particular scene and
production. Obviously, the standard of photographic quality in this case depends
upon the skill and judgment of those whose duty it is to pass upon the finished
product. Nevertheless, in skilled hands, remarkably good and uniform results
were obtained.
29

The Kodak Research Laboratories, meanwhile, worked to produce a technological means
that would complement, but not altogether replace, the reliance on the human eye.
65
Crabtree and Matthews mention the effective use of “sensitometric control strips,”
affirming that “it is evident that the sensitometric control strips must be processed under
the same conditions as the materials being controlled.”
30

The scene tester machines then in use, however, were inadequate. Crabtree and
Matthews note:

While it is generally agreed that an intensity-scale instrument represents the ideal
type, since, in practice, photographic materials are almost always exposed under
conditions of variable intensity, no really satisfactory methods of producing
intensity scales have yet been found.
31

In other words, photographic materials are always vulnerable to different conditions of
lighting and exposure, and require additional methods of evaluating quality. The authors
concede that “[i]n some laboratories, samples of a test negative or positive, usually a
close-up, are developed along with the sensitometric impressions. Many laboratory men
still feel that they can tell more from the picture than from the sensitometric data. By
developing both, a practical test is made.”
32

In these passages, we can observe a tension between the objective precision of the
sensiotmetric machine and the subjective registration of the human eye. Counter to the
assumption that the machinic device would be superior to the eye, in practice, it seems,
each corrects or at least compensates for the failings of the other. Thus the quality control
procedures outlined in Motion Picture Laboratory Practice are not absolute measures,
but comparative ones, instruments that measure the image of a close-up, presumably a
human face, against its perception by a human eye. Crabtree and Matthews suggest that
66
the resolution of this conflict between scientific rigor and subjective, even “artistic”
impression might occur in the future: “There is at present no means of expressing, in a
quantitative manner, the requirements for satisfactory screen quality. Very probably, the
artistic considerations involved largely preclude analytical treatment of the subject.
Positive quality cannot be precisely defined, as it is based essentially on personal
judgment as to what constitutes satisfactory screen reproduction.”
33

Despite the longtime use of test strips in sensitometric analysis, there are only rare
references to China girl cards in the SMPTE literature, and human figures are mentioned
only in passing, if at all. Beyond the citation of a “close-up” in the 1936 publication of
Motion Picture Laboratory Practice, there is a 1958 reference to “a gray lily card” in
George T. Keene’s “A Color Timing Method and Calculator for Subtractive Motion-
Picture Printers,” which emphasizes the gray patch that makes up part of the China girl
image not only as a common point of analysis but a color value prized for its neutrality, a
medium tone that presumably produces the most accuracy. Keene writes: “The only
requirement in gray-card timing is that the card image on the print film appear in all
scenes at a constant color and density, not necessarily ‘gray.’ The choice of this ‘gray’
for a typical scene is left to the timer, but once it is selected, cards in all subsequent
scenes must be matched to this same ‘gray.’ The original card does not necessarily have
to be nonselective, although use of a near-neutral card of medium reflectance will give
the highest timing accuracy.”
34

Keene reinforces Crabtree’s and Matthews’s conclusion that good printing results
are not the sole province of the densitometer but must also be adjusted to the pleasure of
67
the eye. “A print made in this manner, i.e., with gray cards in all scenes matched, might
be called a sensitometrically correct print. It probably will not be the most pleasing print,
but it should be close enough to optimum balance to require only minor changes in some
scenes. These final artistic corrections would be made by the timer after viewing the first
gray-card timed print.”
35
Sensitometry, in Keene’s estimation, can only produce
correctness up to a certain point. The rest, the pleasing or artistic adjustments—in other
words, the subjective rendering—are determined by the timer himself.
Keene’s use of “lily gray card” is shortened in a 1965 article by Pierre Mertz to
the cameraman’s “lily” alone.
36
Lily, in both of these senses, would seem to refer to a
woman’s name, as laboratories commonly gave China girls nicknames like Lili, Marcie,
or Ullie, or as I will later discuss, the color suggested by such colloquialisms as “lily-
white.” Pablo Tabernero’s 1961 article “Establishing and Maintaining Printer Light Color
Balance in Additive Color Printing by a System of Controlled Chance,” meanwhile,
obscures the reference to the human form altogether, naming these test cards “Test
Object.” Tabernero is significantly less reliant on the use of Test Objects than Crabtree
and Matthews or Keene; for him, “it is desirable, but not mandatory, that [the Test
Object] contain a short scale of the fundamental colors R, G, B and Y, M, C. If it contains
normal flesh tones, this also will help.”
37
Indeed, it is not until the challenges of
representing the hue and tone of flesh posed by television does the body of the China girl,
at least in abstract form, resurface in the research and training material employed by film
laboratories.

68
Color

Though various attempts at adding color to film had existed since the beginning of
cinema, Technicolor dominated the color market from the late teens through the early
fifties, in large part due to the vast resources the company poured into its color processes
and the protectiveness with which it guarded its photochemical secrets. Although
Technicolor opened up its operations to licensing services and equipment to other
producers in the thirties, it maintained a significant degree of control and secrecy over the
cinematography, developing, and printing of its film stocks. Fred E. Basten writes: “A
contract with Technicolor was a package that included not only the rental of the three-
color camera but a Technicolor cameraman who worked as an advisor to the studio’s
cinematographer; advice given to art directors, set directors and designers, wardrobe and
property departments; use of make-up and assistance to the studio make-up departments,
the requirement of special lighting equipment; and laboratory processing up to and
including the final release print.”
38
Technicolor thus held a virtual monopoly over the
color film market during the first half of the twentieth century.
Technicolor did much to shift the work of color film to the laboratory, albeit
specialized ones controlled by the company. The two-strip Technicolor I process,
invented in 1917, required a specialized projector that added color to black and white
film prints through filters. The two-strip Technicolor II, which was introduced in 1922,
added color on the film itself in a subtractive process, and could be shown on regular
projectors. A third and far more advanced Technicolor stock, which made use of a three-
69
color system, was introduced in 1932. To process its film, Technicolor opened its own
laboratory and photographic unit in Hollywood to process prints.
39

Kodak, which in the meantime had been collaborating with Technicolor on
Kalmus Positive, introduced a three-color, single-strip color negative and printing film
stock in 1949. Previously it had been working on its own color formulas at its research
facility, and had already achieved success with the second iteration of Kodachrome,
released in 1935 on 16mm. This Kodachrome was significant because it located the
dynamics of color within the chemisty of the film, rather than in the optics of the camera
as previous systems, including those of Technicolor and Kodakolor, had required. The
image of a woman in a headscarf, possibly Leopold Mannes’s and Leopold Godowsky’s
secretary Shirley, appears in different batch tests for Kodachrome.
40
(Figure 10) This
woman later reappeared as a China girl in Buck and Segal’s “Girls on Film” project,
culled from the vaults of the Harvard Film Archive.
The development of the Eastmancolor negative color stock was significant
because it meant that any lab, and not just those operated by Technicolor, could develop
and print color film. DuArt built the first printing machine to handle color negative film
in the early fifties, and other labs soon followed suit, just as other film manufacturers
released their own chromogenic stocks. With the newly available color stocks,
laboratories faced more pressure to maintain consistent control over variations not only in
image density, but now color. Initially, individual labs produced their own China girls.
By the sixties, the film manufacturers were also selling China girls to accompany each
70
film stock. In the seventies, for example, Kodak posed different China girls in the same
brightly-colored, cheongsam-like shirt, one girl for each stock.

Figure 10 Kodachrome est strips with handwriting by Leopold Godowsky
and Leopold Mannes, ca. early 1930s

Accurate color reproduction was especially crucial in the representation of flesh
tones. Accordingly, SMPTE publications can also be seen to grapple with the difficulties
of representing flesh tones. Predictably, these articles abstract the body into a range of
different skin colors, couching implicit issues of race and racial differentiation within
technical jargon and supposedly scientific-objective rhetoric.
In response to new technologies such as sound, color film and later, television,
film laboratory technicians and video camera and monitor calibration specialist had to
devise new methods of quality control. For all the emphasis on densitometry between the
thirties and the fifties, there are few printed references to the human figure until the
71
challenges posed by television. “Flesh tone” and “skin tone” don’t appear in SMPTE
publications until 1955 and 1956, respectively, and both occur as particular problems
arising from tonal and color variables of broadcast television.
41
In color television,
Salvatore J. Bonsignore confirms the primacy of the representation of flesh tones. “Skin
tone is regarded as the most important standard in the color picture,” he writes. “As long
as skin tones appear natural to the public, the color picture will be successful.”
42
Color
effects in lighting, make-up, and staging were permissible so long as they did not
interfere with the perceived natural color of a (white) actor’s face.
The British film manufacturer BKSTS produced a China girl, or “the BKSTS
Reference Leader Picture,” in 1970 to “assist the object and subjective colour balance
control of 16mm and 35mm prints in both the film laboratory and the television studio.”
43

(Figure 11) The company, following the practice of inserting China girls into the
Academy leader of a filmstrip, prescribed “[f]our frames of the standard negative are
inserted into the leader at the colour reference position of each cut negative roll and the
whole roll is then graded to look consistent with the leader picture. The leader picture
later helps the telecine operator to adjust the colour balance of his machine.”
44
The
BKSTS Reference Leader Picture formed the foundation of “a system of
control…allowing each laboratory to continue with its individual grading technique, the
end result being assessed on one common picture.”
45
It was used to assist in the film-to-
television conversions, or the telecine process, containing both “a GREY SCALE for
television waveform use and a CONTROL SQUARE for laboratory densitometer use.”
46

72

Figure 11 BKSTS Reference Leader Picture in negative, 1970

Knight explained the choice of the female figure as the BKSTS reference image:

An aesthetically pleasing picture was required that would provide both objective
and subjective information relating to tone response and colour rendering at the
laboratory grading phase of producing a print and later in setting-up telecine. The
picture therefore contains a face, in close-up, and a selection of neutral grays…A
girl’s face was chosen, rather than a man’s, for no better reason than it seems
traditional to do so. However, since the BBC Research Department finds that the
face of a man makes a more critical test of colour fidelity than that of a girl, future
test scenes may be based on men: after all, more men are seen on television than
women.
47

The last statement, which suggests that men’s faces might produce better or more
accurate color results for quality control, rests on the unusual presumption that gender
might produce differences in skin color. Indeed, the notion that gender might account for
differential skin tone instead of race, a topic that is all but entirely sublimated in film
industrial literature, is striking.
73
The avoidance of race and of bodies in general is manifest in charts that display
“flesh tone” chips or dummy heads fitted with wigs made from human hair. In a
discussion of the BBC’s Test Card 61, E.W. Taylor and S.J. Lent argue that the image of
a live female model provided advantages over these two strategies in “consistency,
uniformity, naturalness, and spectral reflection characteristics.”
48
(Figure 12) They note
that in the printing of film, “the portrayal of a live model enables the subjective flesh tone
balance to be readily made. In this respect, care has been taken to ensure that the picture
reproduced on the television display appears as natural as possible.”
49
The authors seek to
reproduce the accuracy of China girl cards for television, but do so by abstracting the
colors of the body in “[a] suitable choice of printing inks …[which have] resulted in
spectral reflectance characteristics which are substantially the same as real human
skin.”
50
The most extreme example of the color abstracting of the body can be found in
the “skin” signal used for television in the late seventies. Produced by the WGBH
Educational Foundation and the 3M Corporation, the signal’s screen of pale orange was
intended to match white skin tone, and in a semantically loaded turn, it replace the
televisual process of scanning with its own terminology of “skinning.” As Richard Dyer
notes, “The whole processed centered on blank images representing nothing, and yet
founded in the most explicit way on a particular human flesh colour.”
51
Out of
nothingness, it seems, the empty television signal produced a regime of supposedly
natural, neutral skin tone.
In 1976, Kodak engineer John Pytlak introduced the Laboratory Aim Density (or
LAD) system, which gives a more precise reading of density based on a 18% gray patch
74
that forms part of the China girl image.
52
By 1982 Kodak was producing its own LADs,
with the LAD patch being the spot of gray read with the densitometer. This became and
remains the industry standard. From a technical perspective, the LAD patch rendered the
China girl obsolete, to the extent that the image was ever necessary for more than
“artistic” reasons. Yet even the LAD was accompanied by the image of a woman in
close-up. (Figures 13 and 14)

Figure 12 BBC Test Card 61, 1978

Digital technologies, of course, have developed their own variations of LAD
controls, often without a human face accompanying them. Yet despite the increasingly
sophisticated technological means of calibrating color, the image of the China girl
persists even when rendered technologically obsolete. Many of the technicians I’ve
spoken to have admitted there is no longer any real need for the China girl. Yet she
75
lingers, kept by lab workers as a visual reference, for artistry or pleasure or, perhaps, in
the midst of a dying film industry, a sense of nostalgia. Lily looks up, her face familiar,
her smile warming the cold calibrations of the machine.

Figure 13 Kodak LAD, ca. 1978

Figure 14 Kodak LAD currently in use, arranged on a lightbox

76
The China Girl as Image

In the previous section, I considered the China girl as a specialized object used in quality
control procedures in industrial film laboratories. As an image, however, the China girl is
more perplexing. How do we, or how should we, look at the China girl? For lab
technicians, she is the most carefully studied image of any film. The way she’s regarded
in a lab, however, is highly particular: technicians rely on the China girl’s familiarity,
memorizing the ideal amount of detail and contrast in the woman’s hair, the color of her
eyes and lips, and comparing them against the test China girls that travel with other
images. In a lab, a China girl is most effective when it disappears as a distinctive image
and registers instead as a common, ubiquitous one, noticeable only when something
appears out of place.
Viewers, meanwhile, rarely see the China girl. Only when a projectionist fails to
switch over reels during a screening, allowing the countdown leader to appear, do we
sometimes see the image for a few fleeting frames. Its positioning at the celluloid
extremities of commercial films makes it exceedingly difficult, or rare, to see. In fact, if
everything’s working properly, we’re not supposed to see it at all. One projectionist I
spoke to referred to the China girl as “the face of the ashamed projectionst.”
53
When we
see it, it signals a certain kind of problem: its visibility is a glitch, a momentary
breakdown in the cinema machine. Always unexpected, the China girl brings to light, to
visibility, all the previously unseen processes, both cultural and technical, that attend its
image. It is in some ways prohibited, as it reveals the inner workings of the processes that
77
bring films into being, disrupting a movie’s narrative reverie by literally exposing the
constitutive seams of the film’s construction. Countdown leader has this effect, too,
though I would argue that the image of a human face is especially enigmatic as it raises
the question of who this person is, when her image was recorded, and how she came to be
attached to the film that we’re seeing. The China girl is cut into the film, but not in the
way images are typically strung together. Instead, its appearance ruptures montage,
exploding the smooth sutured surface.
In the two ways people look at the China girl, either intently, as lab technicians
do, or surreptitiously, as more casual movie viewers do, both modes involve a type of
occlusion. The first loses the specificity of the overall figure in favor of variation of
details, while the second is premised on the idea that we shouldn’t see the China girl at
all. What might it mean, then, to recover, in a visual sense, the full view of the China girl,
or is such a project even possible?
Following the arguments of seventies feminist film scholars such as Laura
Mulvey and Teresa de Laurentis, we might say that the China girl, like the position of all
women in film, is an image that, at least in part, is constituted by the ways she’s regarded.
Yet the China girl is unlike the woman of classical Hollywood cinema, who, for Mulvey,
“can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it.”
54
Instead of bearing the
meanings made by men, the two occluding modes of looking at the China girl produce a
figure paradoxically constituted in her exclusion. Indeed, for many technicians, the China
girl’s image as a woman is almost incidental. In rare cases, it doesn’t even depict a
woman, but a child, a couple, or even a puppet. (Figure 15) Functionally, the China girl
78
need not signify anything other than itself. It is the master against which duplicates of its
identical image are tested. In this way it is no different from the LAD patch or any other
marker to be read with an instrument. In this sense, it doesn’t matter what the China girl
looks like at all, as it refers only to itself in a tautological circuit of signification.

Skin Tone

Given the apparent non-functioning of the China girl, the image’s enduring presence, in
use still today despite the fact that it is no longer required for technical analysis, becomes
all the more puzzling. Lab technicians insist that it offers a visual check of densitometer
readings, a recognizable form to confirm sensitometric measurements. As a face,
however, the China girl suggests something more, an attachment that approaches a kind
of pathos or sentimentality evident in the many private collectors of China girl frames or,
as DuArt’s Bob Smith said to me, “I love the project, I really do. Normally I don’t get
emotionally involved in these, but this one is, as soon as I heard [it was about the] China
girl, it was almost like a commandment to me.”
55
As film facilities shrink or shut down,
seen in Kodak’s bankruptcy filing and the closing of many film labs (DuArt, for example,
sold off its film equipment in 2010), the China girl has become one of the more poignant
symbols of a disappearing industry. (Figure 16) Its ephemerality, the anonymity of the
women who posed as China girls, the abstractions and rare mentions of the image in
industrial manuals, and the literally marginal position the figure has to the history of
79
cinema, may be, somewhat ironically, the trait that best expresses a sense of nostalgia for
a vanishing medium.

Figure 15 Puppet China Girl, date and origin unknown

The decidedly unsentimental technical articles concerning skin tone, meanwhile,
indicate that the China girl is valued for the woman’s flesh alone, which some argue
provide an index of ideal skin tone. Here, what the China girl looks like matters
tremendously. Given the fact that nearly all China girls in western countries are racially
white, the woman’s idealized appearance means an index based on her white skin. The
notion of “ideal,” of course, is conflated rather problematically with whiteness. The idea
that one single skin tone can be representative for all others, whether restricted to the
tonal range of white skin or inclusive of non-white values, speaks to the degree to which
whiteness is perceived as natural, ubiquitous, and to a great extent, invisible or
inconspicuous, like the China girl herself.
56
The aim for an ideal, which is also measured
80
as a norm, produces a fiction of a single color against which all others can and must be
measured. As Taylor and Lent assert, “Test Cards 61 and 61P have been designed to
present as natural a portrayal as possible of a human subject on a color television display,
so that a sensitive flesh tone color balance may be carried out between the cameras in a
studio. The spectral reflectance characteristics of human skin have been reproduced in the
test cards as accurately as possible.”
57
The use of the word “natural,” here reduced to a
single, white subject, signals the artificial and arbitrary premise of racial categorization.
Accuracy, too, seems at best a contingent value.

Figure 16 Lili Young, China Girl at DuArt, ca. 1968
81
The characteristics of the natural are organized around what Kalpana Seshadri-
Crooks calls “a master signifier—Whiteness—that produces a logic of differential
relations.”
58
Whiteness, in an ideal, singular form, is taken as natural, and in the film
laboratory this is translated into technological and supposedly rational terms. “This
inherently asymmetrical and hierarchical opposition,” Seshadri-Crooks asserts, “remains
unacknowledged due to the effect of difference engendered by this master signifier,
which itself remains outside the play of signification even as it enables the system.”
59
In
visual terms, whiteness institutes a “regime of visibility,” but it also remains outside of
that system, a value that is natural, neutral, and because of these traits, invisible.
Richard Dyer affirms this paradoxical invisibility of whiteness, noting that white
signifies both a color and the absence of color. “Whites must be seen to be white, yet
whiteness as race resides in invisible properties and whiteness as power is maintained by
being unseen…. “
60
In descriptions like that of the BBC Test Card 61, the white face is
assumed to be natural and normal, with the implication that non-white faces are deviant.
Dyer notes a similar tendency in trade photography publications: “The assumption that
the normal face is a white face runs through most published advice given on photo- and
cinematography. This is carried above all by illustrations which invariably use a white
face, except on those rare occasions when they are discussing the ‘problem’ of dark-
skinned people.”
61
These manuals, like those of the motion picture industry, “never refer
to the white face as such, for to do so would immediately signal its particularity. It is
rather in describing facial and skin qualities that the unpremeditated assumption of a
white face is apparent.”
62
In the technical rhetoric of trade publications for both still and
82
motion picture photography, white faces are presented as the norm, while non-white faces
are discussed only as problems, a range of darker tones that fall short of the ideal.
The introduction of color film, however, problematized the white face as well. If
white functionally means being without hue,
63
then color film threatened to add color to
supposedly neutral and colorless faces. This tendency certainly existed in black and white
film as well, as color was registered in different image densities, but color film
exacerbated the differences between hues. Color in film brought white faces into
dangerous proximity to “colored” ones, and the film industry responded with strict
guidelines around the uses of color to minimize the risk of “coloring” a white face. Skin
tones had always been difficult to light and photograph with black and white film, and the
issues of accurate tonal representation became more urgent with color film.
64
As a 1936
issue of Fortune Magazine explained, “The color of naked flesh is one of the hardest to
catch with the color camera.”
65
Richard Misek notes that SMPTE’s Elements of Color in
Professional Motion Pictures, published in 1957, limited the photography of food and
faces to white light, and he surmises that the prohibition against colored lights,
permissible in other contexts, arose from a fear of racializing white faces, or obscuring
the differences, and the implicit hierarchal structure, between white and non-white faces:
“Perhaps the true horror in classical Hollywood was in fact not a green face, but a yellow
face or a pale brown face, a face whose ‘true’ whiteness or blackness was obscured by
colored light.”
66
Lending too much color to a white face with lighting, make-up, or
costuming could also mean racializing it, thus destroying its ideological neutrality, and
implicit superiority, as the master signifier.
83
Technicolor, which billed itself as “natural color” in an advertisement from the
forties, was unsurprisingly vocal in its prescriptions for color applications.
67
Natalie
Kalmus, wife of Technicolor’s chief color consultant Herbert Kalmus, published
guidelines for color usage in her 1935 article “Color Consciousness.” In an attempt to
codify uses of color according to genre, she suggests that vibrant, gaudy colors be limited
to musicals, fantasy sequences, and pageantry while restrained uses of color be applied to
naturalistic scenarios that strive for realism. While Technicolor’s motives were certainly
economic—Misek argues that Technicolor purposefully prescribed color schemes into
pre-existing codes of narrative Hollywood cinema
68
—there is also an underlying racial
and ethnic bias as well. Bright colors, Kalmus writes, should be used sparingly, as
embellishment or accent, and not overwhelm the narrative structure which would
otherwise be cast in “neutral” tones: “…taking our cue from Nature, we find that colors
and neutrals augment each other.”
69
As Kalmus urges restraint with regard to bright
color, however, it becomes apparent that the “color balance” she suggests as belonging to
a “natural” order only works if there is a relative scarcity of color to offset and flatter
predominantly neutral tones, which is to say, white faces. Additionally, the racial
connotations of the genres Kalmus suggests are clear: spectacle was associated with
ethnic displays of dance and music, while the more sober genre of realist drama, which
comprise the bulk of cinema, were enacted by white people. Too much color, she
concludes, lead to “unnatural and disastrous results.”
70

The inherent “racial character of technologies” that Dyer observes reveals itself in
the use of white skin tone as a measure for others.
71
As a racial trait, whiteness may be
84
ideologically neutral or invisible, but in color analysis, it nevertheless registers a range of
chromatic values. Thus the presumed neutrality of white skin tones often presents a
problem in terms of technical analysis. When, during the fifties, David L. MacAdam of
pursued printing tests of “a young lady,” he concluded that “[o]ptimum reproduction of
skin color is not ‘exact’ reproduction… ‘exact reproduction’ is rejected almost
unanimously as ‘beefy’. On the other hand, when the print of highest acceptance is
masked and compared with the original subject, it seems quite pale.”
72
Lighting and
exposing a film based on a white face often means that the values for everything else—
sets, props, costumes, and other actors—are thrown off. A correct exposure for a pale
white face, for example, might mean that a darker complexion will be underexposed. In
films where two actors with strongly contrasting skin tones appear in the same frames
together, Hollywood cinematographers tend to favor exposures that compliment the white
actor.
73
David Corley, former film laboratory technician and founder of DSC Labs, a
company that makes digital test patterns for television broadcast, confirms this problem
of using a white face as an index for color representation. He admits, “Personally, I found
[China girls] totally useless. Because there is an enormous range of skin tones, how do
you say one skin tone is right and another is wrong? The only thing a China girl would be
useful for would be a subjective evaluation of the image.”
74
In these examples, the
objective neutrality of the white face is not only revealed to be a highly subjective and
unstable visual referent, but it can also undo the work of realism it is meant to uphold.

85
Women and Color

Just as they bear the burden of narrative meaning in film, women are also made to
express the many and often contradictory significations of color. The female body, and in
particular the woman’s face, has served as a model for both ideal whiteness and the
pitfalls, but also potential allures, of colorization. As Dyer notes, stars like Lilian Gish
were commonly bathed in a glowing, radiant white light to appear even whiter than their
male counterparts.
75
bell hooks more pointedly observes the racial imperative to make the
idealized woman “ultra-white,” being “a cinematic practice that sought to maintain a
distance, a separation between that image and the black female Other; it was a way to
perpetuate white supremacy.”
76
In this sense, rendering women brilliantly, luminously
white affirms the structure of racial hierarchicalization that Seshadri-Crooks describes.
This lends credence to the idea that “China” in the term China girl signals the material of
refined porcelain, manifest, in some nicknames, as China dolls. Dyer reminds us that,
until the early 19
th
century, cosmetics aimed to make faces literally white, from the
poisonous ceruse (white lead) painted on women’s faces since the time of ancient Greece
to the rice powder that replaced it in the modern era.
77
As mentioned previously, the
“lily” of lily card, could also mean lily white.
Yet women have also been more prone to the deleterious effects of color. As
Elements of Color in Professional Motion Pictures describes, the color scheme of a film
is determined by that of the female star:

86
The feminine star, for example, whose appearance is of paramount importance,
must be given undisputed priority as to the color of make-up, hair and costume
which will best complement her complexion and her figure. If her complexion
limits the colors she can wear successfully, this in turn restricts the background
colors which will complement her complexion and her costumes to best
advantage.
78

Female stars set the range of color in the rest of the film, at least to the degree that the
imperatives of maintaining the whiteness of their faces are obeyed. With the China girl,
too, the look of the woman behind the scenes also determines the look of the film. Neale
observes: “…from the earliest days of colour photography [women] function both as a
source of the spectacle of colour in practice and as a reference point for the use and
promotion of colour in theory.”
79
Women, in Neale’s analysis, serve as both the central,
colorful subjects of films as well as the references of color behind the scenes. They are
the anchors for both systems.
As the stakes of color signification are higher for women, women are
correspondingly more vulnerable to color’s potentially ethnicizing influences. Color, in
this sense, conflates the brightly hued with the ethnic, even in black and white films,
where color variation registers as different shades of gray. Female stars like Marlene
Dietrich in Shanghai Express (dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1931) and Martha Vickers in The
Big Sleep (dir. Howard Hawks, 1946) represented the luminous white ideal as being
corrupted by tonally deeper, ethnicizing influences, the moral darkness of their femmes
fatales matched by orientalist mises-en-scène. The films’ male heroes may be
momentarily seduced by these women’s charms—we might imagine Clive Brook’s and
87
Humphrey Bogart’s sallow faces clouded by puffs of incense—but they emerge from the
films more or less intact, with just a trace of ash to brush off their sleeves.
Femmes fatales, of course, were usually punished for their misdeeds, but despite
their usually grim fates, the corrupting influences of “color” were kept in check, on an
ideological level, by barring the faces of ethnic actors. As Michael Rogin observes,
“Hollywood orientalism could bring once-forbidden pleasures to movie audiences as long
as actual Asian Americans were kept out.”
80
Again as Kalmus insists, color has its
undeniable pleasures, and implicitly these are associated with displays of ethnicity. Color
can be enjoyed so long as it is kept at bay, subservient to the rules of naturalism that
positions neutrality qua whiteness as primary. Thus, as Homay King and others have
argued, ethnic spaces were common sites of spectacle visited in Hollywood films, the
Orient chief among them. King writes: “If Asian Americans have been marginalized in
Hollywood cinema…this marginalization seems at least in part to represent a response to
the centrality of the East as a topic of fantasy representation and concern.”
81
White
women served as proxies for colorful, ethnic, and frequently orientalist entertainment,
though the vision of the East they conjured was wholly imaginary. In keeping with
Edward Said’s formulation of orientalism, the Orient functioned in classical Hollywood
cinema as a space of projection onto which Western notions of identity and power,
particularly those relating to gender, were negotiated.
In the laboratory, too, China girls remain insistently white. Bob Smith, who began
working in developing and printing as part of Navy training during the Second World
War, recalls an “original” China girl that was actually Asian, though I have yet to locate
88
this image.
82
The earliest China girl I’ve found, attached to prints made during early
thirties, consists of a white woman wearing a black dress and a fur white collar.
83
(Figure
17) It is most likely that white women, certainly the standard model for China girls in
Hollywood’s later years, were also the first to be used as test subjects.

Figure 17 China girl, early 1930s

Even more recent attempts at providing a broader range of skin tone references
for Shirleys, the China girl equivalent in the realm of still photography and digital media,
still privilege lighter-skinned models. One of the Shirleys originally packaged with
Adobe’s Photoshop program depicts, for example, a Latinized woman wearing an
elaborate, fruit-filled headdress and holding a mandolin. Despite these exaggerated
markers of the woman’s Latino ethnicity, her face remains bright white. Lorna Roth
89
observes: “the lightness of complexion attests to the reappearance and re-privileging of
the ‘look’ of Whiteness as a beauty norm in this ‘internationally ideal’ photo.”
84
Thus,
whiteness asserts its dominance as the “master signifier” even as the threat of
ethnicization would appear to colorize, or perhaps colonize, it.
In this context, then, the descriptor of “China” in the name China girl speaks less
to a racial marker than an ethnic or orientalizing one.
85
If it is taken as material, like
porcelain (Figure 18), it affirms the ideal whiteness of the China girl’s face; the
orientalist connotations, meanwhile, are signaled not only in the name but in the bright
clothing worn by the model. The otherness signaled by the orientalist designations of the
China girl is deflected by adornment and other strategies that aim to minimalize and
marginalize the oriental, the feminine, and the decorative, three qualities that Rosalind
Galt has argued as forming, in concert, the denigrated category of the pretty, a term
whose three implications have particular significance for the China girl. Galt contends
that the pretty, in its opposition to masculine, rational, and chiefly Western aesthetics, can
productively form a politics of the excluded, namely that of race, gender, and sexuality.
86

Female stars, despite the centrality of their screen images, are excluded by virtue of their
positioning as objects to be manipulated and exchanged by men. China girls, meanwhile,
are doubly excluded, denied agency within the dominant system of aesthetic
representation, and also, as a visual referent behind the scenes, withheld from view.
In his preface to The Order of Things, Michel Foucault relates the formative
experience of reading Jorge Luis Borges’s description of a “certain Chinese
encyclopedia” in his essay “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language” (1942).
87
The highly
90
eccentric encyclopedia organized different classes of real and fantastical animals with an
incoherent, though no less self-evident, system of classification, and in doing so
“demonstrated…the exotic charm of another system of thought… [which] is the
limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”
88
The text’s inscrutability
is tied to its Chineseness, which, as Foucault explains, is considered “the most
meticulous, the most rigidly ordered”
89
—indeed, the most mandarin—of cultures,
encountered at the boundary of the West. As with the China girl, the designation of
Chineseness marks the border of what is familiar, less a specific culture than an
imaginary one, an alternative terrain where everything unfamiliar—animals both real and
imaginary—resides, a place beyond what we see or know, an “atlas of the impossible.”
90

Figure 18 Mannequin as China girl, date and origin unknown

91
The Invisible Face

Thus far I’ve described the China girl only generally in gendered, racially complex, and
fundamentally descriptive terms, as if she were merely an object, an image, a
homogenous construction. While in a grammatical sense that homogeneity holds true, we
should also bear in mind the distinct, if anonymous, identities of the many women who
posed as China girls. As Buck and Segal’s photographs attest, there have been hundreds,
if not thousands, of China girl models. Nearly all of them are shot in close-up, a framing
that, since the films of D.W. Griffith, allow for psychological expression of the
individual. Béla Balázs was one of the earliest and most persuasive theorists of the close-
up, suggesting that the proximity of the camera to the face revealed
“‘microphysiognomic’ details even of this detail of the body.”
91
In addition to minute
expressions, the close-up also opened up the possibility of unconscious ones.
92
This
unconscious expression, in many ways suggestive of Benjamin’s “optical unconscious,”
is that of “the invisible face behind the visible,” a reading into the face of the performer
that discerns a countenance potentially quite different from what a viewer might
immediately perceive. Balázs notes: “On a face, too, one can read ‘between the lines.’”
93

Siegfried Kracauer suggests in Theory of Film that the close-up has a dual
purpose, being both a “unit of montage” and “an end in itself.”
94
The close-up image of a
star’s face is a naturalized part of film grammar, something intended to move the
narrative along, but, as “an end in itself,” it also potentially ruptures that flow. As he
writes, close-ups “blow up our environment in a double sense: they enlarge it literally;
92
and in doing so, they blast the prison of conventional reality, opening up expanses which
we have explored at best in dreams before.”
95

This is in some way analogous to de Laurentis’s formulation of Stephen Heath’s
notion of a “narrative image,” a term that describes how women in cinema join together
“visual and narrative registers effected by the cinematic apparatus of the look.”
96
The
narrative image both propels narrative flow but also has the power to freeze it. Mulvey,
too, notes the capacity of the woman’s image to work against linear narrative drive: “The
presence of women in an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet
her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the
flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be
integrated into cohesion with the narrative.”
97
Gilles Deleuze takes this notion further,
suggesting that close-ups tend to obliterate the three functions of the face, namely the
individuating, the socializing, and the communicating: “The close-up is the face, but the
face precisely in so far as it has destroyed its triple function—a nudity of the face much
greater than that of the body, an inhumanity much greater than that of animals… the
close-up turns the face into a phantom, and the book of phantoms.”
98
Combining
Kracauer’s and Deleuze’s notion of the close-up with de Laurentis’s and Mulvey’s
observations about the function of women in terms of narrative progression and arrest,
then, suggests that the close-up of a woman, here a kind of gorgoneion, can work to
undermine narrative frameworks as much as it affirms it. To use Kracauer’s phrasing, this
is a potentially explosive power.
93
The China girl, of course, is positioned differently in relation to the faces
onscreen, not the invisible other buried within the visible image, but something that
remains outside the field of vision offered by the screen. Narratively, the China girl
relates little to the film to which she is attached; though China girls are on rare occasions
produced for individual films, their production and usage exists independently of the
films that enter the laboratory for processing. China girls can thus accompany any
number of films, and in some cases, several different China girls, artifacts from different
laboratory processes (especially in the case of a restored or duplicated film), can
accumulate on the same strip of leader. The China girl is significantly detached from the
film she serves, and from the perspective of viewers, who are mostly unaware of her
existence, the structure she produces is that of an absence, and an imperceptible one at
that. She is an extreme manifestation of that which suture seeks to exclude, though she is
no less critical in determining cinema’s system of representation.
99

If, following Balázs, a close-up reveals an invisible face within that of an actor,
the China girl figures a different kind of invisible face, one that speaks more generally to
the visible face of film itself. We have seen how the China girl enables the image
onscreen, determining its particular look. Might it also have an arresting, destructive
power like that of the conventional close-up, the volatile side of the narrative image?
What happens when we look at the China girl like any other face, when it does not flash
by aberrantly but is sustained and scrutinized, both as symbol and subject, or function and
figure? What dangers or explosions do we risk when we look at this close-up?

94
The China Girl as Film

Emblem

The China girl has been taken up as a subject in a number of experimental films, many of
which could be considered structural films, to use P. Adams Sitney’s description of a
group of films, made during the sixties and seventies, concerned with their own material
properties of light, projection, and celluloid. The China girl was appealing to many
structural filmmakers; as James Benning, who uses a China girl image in Grand Opera
(1978), has observed, “all films were always structured by a China girl.”
100
Perhaps
because experimental films, unlike commercial film directors, were more likely to come
into direct contact with the celluloid itself, they had more familiarity with the China
girl.
101

Perhaps the best known example of a China girl in experimental film occurs in
George Landow (who later changed his name to Owen Land)’s Film in Which There
Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (1965). (Figure 19) In this
film, Landow optically prints a strip of China girl test leader and doubles it horizontally
across the frame so that the titular edge letter and sprocket holes are visible. The clip’s
brevity and its repetition through optical printing produces, in the China girl, a convulsive
blinking. Sitney called the film “a found object extended to a simple structure…the
essence of minimal cinema,”
102
with the industrial footage Landow employs serving as
synecdoche for the entirety of filmmaking as an industrial as well as artistic practice.
95
Correspondingly, the film’s title is provocatively generic, describing, in a sense, the
conditions for every film, or at least every film’s leader. Here the word “appear” suggests
a “performance” of incidental material, including the accumulation of scratches and dirt
particles that gather over time, and the marks of edge numbers and sprocket hole punches
that exist prior to the film’s exposure. What’s missing from this description, of course, is
the lead performer, the China girl herself.

Figure 19 Still from Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc.
(dir. George Landow, 1965)

Sitney’s commentary on the film focuses on the Duchampian ready-made quality
of the China girl image that remains onscreen for the duration of the film, ignoring the
specificity of the figure that we see. Landow, for his part, didn’t seem to realize that he’d
used the China girl image in a number of films, referring to them decades later as
“bimbos.”
103
The insistence on the found material’s generic quality, its industrial use
96
standing in for the rest of cinema, obscures the images it shows, particularly that of the
China girl. Yet content, as David James argues, is not incidental:

The representation of the female model does engage issues of spectatorship that
are continuous with the dominant issues of the film: for instance, her profession is
to be looked at, but here she will alternately be overlooked by and look at us; the
rhythm of her blinking is one of the signifiers of the mechanism of the film’s
construction and the source of its characteristic pulse; and though she may look
like the Dragon Lady, she is in fact only China Girl. A phantom of industrial
cinema, an object of the attention of technicians but customarily withheld from
the audience, she is now, like the dust she will gather, for the first time made
insistently present to our attention…
104

The China girl highlights the disjunction between women onscreen, whose images are
given to be seen, and the women behind the scenes, like her, who are not meant to be
seen at all. She is constitutive of cinema’s system of representation, but excluded from it.
James continues: “Consequently, the film’s major tension becomes the competition for
our attention between that image and the formal and material effects it carries, between
seeing it and seeing through it.”
105

Here we see the China girl in the place of other women onscreen, positioned
centrally in the frame, yet she still appears much the same way as she does in regular film
viewing contexts, something to be seen through, as James argues, or an object that, in
Sitney and Landow’s commentary, serves as a abstracted marker of industrial conditions
of the medium. If, as Mary Anne Doane argues, female faces have functioned in cinema
as screens, or the “technological support of the process of imaging,” the woman’s face is
represented only generally, a generic, blank image. For Doane, the China girl is one of
the most revealing examples of this obfuscating tendency: “What we witness in the China
97
Doll phenomenon is the hollowed out form of the star system, its evisceration—the
impossible oxymoron of the anonymous star. In these hidden ‘screen tests,’ the figure of
the star is drained of its most essential traits—recognition and recognizability—and the
female face becomes sheer surface.”
106
In Landow’s film, the China girl’s momentary
visibility only reproduces, within the domain of structural filmmaking, the industrial
structures that kept her from view in the first place.
Morgan Fisher’s Standard Gauge (1984), meanwhile, gives specific attention to
the China girl, naming it among a collection of other artifacts gathered during Fisher’s
time working at a stock footage company and an editor on various low-budget films in
the seventies. (Figure 20) In this single-take film, Fisher pulls out discarded scraps of
found 35mm film and describes the ways he came into possession of the material.
Fisher’s film is structural in the sense that it concerns the material properties and histories
of 35mm, as seen through and recorded on16mm film, though it departs from the “purist
cinema” (to use David James’s term) of New York and Viennese structural filmmakers in
its explicit engagement with commercial filmmaking. Through Standard Gauge, Fisher
positions himself on the margins of Hollywood, revealing the behind-the-scenes and
decidedly unglamorous workings of archives, editors, and laboratories in Los Angeles.
The film is as instructional as it is personal, a primer on what filmmaking looks like from
within the belly of the beast, and what it means for an experimental filmmaker to live and
work in Hollywood.
Throughout the film, Fisher scrolls through different footage illuminated on a
light box. Sometimes his commentary is technical, as when he describes the one-dye
98
process of IB Technicolor, and other times autobiographical, as when he pulls out clips of
scenes from Student Nurses in which he appears. These, however, were also left on the
cutting room floor. Often Fisher’s explanations are insufficient—he lingers on a couple
of images for their beauty, for example—and toward the end of the film, long, silent
stretches pass in which Fisher pauses on an image without a word. Despite the somewhat
droll, pedantic tone of Fisher’s deadpanned voice and the flat presentation of film
artifacts, there is a pervading sense of loss: of an industry that, as Fisher explains, heaped
many of these once-useful objects into the trash bin, and of Fisher’s own and now distant
past, bound up in incidental fragments whose value he alone seems able to recognize.

Figure 20 Still from Standard Gauge (dir. Morgan Fisher, 1984)

The China girl stands out among the material Fisher presents. In the film he stops
to look at several, musing that she is a “figure who in some quarters is emblematic,
99
almost, of film itself.” In his concluding remarks on the China girl, he suggests, “This
figure’s sex, her being in the margin of the film, but serving to establish and maintain a
standard of correct appearance; these are aspects of a single question that deserves
thought.” Yet Fisher provides no answer to this question. Nor, for that matter, is it clear
what question the China girl poses; for Fisher, in a sense, the China girl herself is a
question, an emblem of the more or less mysterious processes that bring film into being.
The questions we may have about her are questions that are intrinsically tied to the
medium. Unexplained markings, obsolete perforation marks, the mute smile of
anonymous women: these were fast becoming the only remains of what Fisher
recognized in 1984 as a vanishing industry. As James observes, Standard Gauge was
made significantly after the heyday of structural film, and bears a twinge a sense of
melancholy not present in earlier works by Hollis Frampton or Paul Sharits. The China
girl, then, is emblematic not only of film, but marks a point of nostalgia at which film
history and Fisher’s own autobiography converge. The way Fisher speaks is not unlike
the wistful tenor of the older laboratory technicians I interviewed.
Despite the attention Fisher gives to the China girl, she nevertheless is significant
only because of her relation to other images. Fisher’s sympathetic, even wistful account
of the China girl, for which he assigns her a female pronoun, is still occluded by her
function, her class of image. Though she may be an emblem for all of film, she is, in the
end, anonymous and enigmatic, no different than the assorted bits of leader and frame
irregularities that Fisher scrolls through. She does not transcend the material to which her
image is intrinsically tied, nor does she emerge as anything other than an image, and
100
specifically, an image of a woman, a fetish. In the end, the individual women whose
images we see do not, or perhaps cannot, escape their material confines.
Christopher Williams’s staged photographs of a Kodak Shirley similarly places
the test image in the position of the central subject, her image made all the more
prominent when rendered on the cover of the April 2006 issue of Artforum.
107
(Figure 21)
Here the visibility of the female model is no longer in question, yet still she remains
anonymous, confined to the vernacular of the test image as such. This demonstrates that
visibility is not the only issue at stake; rather, the China girl articulates a particular form
of visuality that is not merely about exposure. Instead, her visuality is intrinsically tied to
the entire representational system of the cinema, not the woman once again clipped and
isolated. To see the China girl, means, paradoxically, to render visible her invisibility.

Figure 21 Christopher Williams, Kodak Three Point Reflection Guide © 1968 Eastman Kodak
Company, 1968 (Meiko smiling), Vancouver, B.C., 6 April 2005 (detail), Artforum (April 2007)

101
In another example, Bruce Conner’s collage Untitled (1954–1961) reveals, on its
verso side, an assortment of pinup girl images, among other ephemera, pasted to its back,
or the work’s “underbelly” as Conner called it. (Figure 22) For Kevin Hatch, “[t]here is
no missing the fact, however, that over time, the dominant image became the seminude
female form.”
108
In opposition to Untitled’s more austere recto composition, the
relatively hidden placement of these women, connected to their “promiscuous
assortment,” suggests that much of the pleasure a viewer derives from the work comes
from looking at a woman who isn’t, or shouldn’t, be seen.
109

Figure 22 Bruce Conner, Untitled (1954–1961) verso
102

Conner was well aware of the China girl’s existence, and as Untitled suggests, it
is the surreptitious, voyeuristic glance that eroticizes the woman; pornography is less
about the image shown than the mode of looking it solicits. In the countdown sequence of
A MOVIE (1958), in the place where a China girl would normally appear, Conner
inserted a clip of a woman in the midst of a striptease.
110
The substitution of this woman
with a China girl underscores the sexual, or rather sexualizing, nature of a particular type
of looking Conner evoked in many of his artworks and films: one that, deliberately partial
and incomplete, prefers to keep the woman anonymous, concealed, and functionally
invisible.
111

Iconopoesis

The films that best convey the paradoxical visuality of the China girl retain the image’s
marginality, blankness, and invisibility, in order to expose the signifying system it
anchors. Michelle Silva’s China Girls (2006) situates China girls in what the filmmaker
describes as their “natural habitat of countdowns and end-tones,” sustaining, in part, the
viewer’s mode of incidental looking while providing some longer segments of China girl
footage as it was originally shot.
112
(Figure 23) The film presents China girls “in the
wild,” so to speak, chiefly strips of countdown numbers that pass rapidly by with long
spaces of clear, dusty leader separating them. In a lab or at a film manufacturing plant,
China girl models were shot not using still photography, but motion picture film. Full
103
reels of film would be exposed with the model sitting before the camera, attempting to
remain still. This is why some China girls, like the one in Film in Which… are seen
blinking; in essence, the many thousand frames of China girls from individual reels
would be clipped a few frames at a time, the figure’s movement thus distributed across
any number of destination prints. Here, Silva’s emphasis on movement, without losing a
sense of the China girl’s marginal position, approximates the fullness of the China girl’s
form. (This sense of the China girl “coming to life” through movement, however slight, is
rendered in even longer segments in Timoleon Wilkins’s MM (1996).)

Figure 23 Still from China Girls (dir. Michelle Silva, 2006)

Movement, of course, is central to cinema’s structure of moving images, and here
it transforms the still China girl, the inanimate doll, into a living, moving, flesh (-colored)
and blood woman. The reanimated China girl is not given the fixed scrutiny of Landow
or Fisher’s treatments, both of which reify, in their own ways, the occluding gaze of the
laboratory technician. Here the China girl’s movement is rendered as something that
104
fleetingly appears and disappears. Yet even with Silva’s fuller rendering of the China girl
as a moving being, this strategy of making the China girl visible does not entirely address
the constitutive invisibility that inevitably attends her image.
In Barbara Hammer’s Sanctus (1990), a familiar face bookends the film: the first
of Kodak’s LAD lassies. (Figure 24) This is also the only face we see in the film, apart
from those shot in negative or the ones seen as fleshy shadows on x-rayed skulls. Set on
either end of a sequence of optically printed and manipulated footage of x-ray
cinematography shot by Dr. James Sibley Watson in the fifties, the framing structure is
analogous to the way China girls appear on the academy leader; it is as if Hammer is
showing not just the length of her film, but the entire filmstrip on which it is printed. At
these extended ends, we see also sprocket holes that signal the foundness of the footage
Hammer reworks. After a brief prologue that intercuts images of the China girl with
SMPTE test cards and x-rayed skulls, the film shifts to Watson’s footage. Hammer
alternately superimposes the footage, repeats and rewinds certain sequences, overlays
portions with text, and recasts the images in bright primary colors. Though the film
includes some male bodies, identifiable in the act of shaving, most of the skeletal forms
we see are either difficult to gender or are female. Female bodies are signaled by
anatomical clues, including breasts on rotating torsos, alternately shadowy and
translucent, and behavioral ones, such as applying lipstick in a compact mirror. The LAD
girl resurfaces toward the end, at first just a pair of watchful eyes, and then with the
closing sequence, her full face returns, followed by the curdling of burning film.
105
Here the juxtaposition of the China girl with the x-rayed bodies is provocative in
the ways both reveal an invisible behind the visible: the China girl situated on the usually
unseen margins, and the x-ray image that shows the body’s interior structure on its
surface. The film suggests a strong connection between the two types of invisible images
we see: the China girl’s face, for cinema, functions like the skeletal interior of the body, a
structuring element. We can even imagine that the China girl’s face belongs to the x-
rayed figures onscreen; superimposed on top of each other, and tellingly matched at the
overlapped place of their eyes, they constitute part of the same repressed body, or what
Akira Mizuta Lippit calls “a repressed corporeality.”
113
Sanctus’s imagery, like all x-rays,
collapses the distinction between inside and out, invisible and visible. Lippit continues:
“The point of view established by the X-ray image is both inside and out. Everything flat,
interiority and exteriority rendered equally superficial, the liminal force of the surface has
collapsed.”
114

Sanctus exposes the China girl as invisible, and by drawing a connection between
her image and those of the x-rayed bodies, her paradoxical invisibility can nevertheless
be seen. Here, she produces what Trinh T. Minh-ha describes as a space “not that of an
object brought to visibility, but that of the very invisibility of the invisible within the
visible.”
115
Rather than being restored to or granted visibility, both operations suggesting
that the China girl is in some ways bereft of visual form or power, the China girl might
instead work to destabilize the images she grounds, to remind us of the always-present
invisible beneath the apparent surface of things. It is, again to use Kracauer’s term, a
106
potentially explosive force: at the end of the film, the image burns, the destructive force
of the x-ray visualized onto the skin of the film.

Figure 24 Still from Sanctus (dir. Barbara Hammer, 1990)

In a 2002 projection performance by Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, A
Sourceful of Secrets, the burning of the China girl becomes the central event. The pair,
then going by the name of the Presstapes, exhibited the piece four times: at the PDX
festival in Portland, the Onion City Film Festival in Chicago, the Images Festival in
Toronto, and TexasSpace, also in Chicago. No documentation exists of the performances,
save a strip of burned film. (Figure 25)

107

Figure 25 Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, A Sourceful of Secrets (2002), projection performance

The performance can be described as thus: In a theater, Gibson and Recoder had
set up four projectors: two 35mm projectors in the booth, and two 16mm projectors
located among the seats in the theater. The piece began with the 35mm projectors running
from the booth. These were projections without film and used, instead, only the white
light of the projector along with colored gels and water sprayed on the glass of the
projector booth. The effect created blurry, superimposed washes of color on the screen,
which was bounded by black masking. Meanwhile, bird songs emanated from a
phonograph player located in the auditorium. After several minutes, either Gibson or
Recoder would enter the theater and switch on the two 16mm projectors, which were also
pointed at the screen. The sound of these projectors’ motors was audible, when they were
turned on, many in the audience would look around for the source of the sound. One of
the artists would begin feeding filmstrips, each containing several China girl frames, into
the 16mm projectors. The strips were held there, still, and the images burned from the
heat of the projector lamps. These fiery images would be seen onscreen, overlaid with the
108
watery ones coming from the booth. Once they burned through, the artists concluded the
performance.
A Sourceful of Secrets not only depicts but enacts the China girl’s disappearing,
her marginality, her invisibility. Unlike Landow, Fisher, or even Silva’s films, which
restore her to a kind of sight, this performance, like Hammer’s film, sustains some sense
of the China girl’s invisibility. It first presents her as visible, a sustained image, then
destroy that image with the very same projection apparatus that made the image possible
in the first place. Invisibility, intrinsically bound up in the visible, cannot be revealed
except for the negation of the image. Here we see another kind of image of the China girl:
the image of her destruction.
The scorched frame, or face, in A Sourceful of Secrets reveals an opening, a hole
through which the light of the projector shines. Here this goes beyond Sanctus’s
metaphoric destruction, wrought by radioactive light, and gestures toward the point at
which the cinema might generate new images. The footage for A Sourceful of Secrets
came from an earlier short Gibson had made, Scratch Test Number 1 (1994–1995), which
no longer exists. Gibson, previously employed as a film inspector at a library in Portland,
had clipped and collected China girls, later optically splicing them into Scratch Test
Number 1, only to cannibalize it for A Sourceful of Secrets. From library to film to
performance, these few frames had been recycled and re-sourced, each iteration
destroyed to give way to something new. Even as it burns in A Sourceful of Secrets, the
China girl image suggests a continued path to something else. As Trihn asserts: “The
109
space of creativity is the space whose occupancy invites other occupancies…. Thus, if
she negates, it is also to refute negation—joyfully.”
116

Out of this negation, the ashes of the image, arises other possibilities for the
politics of the visible. The China girl, herself a “sourceful of secrets,” may in this piece
clear the ground for an iconopoesis, a generative force that Therese Davies attributes to
the face, which is not merely “a type of image but as a productive model of the image.”
117

Frontisi-Ducroux also suggests that Medusa performs an iconopoesis, “a paradigm for the
production of images,” both in the petrified forms she creates with her gaze and her own
image, multiplied and spread as the gorgoneion. Medusa’s face is, for Frontisi-Ducroux,
is the source and subject of her iconopoesis, “which is the condition of her visibility,
since her forbidden face is accessible only in the form of images.
118
Like Medusa’s face,
as Medusa’s face, the close-up presents a potential explosion of cinema’s signifying
system, one built on the regulation of things both visible and invisible.
The intense beam of projected light, held to a stilled image in A Sourceful of
Secrets, suggests, furthermore, the exposure that occurs with all photochemical
photography, a word that comes from the Greek for “light-writing.” Light written on a
celluloid surface, invisibly, until coaxed out in a chemical bath. Because sometimes we
need to burn something in order to see it, to reveal the invisible behind the visible, the
lines hidden within the face. While critiques of representation tend to focus on what is
presented immediately before us, the China girl—excluded, invisible, and mute—calls us
to look elsewhere, offscreen, to the hidden meanings buried in images before they’re
developed, or the ones generated in their destruction.
110

Chapter One References

1
Lili Young, China girl at DuArt, interview with author, 5 January 2012, Los Angeles. See also Figure 16.

2
Julie and Karin Bolstad, interviewed by Gerald Peary, “Girls on Film,” accessed 10 February 2012,
http://geraldpeary.com/essays/ghi/girlsonfilm.html.

3
“Medusa and her beheaded sisters, and even the gorgoneion itself, are evoked much more than
described….This quasi-systemic verbal repression constitutes a first characteristic. The second is that this
figure, defined as impossible to look at, is paradoxically ubiquitous in the Greeks’ environment.” Françoise
Frontisi-Ducroux, “The Gorgon, Paradigm of Image Creation” (1993), trans. Seth Graebner, in The Medusa
Reader, Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers, eds. (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 262–266,
citation on 262.

4
Homer describes the gorgoneion as “the blank-eyed face of the gorgon” in The Aeneid, book 11, line 36;
cited in The Medusa Reader, 10.

5
The China girl has analogues in still photography, television broadcast, and digital imaging as well.
Kodak “Shirleys,” apocryphally named after a secretary to Leopold Godowsky and Leopold Mannes, the
inventors of Kodachrome, are the standard test images for still photography. See Figure 10. See also Lorna
Roth, “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive
Equity,” Canadian Journal of Communication 34 no. 1 (2009), 111–136. The Lena, taken from a 1972
Playboy photo spread featuring Swedish model Lena Sjöblom, was used to set the requirements for digital
image formats in the progenitors of the Internet. See Jamie Hutchinson, “Culture, Communication, and an
Information Age Madonna,” in IEEE Professional Communication Society Newsletter Vol. 45, No. 3
(May–June 2001), 1, 5–7. Another related example is the “Test Card F,” an image of a young girl, Carole
Hersee, frequently displayed on BBC channels during off-air hours between 1967 and 1997. See Ryan
Dilley, “Test Card Special,” BBC News, accessed 10 February 2012,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1282160.stm.

6
John Pytlak, acceptance speech for the Technical Achievement Award, the Academy for Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences, 2001.

7
A roll of celluloid film would be 400 feet of 16mm film or 1000 ft reel of 35mm.

8
Douglas Collins, The Story of Kodak (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 142. See also Collins’s
chapter “Moving Pictures,” 136–180.

9
“To Develop Films,” The Los Angeles Times (18 September 1921), V4.

10
Ibid.

11
Los Angeles Times, 4 September 1921, V2.

12
Ibid.

111

13
Al Young, one of the three founders of DuArt, had previously worked at Erbograph, one of Biograph’s
chief competitors during the 1910s. He left for Los Angeles in the teens to work in the motion picture
studios, but returned to New York by the early twenties. Interview with author, 1 March 2012.

14
See Neal Keehn, “A Report from the Association of Cinema Laboratories,” Journal of the SMPTE 64
(1955), 383–386.

15
C. Francis Jenkins, “Chairman’s Address,” Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 1
(1916), 23.

16
J.I. Crabtree, “The Motion-Picture Laboratory,” Journal of the SMPTE 64 (January 1955), 13–34.

17
Collins, The Story of Kodak, 176–177.

18
“Most people, and especially those who have had to wait until Monday for the Kodak prints which the
corner drugstore promised them on Saturday, know that when the cameraman turns the crank of his
machine in the studio he exposes negative films from which positive prints have to be made before any
pictures can be seen in a theater, but there are few who have any more than a vague idea of how the
thousands of feet of positive film can be obtained from the milky-white negative that comes out of the
camera.” “From Camera to Screen,” New York Times (7 August 1921), 63.

19
Cited in Collins, The Story of Kodak, 171.

20
John Crabtree and Glen Matthews, Motion Picture Laboratory Practice and Characteristics of Eastman
Motion Picture Films (Rochester, N.Y.: Eastman Kodak Company, 1936), 187. Collins attributes
authorship of the book to John Crabtree and Glen Matthews and called it “the motion-picture processors’
bible.” Collins, The Story of Kodak, 287.

21
L.A. Jones and J.I. Crabtree, “A New Sensitometer for the Determination of Exposure in Positive
Printing,” Transactions of the Society for Motion Picture Engineers 15 (1922), 89–101, citation on 89.

22
Ibid., 90.

23
Charles E.K. Mees cited in ibid., 101.

24
J.G. Capstaff and N.B. Green, “A Motion Picture Densitometer,” Transactions of the Society for Motion
Picture Engineers 17 (1923), 154–162.

25
W.B. Ferguson and F.F. Renwick, “A Convenient Accurate Photometer for the Measurement of
Photographic Densities,” Phot. J. 42 (1918), 155; cited in Capstaff and Green, 154.

26
“The history of photometric standards dates back to the early 19
th
century, when the intensity of light
sources was measured by comparison with a standard candle using visual bar photometers.” Yoshi Ohno,
“Photometry,” in Optical Radiometry, eds. Albert C. Parr, Raju Umapathi Datla, and J.L. Gardner (San
Diego, Elsevier Academic Press, 2005), 327–366, citation on 329–330.

27
See C.E. Ives and J.I. Crabtree, “A Trial and Error Method of Preparing a Motion Picture Sensitometer
Tablet,” Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 11 (1927), 740–749 and J. I. Crabtree, C.
E. Ives and Fordyce Tuttle, “A Semi-Automatic Timing Device for Motion Picture Negatives,” Journal of
the SMPTE 15 (1930), 587–597.

112

28
Ibid., 23. Earlier, in another publication, Crabtree had affirmed this same fact: “The application of
sensitometric methods of control to the processing of motion picture film began shortly after the
introduction of the sound picture in 1928, but it was not until 1930 that such methods were in general use.”
Crabtree and Matthews, Motion Picture Laboratory Practice, 186.

29
Crabtree and Matthews, Motion Picture Laboratory Practice, 7.

30
Ibid., 17.

31
Ibid., 11 (emphasis added).

32
Ibid., 189 (emphasis added).

33
Ibid., 198.

34
George T. Keene, “A Color Timing Method and Calculator for Subtractive Motion-Picture Printers,”
Journal of the SMPTE 67 (June 1958), 404–408, citation on 404. Keene writes: “In printing color motion
pictures in a negative-positive system, the object of any color timing system is to utilize information from
the negative to make the best possible first print. There are two techniques in this field involving
densitometry of the negative, one integrating the full-frame densities and the other reading a gray lily card
held in the scene key light” (404).

35
Ibid. (emphasis added).

36
Pierre Mertz, “Exposure Control,” Journal of the SMPTE 74 (July 1965), 577–593, citation on 582.
“Lili” is also the most common name for the China girl image as used in French film laboratories, along
with the term “Kodakette.”

37
Ibid., 502.

38
Fred E. Basten, Glorious Technicolor: The Movies’ Magic Rainbow (New York: A.S. Barnes and
Company, 1980), 66; cited in Steve Neale, Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Colour (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1985), 138. For a detailed account of Technicolor’s hold over the color industry,
see Neale, Cinema and Technology, 129–144.

39
Neale, Cinema and Technology, 132. In attempts to break up Technicolor’s color and Kodak’s black and
white film stock monopolies, antitrust suits were filed against both companies in the mid-forties (137).

40
Collins, The Story of Kodak, 206. The image of the woman in a headscarf also appears as the China girl
for Eastman Color Negative Film Type 5251, which can be seen in Morgan Fisher’s Standard Gauge
(1984). 5251 was used from 1962–1968.

41
“Flesh tone” is used in Donald G. Fink, “Color Television vs. Color Motion Pictures,” Journal of the
SMPTE 64 no. 6 (June 1955), 281–290 and “skin tone” appears in Harold Wright, “Television Studio
Practices Relative to Kinescope Recording,” Journal of the SMPTE 65 (1956), 1–6.

42
Salvatore J. Bonsignore, “The Art of Color TV,” Journal of the SMPTE (1956), 435–436, citation on
435.

43
Ray E. Knight, “The BKSTS Reference Leader Picture,” British Kinematography Sound and Television,
(September 1970), 248/1095–252/1099, citation on 248/1095. The BKSTS image was manufactured by
Studios and Engineering at Thames Television Limited, in collaboration with Technicolor and Rank Film
113

Processing Limited. Additionally, Knight notes that Kodak survey control strips were used to “establish
standard conditions” (252/1099).

44
Ibid.

45
Ibid., 249/1096.

46
Ibid.

47
Ibid., 249-250/1096–1097.

48
E.W. Taylor and S.J. Lent, “BBC Test Card No. 61 (Flesh Tone Reference): Colorimetric and Other
Optical Considerations,” Journal of the SMPTE 87 (February 1978), 76–78, citation on 76 (emphasis
added).

49
Ibid.

50
Ibid.

51
Richard Dyer, White (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 94.

52
Steve Blakely, laboratory technician at DuArt: “The 21 step strips that were exposed in the lab (on a
sensitometer) were more variable from lab to lab and the exposures varied depending upon the exposure the
lab did, the stock itself, and the way it was developed. The strip plotted out was a means of determining
the gamma/contrast of the processes.” Interview with author, 4 January 2011.

53
Becca Hall, projectionist at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago and director of the Northwest
Chicago Film Society, phone interview with author, 2 February 2012.

54
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip
Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 198–199.

55
Bob Smith, interview with author, 4 January 2011.

56
Jean-Louis Comolli and Paul Narboni, Brian Winston, Lorna Roth, and Richard Dyer have all
investigated the racial qua ideological biases within image technology apparatuses that otherwise present
themselves to be based on neutral scientific principles. See Comolli and Narboni,
“Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” trans. Susan Bennett, Screen 12 no. 1 (1971), 145–155; Comolli, “Technique
and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field,” trans. Diana Matias, in Narrative, Apparatus,
Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, 421–443; Winston, “A Whole Technology of Dyeing: A Note on
Ideology and the Apparatus of the Chromatic Moving Image,” in Daedalus 114 no. 4 (Fall 1985), 105–123;
Winston, Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television (London: British Film
Institute, 1996); and Roth, “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies,
and Cognitive Equity.” Dyer, additionally, notes that, against the presumed neutrality and scientificity of
imaging technology, racial biases nevertheless have governed the development of film stocks, chemicals,
and other machines that produce the very conditions by which representation can occur. “Stocks, cameras
and lighting were developed taking the white face as the touchstone. The resultant apparatus came to be
seen as fixed and inevitable, existing independently of the fact that it was humanly constructed. It may be—
certainly was—true that photo and film apparatuses have seemed to work better with light-skinned peoples,
but that is because they were made that way, not because they could be no other way” (90).

114

57
Taylor and Lent, “BBC Test Card No. 61 (Flesh Tone Reference): Colorimetric and Other Optical
Considerations,” 78 (emphasis added).

58
Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, Feminism for Today
(London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 20.

59
Ibid.

60
Dyer, 45.

61
Ibid., 94.

62
Ibid., 95–96.

63
Dyer reminds us that white is commonly defined both as a color and “colourless” in the 1933 Oxford
English Dictionary and the 1992 Collins English Dictionary. Ibid., 46.

64
For a discussion of the problems associated with orthochromatic and panchromatic film stocks, see ibid.,
91–93.

65
Fortune Magazine (June 1936), 40.

66
Richard Misek, Chromatic Cinema: A History of Screen Color (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell,
2010), 129.

67
Neale, Cinema and Technology, 147.

68
Misek, Chromatic Cinema, 37.

69
Natalie M. Kalmus, “Color Consciousness,” Journal of the SMPTE 25 (1935), 139–147, citation on 142.

70
Kalmus, “Color Consciousness,” 147. Kalmus tries perhaps too strenuously to avoid falling into
racialized rhetoric, particularly when she describes the cultural attributes of black and white. “Our language
is replete with references to this frightful power of black—black art, black despair, black-guard, blackmail,
black hand, the black hole of Calcutta, black death (the devastating plague of medieval Europe), black list,
black-hearted, etc” (144). “White uplifts and ennobles, while black lowers and renders more base and evil
any color” (144).

71
Dyer, White, 83.

72
David L. MacAdam cited in Brian Winston, “A Whole Technology of Dyeing,” 105–123, citation on
120.

73
Dyer discusses this embedded photochemical anti-miscegenation in Hollywood films that have had at
least one black and one white lead, including the Lethal Weapon series, In the Heat of the Night, Rising
Sun, and A Few Good Men. Dyer, White, 98–103.

74
David Corley, phone interview with author, 26 January 2011.

75
Some of the techniques used in classical Hollywood cinema to render white women whiter than white
included “haloes, backlighting, soft focus, gauzes, retouching, and all the other conventions of feminine
lighting. The ethnically loaded evils of shadow and shine can be eliminated…” Dyer, White, 125.
115

76
bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze” in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornton (New York:
New York University Press, 1999), 307–320, citation on 311.

77
Dyer, White, 48.

78
Elements of Color in Professional Motion Pictures, cited in Edward Buscombe, “Film Sound and Color,”
Jump Cut no. 17 (April 1978), 23–25, citation on 25.

79
Neale, Cinema and Technology, 152.

80
Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), 129. Cited in Homay King, Lost in Translation: Orientalism,
Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 45.

81
King, Lost in Translation, 45.

82
Bob Smith, interview with author, 4 January 2011.

83
The dating of this China girl was confirmed by Becca Hall, phone interview with author, 2 February
2012.

84
Roth, “Looking at Shirley,” 123.

85
The terms China girl and China doll were both fixtures of American popular culture from the early
nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. The two terms are often conflated with each other, though
they maintain separate etymological histories as well. China doll refers to the production of porcelain dolls.
China, as a material, was originally imported from China, the country, until European manufacturers began
producing their own in the early eighteenth century to make plates, vessels, and refined objects like toys.
China dolls, relatively expensive items that, unlike other dolls, were more often meant to sit on shelves and
in display cases than be handled by children, were imported from Europe into the United States. Often, and
again because of cost, China dolls were manufactured as heads that would later be affixed to stuffed bodies.
Sometimes German, French, or English-manufactured China doll heads would be shipped overseas and
fitted with American-made bodies. See Mary Hillier, Dolls and Doll-makers (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1968), especially 143–161.
“China girl,” meanwhile, has a specific connotation of Asian women. Afong May, the first
Chinese woman reported to have come to the United States, was described as “The Chinese Lady” in ads
promoting her ethnic display at Peale’s Museum in 1834. Numerous popular songs throughout the
twentieth century contained the term “China girl” in their titles and lyrics, including “The Dresden China
Girl” by Edward Warren Corliss (New York, Chicago: M. Witmark & Sons, 1900), “China Girl Love
Song,” by Frank M. Pagano (The Tempo Publishing Co., 1943), “China Girl,” by Henry Halstead, Don
Warner, and Louis Singer (San Francisco: Sherman, Clay & Co, 1924), “China Girl: Novelty Song and
Stomp,” by Emma P. La Freniere and Jimmy Dale (New York: Roy Music Co, 1935), and “China Girl” by
David Bowie and Iggy Pop (1977). Slim Whitman’s “China Doll” (1954) plays on the notion that the
woman is doll-like and passive, an object to be possessed and controlled (and purchased): “She’ll never
leave me/She’ll not deceive me/And never grieve me/My china doll.” Elliot Smith’s “Waltz #2 (XO)”
contains the particularly haunting lyric: “She appears composed/So she is, I suppose/Who can really
tell?/She shows no emotion at all/Stares into space like a dead China doll.” The term China doll is also
present in musical theater and film, including Charles George’s musical about the amorous rivalries over a
Chinese girl in My China Doll (New York: S. French Inc., 1931) and the film China Girl (dir. Henry
Hathaway, 1942), a WWII-era romance starring Gene Tierney as Haoli Young.
From the late 1920s to the early 1990s, the period in which the China girl was most widely used in
the film industry, the term “oriental” was commonly used to describe a person of Asian descent. Asian
116

women were also called China girls or China dolls. It was not until the various civil rights and liberation
struggles of the late 1960s and 1970s that the term Asian American was widely adopted, and largely as part
of a growing anti-Vietnam War effort. In the relatively isolated and stubbornly patriarchal world of the film
laboratory, of course, the term China girl remained unchanged.

86
Rosalind Galt, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 20.

87
Borges attributes the Chinese encyclopedia, entitled the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge,
to Dr. Franz Kuhn. Among the categories the animals were organized into are “embalmed ones,”
“mermaids,” “those that are included in this classification,” and “those that at a distance resemble flies.”
See “John Wilkins’ Analytic Language,” in Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot
Weinberger, trans. Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin, 1999),
229–232, citation on 231.

88
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage
Books, [1966] 1994), xv (emphasis in original).

89
Ibid., xix.

90
Ibid., xvii.

91
Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (New York:
Dover, 1970), 74.

92
Balázs writes, “[there] are certain regions of the face which are scarcely or not at all under voluntary
control and the expression of which is neither deliberate nor conscious and may often betray emotions that
contradict the general expression appearing on the rest of the face.” Ibid.

93
Ibid., 75.

94
Siegfried Kracauer. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1960), 47.

95
Ibid., 48.

96
Teresa de Laurentis, “Oedipus Interruptus” (1984) in Feminist Film Theory, 83–96, citation on 88.

97
Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 203.

98
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Barbara Habberjam and Hugh Tomlinson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 99.

99
“The various absences upon which classic cinema turns, from the excluded real to the hidden camera and
tape recorder, are in effect signified through woman.” Kaja Silverman, “Suture,” in Narrative, Apparatus,
Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 219–235, citation on 229.

100
James Benning, phone interview with author, 21 October 2010.

101
Outside of its appearance on film leader, the China girl rarely appears intentionally in commercial film.
One notable exception is the closing credit sequence for Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (2007); it is
perhaps not surprising that Tarantino, given his well-known fanaticism for film esoterica, would be
especially interested in China girls.
117

102
P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, 3
rd
edition, (New
York:Oxford University Press, 2002), 364.

103
“I discovered that five of my films contain bimbos, it seems to be a recurrent theme. They are: The Film
in Which has the so-called ‘china girl’; Bardo Follies, the Southern Belle waving to the boat; Institutional
Quality, the girl who demonstrates the projector; Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present has the ‘booth
bimbo’; New Improved Institutional Quality has the 3D version of the ‘china girl.’ So that’s some useless
information.” Owen Land interviewed by Mark Webber, 3 July 2004.

104
David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1989), 245. James’s use of the word “phantom” recalls Deleuze’s formulation of the close-up as “the book
of phantoms,” an inscrutable void present within the face.

105
Ibid., 246.

106
Mary Anne Doane, “Screening the Avant-Garde Face,” in Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed, eds., The
Question of Gender: Joan W. Scott’s Critical Feminisms, 21
st
Century Studies (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011), 206–229, citation on 223–224.

107
The April 2006 issue of Artforum featured two covers, one in which the woman smiles, and the other in
which she laughs.

108
Kevin Hatch, Looking for Bruce Conner (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 79. I thank Erica Levin
for making the connection between this collage by Conner and the marginal status of the China girl.

109
Ibid.

110
A MOVIE is also referenced in Standard Gauge. In a section where Fisher describes his work as a stock
footage researcher in 1970, he visited a library to collect documentary scenes of violent deaths. He found
an execution in the Pathé newsreel archive that was used A MOVIE. When Fisher returned ten years later to
have the footage reprinted, the film librarian gave him discarded nitrate footage of the Hindenburg, which,
as Fisher notes, is also seen burning in A MOVIE.

111
Michelle Silva, Bruce Conner’s former assistant, recounts gifts of clipped China girl frames Conner
would leave her while she was working on her film China Girls (2006). Interview with the author, 8
January 2012.

112
“China Girls,” Canyon Cinema Catalog, accessed 12 June 2012,
http://canyoncinema.com/catalog/film/?i=4116.

113
Akira Mizuta Lippit has called Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection, analogous to the x-ray image, a
“repressed corporeality.” Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2005), 39.

114
Ibid., 42.

115
Trinh T. Minh-ha, “The World as a Foreign Land,” in When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation,
Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 187; cited in Lippit, Atomic Light, 40.

116
Ibid.

118

117
Therese Davis, The Face On The Screen: Death, Recognition, and Spectatorship (Bristol and Portland:
Intellect Books, 2004), 31.

118
Frontisi-Ducroux, “The Gorgon, Paradigm of Image Creation,” 262.
119
Chapter Two: Troublesome Heads

What is it that makes History? Well, bodies.
And Art?—A body that has lost its head.

—Joseph Brodsky
1

Louis Marin describes Caravaggio’s Medusa image as a ruse, a trick. In one swift motion,
the painter’s brushstroke coincides with the swipe of Perseus’s sword, suturing over the
severing of Medusa’s head with the moment that comes before and the one that comes
after, both instances locked in the gorgon’s frozen look of horror. This is a cut that
conceals, and one that also slices through a woman’s body. In Thomas Edison’s The
Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (1895), the cut of the executioner is similarly wedded
to the cinema splice. In one of cinema’s earliest incarnations, we see a medusan optics at
work, staging the central scene of the myth, its spectacular horror, and its surreptitious
cut which, already in 1895, forms one of the medium’s most basic, and at a material
level, most constitutive elements. (Figure 26)
As indicated by the title, the 50-foot kinetoscope reel depicts the famous scene of
Mary Stuart’s death in 1587. Surrounded by guards and various attendants, the Catholic
queen, played by Robert Thomae, the secretary and treasurer of the Kinetoscope
Company, is first blinded folded then instructed to kneel before the executioner’s block.
2

The blade comes down, her head falls into a basket, and in a gesture that recalls the
Medusa scene, the executioner lifts the head and shows it to the camera. A closer
examination of the film reveals a telling splice made just before the axe falls: a moment,
120
following Heath, when “castration is in the air.” The actor’s body is replaced with a
dummy and effectively disappears. The cut that severs Mary’s head makes literal, and
fleetingly visible, the film’s single and decisive cut.

Figure 26 Still from The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (dir. Alfred Clarke and Thomas Edison,
1895)

Unlike many of Edison’s films made during this time, The Execution of Mary
Queen of Scots, sometimes just called Execution, was not shot inside the Black Maria
studio at the Edison Laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, but outdoors, perhaps to
make reference to the staging of the original event in public. Charles Musser’s definitive
filmography dates the film as having been released on 28 August 1895, while the Bulletin
of the Museum of Modern Art lists it as having been included as part of the world’s first
projected display of motion pictures, in a screening organized by Jean Aimé LeRoy at the
Riley Brothers’ optical shop in New York on 5 February 1894.
3

121
For Kracauer, the film is an early example of cinema’s tendency to depict images
of disaster: “[e]lemental catastrophes, the atrocities of war, acts of violence and terror,
sexual debauchery, and death…events of this type.”
4
Like the “Head of Medusa”
passage, his discussion of The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots serves as an emblem for
the kinds of horrific images and experiences common to cinema. The scene Kracauer
discusses, the lifting of the head “so that no spectator can possibly avoid looking at the
frightful exhibit,” recalls a scene familiar to both histories of medusan imagery and that
of public executions.
5
The former is depicted in numerous scenes in painting and
sculpture, from Benvenuto Cellini’s sculpture Perseus With the Head of Medusa (1545-
54) in the Piazza della Signoria, where the executioner lifts her severed head and displays
it to the crowd, to the image of Kanye West holding a woman’s severed head by her hair
in his “Monster” (2011) music video. (Figures 27 and 28) The latter is a visual trope that
has often been used to assert patriarchal state power in spectacular, public ways.
Yet while Kracauer includes Edison’s film as part of a discussion on cinema’s
relation to “overwhelming” phenomena in real life, he misses an important aspect of the
film, which is that its central event, the decapitation, is a trick. Indeed, it is the earliest
known example of stop-motion substitution, a technique more commonly associated with
the trick films Georges Méliès made several years later. Significantly, unlike Méliès’s
displays of cinematic magic, the trick of Edison’s film does not announce itself. As Mary
kneels down, her body is replaced with a dummy just before the fatal blow. Though the
film is billed as a historical reenactment, a “realistic reproduction of this famous
historical scene,” the staging occurs in ambiguously realist, and decidedly not magical-
122
theatrical, terms.
6
Hence the realist “cut,” the one depicted in this historical scene,
conceals the actual “cut” of cinema.

Figure 27 Benvenuto Cellini, Perseus with the Head of Medusa (1545–54)

The refracted medusan optics of this film reveals the imbrication of power,
punishment, and the cinematic in doing violence to and vanishing the female body. Cut
through and cut out, the woman’s body is the object that spectacularly converges
cinematic and state apparatuses. This severed body is also, in its seeming friability, and in
its magic film manifestations, its ghostly immateriality, closer to the representational
structures that otherwise attempt to limit or contain it. The woman’s body, often invoked
123
in terms of its reproductive capacities, always threatens to exceed these structures, a
generative force that manifests in the media, as media, in uncontrollable, excessive ways.

Figure 28 Still from Kayne West, “Monster” (dir. Jake Nava, 2011) music video

Film Trick

The history of early or “primitive” cinema is typically, if reductively, understood as
having two divergent strains: first, the actuality film, proto-documentary scenes of
ordinary life and distant locales typified by Louis and Auguste Lumières’ films and
second, the trick films of magician-filmmakers like Méliès, which emphasized spectacle,
fantasy, and theatrical elements borrowed from the fairground, vaudeville, and the magic
stage. In The Magician and the Cinema, Erik Barnouw describes three chronological
stages in the progression of magic on film, which has its roots in the magic theater of the
late nineteenth century. The first concerned the presentation of images themselves, which
124
is to say the technology of cinema. Nothing “magical” occurred in these films except the
marvels of the medium, generally shot as actuality films. The second stage, which
occurred from 1896–1898, involved the presentation of a magician on film in what were
essentially filmed magic performances. By the turn of the century, magic and cinema
entered the third and for Barnouw, the most important phase, the trick film. The trick film
exploited the potential of the film medium to produce magic effects with trick
photography, effectively hybridizing cinema and magic performance. Some of these trick
films reenacted classic magic performances, particularly those that involved
transformations, vanishings, and the appearance of ghosts. The celluloid manipulation
required to accomplish the tricks of trick films also brought about the invention of a
number of formal techniques: superimposition, stop-motion photography, dissolves,
fades, masking, modeling, rear-projection, and compositing, all of which would have
important uses in later visual and special effects.
7

The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots problematizes the development Barnouw
charts among the three stages, as well as the distinction between actuality-style
filmmaking and trick films in general. As an historical reenactment film, its subject
implies some degree of staging, yet the manner in which the central event occurs appears
straightforward, shot with a static camera in an apparently uninterrupted take. The film
blends Barnouw’s first and third film magic stages, combining the appearance of an
actuality with a deceptively complex editing structure. Indeed, the film eschews the
category of magic altogether. Only when the executioner lifts up the queen’s head does it
125
share the direct presentational mode of the trick film—until that moment the entire film is
staged as if the camera is absent, or observing the action unnoticed.
Though he does not mention the film specifically, Tom Gunning notes that the
substitution splice of the variety used in The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots
constitutes a deeper trick, an effect that conceals itself within the fixed framing of the
single shot film. In maintaining a “unified viewpoint of action,” he observes that early
cinemagicians slipped post-production edits that went undetected, even among trained
film historians, for decades. By maintaining the shape and coherence of the frame,
filmmakers could hide subtle splices. He argues: “this regime of the single uninterrupted
shot, independent and unsubordinated to the demands of montage, is often an appearance
rather than a reality, a mask for a complex but easily ignored labor, a distraction from the
traces of a historically neglected practice.”
8
Within the seemingly continuous single shot,
early filmmakers could direct a viewer’s attention to certain elements within the frame,
and obscure the traces of cuts that made magic tricks possible.
The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots, then, is doubly surreptitious for the fact
that it does not position itself as a magic film; its substitution splice is concealed not only
through the single shot mode of viewing, but in its generic designation as something
other than a trick film. As Frank Gray observes, “[t]he edit, in this case, was designed to
be an ‘invisible’ visual event as the viewer’s attention was directed to the decapitation
and hopefully not to the visual means of its cinematic representation.”
9
Yet the film’s
status as an historical reenactment film renders its representational status ambiguous; the
central event, the beheading of a woman, could have appeared to viewers as both real,
126
borrowing from the historical facticity of the event, and unreal, in its restaging for film
amusement purposes. Even in contemporary viewing contexts, the terms by which Mary
Stuart’s execution occurs is unclear. At the Edison Historic National Park, for example,
the film screens as part of a short reel of films in one of the complex’s studios. More than
any other film, The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots elicits the strongest reactions
among viewers, ranging from expressions of shock at the film’s graphic violence to
disavowal and denial maniest in grumblings about poor special effects. In the last case,
one local teacher, bringing a class of elementary school students to the center on a field
trip, preemptively taped sheets of white paper over the monitor showing the film so that
her students wouldn’t be exposed to the offending material.
10

What was the “horizon of expectations” that framed the reception of this film at
the time of its making?
11
Absent audience accounts, newspaper reviews, or promotional
ephemera, we can look to discourses on other films and related genres, including topicals,
historical films, other execution scenes, and even magic films, for their treatments of
death, to speculate about viewer responses. As Jonathan Auerbach notes, the veracity of
films in the so-called primitive period was very much an unsettled question. “While rival
filmmakers traded charges of ‘genuine’ versus ‘counterfeit’ in describing their products,”
he notes, “and audiences might have occasionally worried about the ontological status of
the spectacles they were watching, for the most part it seemed not to matter much if it
were truly the boxer Jim Jeffries on the screen or an impersonator, as long as the images
of the bodies in motion were clear and vibrant.”
12
Echoing Tom Gunning and André
Gaudreault’s cinema of attractions thesis, Auerbach asserts that the spectacle of
127
movement itself was often the central draw.
13
The accuracy of an event depicted, at least
in this late-nineteenth century moment, mattered less than the manner in which it was
visually realized. Auerbach notes that the reenactment was considered the norm in other
forms of popular amusements as well. In this way, faked actuality, simulation, and
historical reenactment films were “highly conventionalized displays.”
14
Miriam Hansen
affirms this view: “The sensationalist appeal of such films cuts across documentary and
fictional modes of representation and overtly caters to sadistic impulses; later films could
do this only in the guise of narrative motivation and moral truth.”
15

Edison himself asserted the educational, and, by proxy, cultural value of his
company’s films. Though his films of the late 1890s were typified by lurid peepshow
kinetescope fare, he was, by the first decade of the twentieth century, chiefly concerned
with establishing himself as a protector of cultural and moral values. In the inaugural
issue of The Edison Kinetogram (later just Kinetogram), a catalogue published bi-
monthly between 1909 and 1916, he proclaims, “The Moving Picture has brought within
the means of all the opportunity to cultivate and broaden and delight the mind that in the
old days was only possible by much travel and extensive reading; and I predict that in the
years to come a good part of the education and culture of our citizens will be based on
this particular source of amusement.”
16
Throughout Kinetogram’s run, in between notices
on upcoming releases, the editors would reprint newspaper defenses of the quality of
Edison films, a strategy no doubt meant to distinguish the company from its many
competitors. Regarding historical value, Edison remarks in 1911: “The study of history is
quite possible. At the present time the incidents and events of history are more or less of a
128
confused mass of kings, statesmen, wars, treaties and famines, in the minds of most
children, whereas by moving pictures the actual events could be depicted and would form
as indelible an impression as if really seen.”
17
Against its many imitators and purveyors
of bawdier cinematic fare, the Edison Company sought to position itself as a champion of
moral righteousness, historical accuracy, and educational value.
The dilated view onto historical events was not without distortion, however, as a
film like Mary Stuart (1913) makes clear. From its description, the film, which takes the
same subject of The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots, is decidedly more in the vein of
an historical romance:

In all history there is no more pathetic figure than beautiful Mary Stuart, the
lovely Queen of France and Scotland, whom fate seems to have marked from
childhood as a victory of its cruelty. Her hopeless struggle, in the relentless power
of the great Queen Elizabeth, the plots and intrigues of the followers of both
queens, form one of the most romantic and exciting series of incidents outside of
fiction.
18

The biopic concerns the beleaguered queen’s failed romantic relationships as much as, if
not more than, her political downfall, portraying her life as melodrama rather than a sober
account of historical occurrences. Life, unlike the film made eighteen years earlier, is the
operative term; in Mary Stuart, the film concludes just before the fated execution. Where
the previous film is concerned only with Mary’s death, this film treats only her life.
Despite the iconographic beheading for which Mary Stuart is chiefly remembered, or
perhaps because of it, the final scene stops just short of the moment of her death:

129
She mounts the scaffold, the charges of treason are read to the curious, hungry
crowd watching. Oh, the anguish on the Queen’s tired face at these false
accusations! She forgives the headsman, offers a prayer for her too trusting soul,
and bares her white neck to the axe. The film fades on Leicester bowed with grief
and remorse on the stairs which Mary had just ascended on her way to the
scaffold.
19

Mary Stuart was made in the “transitional” period during which time expectations
for narrative progression and coherence were developed, but it shares with its early
cinema predecessor not only a central figure, but what I would argue is the same morbid
fascination with the tragic, violent end to her life, however repressed this end becomes by
1913. Scenes of death and specifically execution were common in the early cinema
period, and The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots is immediately followed in the Edison
catalogue by another historical reenactment film, Joan of Arc (1895), which depicts the
burning at the stake of the saint. These films, together with Rescue of Capt. John Smith
by Pocahontas (1895), itself a near-execution, form a trio of historical scenes based on
famous paintings or other iconographies Alfred Clark shot outdoors at the West Orange
facility.
20
Other execution films of this period include A Frontier Scene/Lynching Scene
(1895) with the execution of a horse thief by cowboys; The Hanging of William Carr
(1897),
21
a contemporaneous depiction of a farmer tried for killing his 3-year old
daughter; and Shooting Captured Insurgents (1898), another topical featuring a Spanish
firing squad executing Cuban prisoners during the Spanish American War.
Among Edison’s early execution films, perhaps the most spectacular, and from a
formal standpoint the most technologically sophisticated, is Execution of Czolgosz, with
Panorama of Auburn Prison (1901), which combines a staged interior scene with what
130
could be called documentary or proto-newsreel footage of the exterior of the prison shot
on the day of Czolgosz’s death by electrocution. Though the film was shot and
distributed separated, with or without the two exterior shots, the film’s “striking hybrid of
actuality footage and theatrical reenactment…most forcefully dramatizes early cinema’s
developing capacity to plot and sustain a powerful kind of excitement of its own.”
22

David Levy cites “a weak ontological frontier” between fiction and actuality footage that
viewers seemed especially willing to cross; “[f]or their part,” he argues, “early film
producers were quick to realise that one didn’t have to be at the scene of an event with a
camera in order to capitalize on the popular demand for topical material.”
23
Execution of
Czolgosz and other “faithful duplication” films that blended actuality expectations with
optical manipulation demonstrate how the viewers’ desire to look functioned as an
integral part of the trick. The rhetoric of actuality films, of course, is already at work in
an historical reenactment like The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots, which is false not
only in its restaging of the event—the casting of a man in the role of a woman, the
replacement of a live body with a stuffed dummy—but also for the historical blunders it
makes: gone are the layers of clothing Mary Stuart stripped before she knelt at the
chopping block, the wig that fell off her head, or the several messy attempts it took for
the executioner to accomplish his task. The guards in the film, furthermore, are dressed in
the uniforms of the Vatican’s Swiss Guards, at best a weak approximation of sixteenth
century English military wear.
24
Here, the trick is not one of magic, but of looking, a
looking that also involves overlooking, missing the gaps hidden in plain sight, the bodies
that slip unnoticed through them.
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Capital Punishments

At the time of the film’s release, Mary Queen of Scots was already a figure of fascination
in popular and particularly visual culture. The tercentenary of her death occurred in 1887,
and the occasion was marked with services at Petersborough, the cathedral where she was
first buried, and Fortheringay Castle, the site of her execution, and in 1889 the British
Museum mounted a display of Stuart relics.
25
In the late 1880s, controversy surrounding
Mary once again stirred over the question of her candidacy for sainthood; in 1896, the
Westminster Diocese approved the proposed canonization of Mary Queen of Scots,
though after much debate, the case of her martyrdom was never resolved and remains
contested to this day.
26
Waxwork replicas of the scene of Mary’s execution, meanwhile,
remained popular enterainments among eighteenth and nineteenth century audiences, and
in August 1930 the Mary, Queen of Scots House and Visitor Centre, Jedburgh, was
founded, presumably in the queen’s former residence.
27

For Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, the figure of (a headless) Mary Stuart is intrinsically
connected to the maintenance of order in modern, Elizabethan Britain. Convicted of
treason for her supposed involvement in a plot to assassinate her cousin Elizabeth Tudor,
Mary Stuart was first imprisoned for nineteen years then executed on 8 February 1587.
Lewis writes:

as of the moment of her death, Mary Queen of Scots could be understood—
indeed, could hardly not be understood, whatever one thought of her guilt or
innocence—as a sacrifice to the imagined coherence of the nation-state and its
representative Elizabeth. She thereby became the perfect figure for what had to be
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repressed in order for both individuals and the collective they formed to believe
the fiction of their own unity and integrity.
28

Like the scene of Perseus holding up the severed head of Medusa, the staging of Mary’s
public and highly visible death signals Elizabeth’s triumph over Mary, the Protestant
sublimation of the would-be Catholic pretender to the throne, a moment that also, and
perhaps because of this scene, marks the beginning of the modern British nation-state.
Following her death, however, Mary hardly disappeared from view. Deployed by
proponents of Elizabethan propaganda from the instance of her beheading, she remained
a figure that was alternately repressed and reproduced. Immediately following the
execution, for example, Robert Wyngfield, ever a loyal subject of Elizabeth, wrote this
grisly account:

…then her dressing of lawn fell from her head, which appeared as if she had been
seventy years old, polled very short, her face being in a moment so much altered
from its form when she was alive, as few could remember her by her dead face.
Her lips stirred up and down almost a quarter of an hour after her head was cut
off.
29

Wyngfield’s description underscores the ugly, wizened appearance of Mary’s face before
and after death. With the tumbling of her “dressing of lawn,” he suggests that this true
countenance of Mary, her decrepitude, had been there all along, hidden under a wig and a
veil. The monstrous lurks in Wyngfield’s account as well, animating Mary’s lips long
after the fall of the axe, and suggesting, again like Medusa, an uncanny afterlife that
exceeds the moment death.
133
James Anthony Froude’s History of England (1862) affirms the gruesomeness of
the scene, and focuses in particular on the “labored illusion” of Mary’s appearance, its
false nature revealed at the moment of her death:

[Mary’s] head hung by a shred of skin, which he divided without withdrawing the
axe; and at once a metamorphosis was witnessed, strange as was ever wrought by
wand of fabled enchanter. The coif fell off and the false plaits. The laboured
illusion vanished. The lady who had knelt before the block was in the maturity of
grace and loveliness. The executioner, when he raised the head, as usual, to shew
it to the crowd, exposed the withered features of a grizzled, wrinkled old
woman.
30

For Froude, the most significant metamorphosis that Mary undergoes is not from life to
death, but the exposure of the truth of Mary’s appearance. The axe effects a kind of strip
show, tearing away the queen’s garments like layers of skin, and making not distinction
between them. Illusion, enchantment: all is laid bare along with Mary’s body.
By contrast, Agnes Strickland’s Life of Mary Queen of Scots (1844) focuses on
the pain borne by Mary and the sympathy of her spectators. After wounding Mary with
two swipes of the blade, the executioner’s third attempt was successful:

She neither screamed nor stirred, but her sufferings were too sadly testified by the
convulsion of her features, when, after the third blow, the butcher-work was
accomplished, and the severed head, streaming with blood was held up to the gaze
of the people…. The silence, the tears and groans of the witnesses of the tragedy,
proclaimed the feelings with which it had been regarded.
31

Strickland underscores the relationship between Mary and her witnesses, which transfers
or transubstantiates (we should not forget the Catholic dimension of Mary’s plight, and,
134
with her elaborate undressing of black outerlayers to a crimson garment, the express
overture to martyrdom) Mary’s physical suffering into her subjects’ emotional duress.
The queen’s mute cries are expressed through those who watch her, and after she dies,
she lives on in their grief.
Thus, despite the repression of her form, Mary persists in Elizabethan and
Victorian England precisely as an absence, one that derives its endurance specifically
through a national sense of mourning. Lewis observes: “Mary’s metamorphoses expose
the violence that makes modern history…. Mary has always also been a door to what
isn’t exactly there, in history—into the non-historical experience of self-induced and
eternally lamented loss.”
32
Her survivals in popular entertainments, momentary revivals
on key anniversaries, and the campaign to rewrite history by rendering her a Catholic
saint, point to another world that could have been, a past that might have taken a different
course. And she lives on: uncannily monstrous in Wyngfield’s and Froude’s accounts,
and in Strickland’s, through the sorrow of her subjects.

Figure 29 Death mask of Mary Stuart at the Mary, Queen of Scots House and Visitor Centre,
Jedburgh, Scotland
135
Specifically, and Edison and Clark seem to have understood this, Mary lives on as
a head. Bowman describes a death mask on display at the Jedburgh center, which,
according to the museum’s website, was found by Charles Hepburn in Peterborough,
though its origins beyond Hepburn’s retrieval remain unknown.
33
With its apocryphal
provenance, the head remains an uncertain object, and Bowman admits sharing his
skepticism with another visitor, “joking grotesquely about the practical difficulties of
casting a death mask from a severed head and talking about how ‘fake’ it looked with the
makeup and wig.”
34
(Figure 29) Yet the head remains for him “ghostly,” perhaps as
unnerving as the twitching lips in Wyngfield’s description, or the painting of Mary’s
severed head encountered by Nathaniel Hawthorne on an 1856 visit to Sir Walter Scott’s
estate in Abbotsford, Scotland.
35
Reflecting on Scott’s impressive collection of paintings,
Hawthorne remarks:

the one that struck me most—and very much indeed—was the head of Mary
Queen of Scots, literally the head cut off, and lying on a dish. It is said to have
been painted by an Italian or French artist, two days after her death. The hair curls
or flows all about it; the face is of a death-like hue, but has an expression of quiet,
after much pain and trouble—very beautiful, very sweet and sad; and it affected
me strongly with the horror and strangeness of such a head being severed from its
body. Methinks I should not like to have it always in the room with me.
36

Hawthorne’s account, like Shelley’s medusan ekphrasis, ostensibly contemplates an
image of serenity, a severed head resting on a dish, but concludes with a sense of
shuddering, of horrific frisson. The violence of the execution, its “pain and trouble,”
seems to make an uncanny return. Despite the passive beauty of Mary’s expression,
Hawthorne is unsettled. “I should not like to have it always in the room with me,” he
136
confesses: strange phrase. Is it the image of a severed head, the evidence of a former
violence, which strikes him with “horror and strangeness”? Or is it the idea of this
painting, this head, being close to him, in the same room, that disturbs him most, an
image that strikes him with a force similar to that of the violence it depicts? Could it be
the possibility, or impossibility, of the head still alive, curls flowing, and eyes that might
yet be watching?
Mary Stuart’s gruesome beheading in the late sixteenth century, without even the
efficiency of the guillotine invented two hundred years later, occurred at a time when
punishment was a regular part of public life, even an execution as unusual as the
beheading of a head of state. Yet as Michel Foucault observes in Discipline and Punish,
torture and execution disappeared as forms of spectacle in the late eighteenth and mid-
nineteenth centuries.
37
As part of institutional changes that shifted from a logic of
punishment to a rhetoric of rehabilitation, the penal and legal systems were abstracted,
rationalized, medicalized, desanguinated,
38
and, in the despectacularization of execution,
distanced as far as possible from the body. Foucault notes: “in punishment-as-spectacle a
confused horror spread from the scaffold; it enveloped both executioner and condemned;
and, although it was always ready to invert the shame inflicted on the victim into pity or
glory, it often turned the legal violence of the executioner into shame.”
39
The sympathy
shared between the body of the condemned and the body of the condemner—and indeed
in Wyngfield’s, Froude’s and Strickland’s accounts there is no way to tell the story of
Mary’s beheading without mentioning her executioner—put the two in dangerous
137
proximity. As a result, Foucault contends, the modern state worked to separate them,
minimize their contact, or at least relocate violent punishment away from the public eye.
As The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots makes clear, however, punishment-as-
spectacle does not disappear entirely from view. Though public executions had retreated
indoors by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (as seen, for example, in
Execution of Czolgosz), their visibility was displaced onto other realms, including the
magic stage, the wax museum, and notably, the cinema. Though it had vanished from the
public square, death was staged elsewhere, still spectacular, and frequently onscreen: in
reenacted executions from the annals of history, topicals dramatizing the events of the
Spanish American War and the western frontier, as well as trick films whose magical
displays toyed with the boundary separating life from death.
As Peggy Kamuf observes in a discussion of Jacques Derrida’s death penalty
seminars, “the condition of visibility…is necessarily inscribed in the law of the death
penalty,” even when confined to closed spaces or relocated elsewhere.
40
She notes the
frequency of Derrida’s references to dawn, how executions have and still are typically
carried out at that hour which is light enough to see, yet still dark enough to obscure.
“Not yet day, still somewhat night, dawn marks the liminal space into which a decision
cuts—tranche.”
41
At this hour, even the decision, the division, the cut is obscure: as
Kamuf notes, the Latin root of crépuscule, creperus, means doubtful, uncertain.
42

The lines separating day from night, condemned from executioner, life from
death, and visible from invisible, are unfixed, transgressible; they comprise yet another
“weak ontological frontier.” In accounting for the popularity of execution films in early
138
cinema, Charles Musser cites the ambiguity of death as a central allure: “Audiences had
been impressed that the image of someone who was demonstrably dead could appear so
lifelike.”
43
Looped in the kinetoscope, which was the primary way audiences viewed The
Execution of Mary Queen of Scots, the decapitated corpse would also cycle back to life,
to Mary’s fleshy body, a continuous alternation between inanimate dummy and living
actor that further underscored the plasticity of the line, the tranche—the splice—that
separates life from death. The primary draw, however, was most likely the violence itself,
a survival of the sixteenth century scaffold, a scene both alluring and repulsive, that
catapults forward into contemporary scenes of violence, from slasher films to terrorist
communiqués.
44

Foucault observes that in the mid-nineteenth century, the veil, or perhaps more
accurately the blindfold, remained as a vestige of older public executions. “The
condemned man was no longer to be seen. Only the reading of the sentence on the
scaffold announced the crime—and that crime must be faceless. (The more monstrous a
criminal was, the more he must be deprived of light: he must not see, or be seen…)”
45

The veil performs a double function. The first deprives the condemned of a face,
producing a disfigurement that, as Adriana Cavarero observes, “destroy[s] the uniqueness
of the body.”
46
Without a face, the primary point of identification, the condemned man or
woman becomes a body, any body, an abstraction well on its way to becoming a corpse, a
mere object. The second function of the veil prevents the condemned from seeing his
executioner, his accusers, and his witnesses. Auerbach contends that the blindfold blocks
the intersubjectivity of eye contact, the look of and recognition in death and the pivotal
139
point of connection in the Medusa myth. With the veil in place, like the sheets of paper
the teacher taped over the monitors at the Edison Historic National Park, or Perseus’s
shield-cum-screen, those who watched an execution could avoid the “uneasy look of
death.”
47
In The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots, before Mary kneels, a maid affixes a
blindfold to her head. The act sets up the trick of disfigurement—the substitution of the
actor’s body for a dummy head beneath the veil—and also forestalls Mary’s troubling
look.
The look we do not see, the direct solicitation of the viewer’s attention, is an
otherwise common trope in the cinema of attractions. Gunning argues that, among other
confrontational modes of address, the direct look, seen in a wink or knowing glance at the
spectator, registers an awareness of the spectacle as spectacle, and the viewer’s
complicity in this matrix of looking.
48
Only later, in the transitional period, did
prohibitions against the direct look begin to take effect. In a New York Dramatic Mirror
column from 1910, Frank Wood argues for the erection of a “fourth wall” that separates
audience from actors, thus sealing off the diegetic world from that of the spectator:

When the movement or attitude of the player is obviously unnatural in turning his
face toward the camera he betrays by the act the fact that he is acting—that there
is someone in front unseen by the spectator to whom the actor is addressing
himself. Immediately the sense of reality is destroyed and the hypnotic illusion
that has taken possession of the spectator’s mind, holding him by the power of
visual suggestion, is gone.
49

Here another boundary to be crossed, another illusion to be shattered. Wood
perhaps understood the amplified sense of danger, of contamination, that connected the
140
figures onscreen to those in the audience, particularly in the matched eyelines of direct
address. There is, as in Hawthorne’s account of the painting of Mary Stuart’s severed
head, an uneasiness associated with proximity, as if the direct address acknowledged that
audience and actors shared the same room, the same look. In The Execution of Mary
Queen of Scots, after the blade has fallen, the executioner turns to the audience to display
Mary’s head. The official in Execution of Czolgosz, too, faces the camera at the film’s
conclusion, and for Auerbach this indicates “how in the process of viewing the film we
have become those witnesses for the state.”
50
Both retain a survival of the Medusa scene,
Medusa’s frontal stare diverted in the mirror, cut off, bagged, and relocated in Perseus’s
triumphant stance. It is a look he shares with the executioner in The Execution of Mary
Queen of Scots, a direct look that in a few short years would also become prohibited.
Buried beneath all of these restricted views is Medusa’s threatening gaze: eyes that
might, even in death, even blindfolded or concealed in a sack, flutter open.
Medusa lurks in another of Edison’s films as well, Old Maid Having Her Picture
Taken (1901). Here the old maid (in her advanced age and ugliness, the spinster is not
accidentally associated with non-reproductive female bodies deemed excessive to the
social body) plays the Medusa myth as a joke. As she waits anxiously for a photographer
to arrive so that she can have her picture taken, she glances at herself in a large mirror,
turns to look at the audience, then, before she can look back, the mirror cracks. Startled,
she attempts to recompose herself, but her terrible face asserts its destructive power again
when the photographer, having finally arrived, sets up the camera. She preens and poses,
and when he releases the shutter the camera explodes. The seemingly unharmed though
141
no less irate photographer rails at the woman for damaging his equipment. Yet the
implications of her gaze, and the malevolent effect it has when it is reproduced in a
mirror or camera, are far more serious than the film’s farcical tone: if this Medusa can
shatter a mirror and explode a camera, what might happen to the audience, to whom she
has already turned her devastating gaze?

Women and/as Media

The violence inflicted in The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots occurs on the body of a
woman. Mary’s body, however, is already phantasmatic: in flesh she is played by a male
actor, and in death she is replaced by a dummy. With her body vanished, what remains is
an image, and, in the displaced gaze of her severed head, a directed look that sutures over
the body’s absence with apparent continuity. This image and the look that attends it via
the cinematographical apparatus are complicit in the act of disappearing the woman’s
body.
Constance Balides and Judith Mayne and have demonstrated how in early cinema
genres, women’s bodies are used for spectacles often violent or erotic (or both) in nature.
Balides cites What Happened on Twenty-Third Street, New York City (Edison, 1901) as a
telling, and tellingly gendered, “scenario of exposure” common to and indeed constitutive
of early actuality films.
51
In this staged scene, passersby walk along a bustling city street
when a draft from a subway grate lifts up a woman’s skirt; for Balides, the apparent
142
ordinariness of the actuality is organized around erotic spectacle. Mayne, meanwhile,
investigates the fragmentation of the body formally effected by the close-up. While she
observes that men were also subjected to this segmentation of the body via the camera,
she concludes that women were more frequently associated with this practice: “there is
little question that the display of a body part is much more characteristic of the female
body.”
52

Linda Williams addresses the more overt theatricality of trick films, where bodies,
like their counterparts on the magic stage, were spectacularly severed, decapitated,
disappeared, recalled, and reconstituted. Like Mayne she notes that male bodies were
subject to this “drama of morcellation and restoration” as frequently as those of women,
but for her, the governing logic of dismemberment relates more fundamentally to almost
exclusively male control of the apparatus and the bodies subjected to its violence.
53
She
writes:

More important than the vanishing act, more important than the imitation of
procreative powers, is the construction of a scenario which gives the magician-
filmmaker power over all the bodies in his domain, allowing him not simply to
conjure away the woman but symbolically to reenact, and thus master through
obsessive repetition, the problem of difference, the threat of disunity and
dismemberment posed by the woman’s body.
54

As Williams describes, the staging of male power and apparent mastery over the bodies
of others, notably women, is affirmed by the fact that Méliès, for her the exemplar of this
tendency, is the only person who addresses the film audience directly; none of his actor-
assistants, male or female, are ever permitted this look.
55
As filmmaker and magician, in
143
front of and behind the camera, men control both the images one sees, as well as the
means of looking.
In this regard, the technique of stop-motion substitution, which, as we have seen,
is not restricted to trick films alone, takes on an urgent, political dimension where it
concerns the concealment of all or part of a body. The substitution of real bodies for fake
ones, visible for invisible, in frame or off screen, presumes a structure that orders and
separates bodies in politicized ways. As Judith Butler contends, “How bodies which fail
to materialize provide the necessary ‘outside,’ if not the necessary support, for the bodies
which, in materializing the norm, qualify as bodies that matter.”
56
We have already seen,
in the first chapter, how China girls reside on the margins of the film frame, their
images—tones, colors, faces—providing a support for the bodies we are otherwise
permitted to see. The invisible beneath the visible is at work in The Execution of Mary
Queen of Scots, as well, in the cut that conceals the body of another woman. Cinema does
not only spectacularize the trick, or hide its substitutions, but structurally produces, in its
privileging of certain “bodies that matter,” the exclusion and often violent suppression of
others.
The matter of bodies, too, their material substance, is precisely the trade of the
substitution trick. Méliès’s first substitution, in 1896 (already his seventieth film),
involved the vanishing of a woman’s body, a cinematic translation of the wildly popular
Vanishing Lady act of 1880s London.
57
On film, bodies could be treated as both material
and immaterial, there and not there. Karen Beckman writes: “Magic repeatedly presents
the manipulation of fantasy or imaginal bodies as if it were the manipulation of real
144
bodies.”
58
The dematerialization of the body, if not achieved through an act of violence
like the decapitating swipe of the executioner’s scimitar in The Terrible Turkish
Executioner (Méliès, 1904), evokes a bodily violence regardless, in the very
transformation that occurs.
Beckman argues that the grisly implications of magic displays were rendered
palatable and indeed thrillingly entertaining because they were presented as harmless. As
on the stage, magic films like The Terrible Turkish Executioner, where four men lose
their heads to an overzealous executioner wielding a gigantic sword, produce not horror
but maintain a mischievous, playful tone by returning the heads to their rightful bodies by
film’s end. The restoration of the whole body, of the beginning, reassures the audience
that this violence, at least, is impermanent and thus non-threatening.
59
As the Star Film
catalogue describes, “there is nothing gruesome about this scene, terrible as it may seem.
It is simply ludicrous throughout.”
60
For Beckman, the presumed harmlessness of magic
foregrounds the relation between the play of visible bodies in cinema and the social
debates around overpopulation, specifically the “surplus women problem,” and anxieties
over colonial bodies circulating elsewhere in the Commonwealth in the late nineteenth
century. She speculates: “perhaps because of this assurance of harmlessness, that the
interconnection between these spheres can become visible.”
61
In this way, cinema stages
occlusions happening in other cultural spheres, rendering these marginal bodies central
and visible, at least in their spectacular apparitions and vanishings.
Yet even as he controls the cinematic apparatus, the means of making and
displaying images, the filmmaker does not fully mitigate the threat of violence otherwise
145
suppressed by an outer appearance of harmlessness. In magic films, this is particularly
evident in films that feature some kind of device to conjure images and bodies: cameras,
telegraphs, posters, or, in other words, media. In The Magic Lantern (Méliès, 1903), for
example, two clowns assemble a large magic lantern that, after first projecting images on
a wall, opens to reveal a near-constant stream of women who emerge from within the
lantern. No longer used for its intended purpose of projection, the magic lantern becomes
a magic machine, and every time it’s open and shut it produces, to the delight of the
clowns, more and more dancing girls. Chaos, however, soon follows: as the clowns begin
fighting over the lead dancer, a band of soldiers enter to attack. The pair scramble to hide
in the magic lantern. When the soldiers open the lantern, the clowns have transformed
into a jack-in-the-box figure with a giant head. The soldiers flee and the women return,
encircling the new, grotesque creature in a feverish dance. Here the conjuring device,
which, by extension, includes the cinema, produces not only an abundance of bodies but
a scene of fighting, disarray, and finally, the mutation of conjurers themselves. The
logical extension of the magic lantern, the film proposes, is a machine that overtakes the
ones who originally constructed it. And it begins by feeding their desires to render, then
materialize, female bodies; it is, in a sense, a malevolent, maternal body itself, and this
too must be conquered and controlled.
In magic films, the female body is strongly associated with the medium or
magician’s prop that conjures it. As demonstrated in The Magic Lantern, the
reproducibility of late-nineteenth century media—photography and film especially—is
allied with the reproductive capabilities of women. Films like The Vanishing Lady
146
(Méliès, 1896), in which a sheet, another cloth to conceal the face and its gaze, is placed
over a woman and transforms her into a skeleton, invert this connection by asserting the
magician’s powers of controlling women, though, as Beckman argues, the
dematerialization of the woman’s body still affirms her generative capabilities. “With the
help of mirrors, trapdoors, elevators, photographs, and films, the visual image of
‘woman’ emerges on the modern scene as utterly unstable and constantly prone to
disappearance, in spite of, or perhaps because of, its endless reproducibility.”
62

Williams describes the “body as mechanism” in her examination of Muybridge’s
chronophotography studies and Méliès’s magic films. In her view, the machine,
intrinsically tied to the woman’s body, is “less an impartial instrument than a crucial
mechanism in the power established over that body, constituting it as an object or subject
of desire, offering up an image of the body as mechanism that is in many ways a
reflection of the mechanical nature of the medium itself.”
63
To gain control of the
machine figured within a film like The Magic Lantern means controlling the unruly
female body that is both product and extension of it. The “harmless” staging of chaos in
Méliès’s magic films and their “ludicrous” scenarios may, following Beckman, allow
room for the anxieties associated with women and reproductive machines to surface, but
in a more ambiguous case like The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots, which does not
purport to innocuousness, there is a stronger imperative to assert the male filmmaker’s
control. Here, in what Kracauer called a “frightful exhibit,” the threat of women is very
much present, and in the matched cuts of the filmmaker and executioner, the violence
147
wrought on the body of the woman is intrinsically connected to the violence of the
cinema machine.
The threat of women is also a threat carried out against women. Mary Ann Doane
argues that, against the various shocks and traumas modernity imposes on the psyche and
body of the presumed white male viewer, his anxieties are displaced onto others, namely
those who are other to him in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. Mastery over the
cinematic apparatus is thus demonstrated through the technological manipulation of
women’s bodies, whether in the trick films of Méliès, the staged deaths of early execution
films, or the spectacular fragmentation of female bodies in the choreography of Busby
Berkeley. (Figure 30) Preserving the white male body, in these cases, means displacing
cinema’s violent effects onto others. For Doane, this “discourse…effectively constitutes
itself as a denial of the body through the projection of contingency and embodiment onto
the white woman or the racial other.”
64

Figure 30 Stills from Gold Diggers of 1935 (dir. Busby Berkeley, 1935)
148

Figure 30: Continued

In The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots, the violence against a woman takes the
form of a beheading. Surveying a history of decapitations in art, Julia Kristeva observes
that, against the disappearance of female beheadings in the modern era, “this scarcity of
female decapitations expresses a fundamental repression, the most difficult to admit: it is
the mother’s head at which we aim, she is the capital vision, with so excessive a vital,
libidinal impact that it warrants an equally capital repression.”
65
The maternal body, itself
a reproductive machine, must be directed, controlled, and, should that fail in displays of
“harmless” mayhem, it must be stopped, cut off, turned against itself, and destroyed.
Kristeva observes two anxieties that restrict the space of women to the maternal, either
expressed in “[t]he archaic fear of losing the mother, to the point of impotence and death,
with its corollary that is the all-powerful mother; and the fear of castration for the man,
149
with its corollary that is the castrated woman.”
66
How slippery the line between life-
giving and life-taking, how easily the vagina substitutes for the face, as Freud observes of
Medusa’s head, or for, Kristeva, the “vulva and vultus, genitals or face, two fantastical
equivalents that the myth of Medusa brings together.”
67
Castrating image: image of
castration. These “excessive splendors of pictorial decapitations,” then, “reveal the dual
unconscious logic that leads us to invest in the visible itself, insomuch as it is a sublime
defense against these two fears.”
68
The beheading is spectacular, insistently visual
evidence of male mastery over women, the mother’s reproductive powers neutralized, or
made destructive. The trace of horror, however, still lurks in the head itself, the face that
it bears and threateningly implies: “even when violence tears at other parts of the body,”
Cavarero affirms, “horror always concerns the face.”
69
In The Execution of Mary Queen
of Scots, the head and the eyes are hidden, covered by a cloth even before the moment,
the look, of death.
The film’s scene of beheading and the substitution splice that makes it possible,
does not, as Frazer notes, “create a new reality” as magic films do but instead “facilitates
the seemingly impossible.”
70
Confined to the realm of the historical, if not the real, the
staging of Mary’s execution, and the act of witnessing implicated in the viewer, cannot so
easily escape under the aegis of harmlessness. What is impossible about the film? A
death without consequence, without violence, perhaps, though these deleterious effects
are not gone but displaced, hidden, cut out. The cut is the film’s central event, both on the
level of its historical subject its and formal technique. Fused together, these cuts carry out
the work of the film’s deeper, hidden execution: not the actual dismemberment of the
150
female body, or what is visible onscreen, but the body’s dismantling all the same, at the
nearly imperceptible level of the frame. Indeed, the film itself is an execution in the sense
of an operation carried out, and it precisely takes the form of an excision, a bodily
exclusion. All that remains at the film’s conclusion is the dummy head lifted by the
executioner’s hand: death’s head, gorgoneion, sign of impossible violence, the impossible
view of one’s own death. But also a face concealed, covered by a veil behind which
twitches the uncanny life of the impossibly still-moving, the glare of an impossible gaze.

Death’s Head

The face, Kristeva tells us, “eludes capture.”
71
From the scene of beheading, the “capital
act,” the face escapes, hidden beneath a veil, within the very cut of the film, the interval
between frames.
72
Where does it go, however? And was it ever really there?
At the moment of death, the head undergoes a transformation, becoming
monstrous in the possibility of its continued life. Until the eighteenth century, German
surgeons were still examining “the problems of the autonomous life of a head,”
attempting to gauge whether a head still lived after decapitation, and, if so, for how
long.
73
Even without evidence of movement, severed heads seemed uncannily alive, and
indeed they often survived their bodies in horrific memory recalled in the form of death
masks or, like the painting that unnerved Hawthorne, in immortal portraits. Death’s head
skulls like the vanitas of sixteenth and seventeenth century Dutch paintings are another
151
form of survival of the severed head, symbols that indicate a shared condition, a memento
mori that the viewer, too, will eventually succumb to the same fate. A more
contemporary example of this uncanny, still-moving effect is expressed in the Headless
Lady sideshow at Coney Island, featured in a 6 August 1945 article in Life Magazine,
photographed by Diane Arbus, and still exhibited today. The spectacle’s draw is in many
ways the converse of the description of Mary Stuart given by Wyngfield; instead of a
still-moving head, is the still-moving body of a woman without a head. (Figure 31)

Figure 31 Diane Arbus, The Headless Woman (1961)

152
While some recoil with horror to the severing of the head, there are those who
revel in its erotic potential. Much of the intrigue surrounding the exploitation film Snuff
(dir. Michael Findlay and Roberta Findlay, 1976), for example, centered on what
appeared to be the actual murder, prompted by a sexual encounter, of a woman in its final
scene. The controversy went so far as to prompt an investigation by Robert M.
Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney, who revealed, “It is nothing more than
conventional trick photography as is evident to one who sees the movie. The actress is
alive and well.”
74
In the philosophical tradition, Georges Bataille’s fascination with death
and dismemberment is well-known, and for him the images of suffering, particularly of
the vulnerable, offered a form of repudiation of bourgeois values, and through their
destruction, some form of authentic vision akin to the effects of Greek tragedy which
“depicted for gathered men the signs of delirium and death whereby one might recognize
their true nature.”
75
For Sade, to whom Bataille’s work is strongly indebted, the erotic
charge was located in the act of killing and the instrument itself. In 120 Days of Sodom
(1782-1785), he “unveils the erotic fantasies underlying the machinery.”
76
The erotics of
the dead head, while specific in their incarnations, also lend themselves to the distancing
effects of allegory, especially, as with Bataille, in political discourse. Kristeva probes the
limits of the severed head as political symbol: “Does decapitation become the emblem of
social and historical division? Or rather the brutal admission of our internal fractures, of
that intimate instability that prompts movements, but also crises? Self-perception of a
fundamental imbalance, of that ‘dark work’ that is the speaking being, divided and
unreconciled?”
77
Might it be an emblem that works to annihilate itself?
153
These monstrous, erotic, and symbolic transformations of the severed head fuel a
dimension of horror, yet as Kristeva astutely observes, “the power of horror would be
nothing without the horror of the feminine.”
78
Women as perpetrators of violence, as well
as its victims, amplify the power of horror especially when expressed as dismemberment
and decapitation. Cavarero affirms this notion of feminized horror, and, taking it a step
further, suggests the more extreme “horrorism” of violence perpetrated by Medea, a
woman who not only kills, but murders her own children. Instead of targeting heroes, she
aims for the helpless, and inverts, or perverts, the order of the maternal body as
something that destroys the life it creates.
79

In discussing the uses and significations of the head after its severing, however,
we still have not addressed the face, which remains elusive. The blindfold Mary wears in
The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots is what distinguishes her face from a mere head,
covering one to emphasize the other. It functions like the sack that conceals Medusa’s
deadly, unseeable face, transforming it into a head that can be prized, literally, as a
trophy. At best, at most, hers is a face implied. Medusa’s face, and more pointedly her
look, can only be concealed or approximated. Indeed, in rendering any face, artists
understand the incompleteness involved in the task of representation. Diderot, for
example, called the face a torment: “Thus what a torment is the face of man for them [the
colorists], that canvas that shifts, moves, stretches, relaxes, turns pale, blanches according
to the infinite multitude of alternatives of that light, mobile breath we call the soul.”
80

Even when scrutinized as in the case of the China girl, the face, the “capital vision,” does
not hold.
154
Thus the task of artists, Kristeva asserts, is to “abandon the spectacle, infiltrate the
borders of appearances, and find there a kind of face that has not yet found its face, that
never will, but that never stops seeking a thousand and one ways of seeing.”
81
The face is
not only an image, but, as visage, the French word for face, it involves a mode of seeing,
and one that can never be fulfilled. Though it promises, in its ability to capture motion as
well as photographic detail, to capture more of the face, its “infinite multitudes” of
expression, cinema, too, will struggle with the figuration of the face. Kristeva makes only
a few remarks on cinema in her study of severed heads, but in one instance she
proclaims: “The cinema will not be outdone. It will take over for the history of painting
and thus, inevitably, of decapitation.”
82
A head without a body, a face that refuses to be
seen: in the end, only cinema might extend the reach of Medusa’s visage, that incomplete
image to which we’re bound in an eternal look.
155

Chapter Two References

1
Joseph Brodsky, Collected Poems in English, ed. Ann Kjellberg (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2000), Sonnet XII, 230.

2
Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, History of the American
Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 87.

3
Charles Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900: An Annotated Filmography (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 189, and “Film Notes. Part 1: The Silent Film,” The Bulletin of the
Museum of Modern Art 16 no. 2/3 (1949), 1+5–68, citation on 5: “Once people had overcome their
amazement that the moving picture really moved, the new invention was appreciated because it could
record the present—topical views of Fifth Avenue or a French railway station were much enjoyed—and
because it could recreate the past. This ruthless little film was made for the Kinetoscope, but in February
1894, Jean A. LeRoy succeeded in projecting it on a screen.”

4
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1997), 57.

5
Ibid.

6
F.Q. Maguire & Co., Catalogue, [March 1898], 29, cited in Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 189.

7
Erik Barnouw, The Magician and the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

8
Tom Gunning, “‘Primitive’ Cinema: A Frame-up? Or the Trick’s on Us,” Cinema Journal 28 no. 2
(Winter 1989), 3–12, citation on 5.

9
Frank Gray, “The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899), G.A. Smith and the Emergence of the Edited Film in
England,” in The Silent Cinema Reader, ed. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer (London and New York:
Routledge, 2004), 51–62, citation on 53.

10
Phone interview with Karen Sloat-Olsen, Chief of Interpretation and Education at Edison Historic
National Park, 5 December 2011.

11
Gunning, “‘Primitive’ Cinema,” 3.

12
Jonathan Auerbach, Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2007), 31.

13
See Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” Art and
Text 34 (Spring 1989), rpt. in Film Theory and Criticism, sixth edition, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 862–876.

14
Auerbach, Body Shots, 31.

15
“While the boundaries between documentary reality and mise-en-scène may have been relative, they
seem to have mattered less than the kind of fascination which connects, for instance, the ‘realistic
156

imitation’ of President McKinley’s assassin in the electric chair in The Execution of Czolgosz (Edwin S.
Porter and Thomas Edison, 1901) with historical reenactments such as The Execution of Mary Queen of
Scots (Edison, 1895)—or the substitution trick in Execution by Hanging (Biograph, 1905) with the
authentic footage of Electrocuting an Elephant (Edison, 1903).” Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon:
Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 31.

16
Thomas Edison, “A Word from Mr. Edison,” The Edison Kinetogram 1 no. 1 (1 August 1909), 11.

17
Thomas Edison, “Mr. Edison Talks on Motion Pictures,” Kinetogram 5 no. 3 (1 September 1911), 18.

18
The Edison Kinetogram 8 no. 9 (1 June 1913), advertisement on back cover.

19
Mary Stuart, The Edison Kinetogram 8 no. 10, (15 June 1913), 18.

20
Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company, The
UCLA Film and Television Archive Studies in History, Criticism, and Theory (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991), 56.

21
“This photographic Film shows just as plainly as if you were there, every act and every motion of the
proceedings on the gallows…being a cold morning, you can see the little clouds of breath from the mouths
of the participants.” F. Z. Maguire & Co., Catalogue, [March 1898], 48; cited in Musser, Edison Motion
Pictures, 371.

22
Auerbach, Body Shots, 38. For a more thorough discussion of Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of
Auburn Prison, see Auerbach, Body Shots, 37–41; Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 319–320; and
Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 187–190.

23
David Levy, “Reconstituted Newsreels, Re-Enactments and the American Narrative Film,” in Cinema
1900 | 1906: An Analytic Study by the National Film Archive (London) and the International Federation of
Film Archives, ed. Roger Holman (Brussels: Féderation Internationale des Archives du Film, 1982), 243–
206, citations on 249 and 246.

24
The Bootleg Files: The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots,” Film Threat, 26 June 2009, accessed 1
April 2012, http://www.filmthreat.com/features/2337/#ixzz1BnPn9rpC.

25
See “Mary of Scots’ Tercentenary,” New York Times (23 November 1886), 5; “Remembering Mary
Stuart,” New York Times (17 September 1887), 4; and “Relics of the Stuarts,” New York Times (March 10,
1889), 14.

26
See “Mary Queen of Scots,” The New York Times (11 September 1887), 14; The United Press, “That
Erring Blue Book,” New York Times (22 March 1896), 17; and “Mary Stuart as a Saint,” New York Tribune
(12 April 1896), 31.

27
See Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (London and New York:
Routledge, 1998), 99–106, and Michael S. Bowman, “Tracing Mary Queen of Scots,” in Places of Public
Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, ed. Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott
(Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2010), 191–215.

28
Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots, 11.

157

29
Robert Wyngfield, An Account of the Execution of Mary, the Late Queen of Scots (1587), in The
Clarendon Historical Society’s Reprints, series II. 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1884–1886), I: 11; cited Lewis, Mary
Queen of Scots, 13.

30
James Anthony Froude, History of England, 12 vols. (London: 1862), XII, L361; cited Lewis, Mary
Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation, 201.

31
Agnes Strickland, Life of Mary Queen of Scots, 2 vols. (London: 1844); vol. 2, 456; cited Lewis, Mary
Queen of Scots, 183.

32
Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots, 230.

33
“Mary, Queen of Scots House—Jedburgh,” accessed 1 April 2012, http://www.marie-
stuart.co.uk/Castles/MaryHouse.htm.

34
Bowman, “Tracing Mary Queen of Scots,” 210.

35
Ibid., 199.

36
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Abbotsford,” Passages form the English Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed.
Sophia Hawthorne (Eldritch Press, [1883] 1999), accessed 1 April 2012,
http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/pfenb01.html#d1856, cited in Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots, 1 and
Bowman, “Tracing Mary Queen of Scots,” 191.

37
“And yet the fact remains that a few decades saw the disappearance of the tortured, dismembered,
amputated body, symbolically branded on face or shoulder, exposed alive or dead to public view. The body
as the major target of penal repression disappeared.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of
the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 8.

38
Adam Rosenthal notes that the United States, “by focusing on the question of cruelty, has systematically
attempted to remove all traces of blood from the scene of the section, without reflecting—or wanting to
reflect—on the legitimacy of the death penalty as such.” The goal, as he implies, is to do away with blood
and its reminder of death; the excessively bloody scene of Mary Stuart’s execution, along with the red
martyr’s cloth she strips down to, represents the opposite tendency to highlight the gory theatricality of
execution. Adam Rosenthal, “Scenes of Morality in Derrida’s Peine de mort,” presentation at Workshop on
La Peine de mort 2, Session 11 (Institut Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine, Caen, France: 4–9 July
2011), 4.

39
Ibid., 9.

40
Peggy Kamuf, “The Dawn of the Seminar,” presentation at Workshop on La Peine de mort 1, Session 10
(Institut Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine, Caen, France: 7–12 July 2010), 1.

41
Ibid., 2.

42
Ibid., 6.

43
Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 187.

44
Adriana Cavarero’s discussion of beheadings in terrorist videos demonstrates how contemporary images
of horror have returned to an earlier, pre-French Revolution moment of public beheadings. “The
iconography of the French Revolution has made the detached heads displayed to the crowd by the
158

executioner familiar. Despite the repetition of the act, the horrors of the present age break away from the
mechanical rationality so prized in the guillotine. Grasping the helpless victim by the hair and standing at
just the right angle to the television camera (and thus to the international media audience), the modern
executioner slices off the head with a knife. More than simply being carried out, the crime is staged as an
intentional offense to the ontological dignity of the victim.” Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 9. Susan Sontag similarly notes of the tendency to isolate
the scene of beheading in terrorist videos; of the propaganda video that, among other footage, shows the
violent beheading of Daniel Pearl, she remarks, “It is easier to think of the enemy as just a savage who
kills, then holds up the head of his prey for all to see.” Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador.
2003), 70.

45
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 13–14 (emphasis added).

46
Cavarero, Horrorism, 8.

47
Auerbach, Body Shots, 42.

48
Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Early
Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 56–62.

49
Frank Wood, “Spectator’s Comments,” New York Daily Mirror (14 May 1910); cited in Auerbach, Body
Shots, 43.

50
Ibid., 40.

51
Constance Balides, “Scenarios of Exposure in the Practice of Everyday Life: Women in the Cinema of
Attractions,” Screen 34 no. 1 (Spring 1993), 19–37.

52
Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 160.

53
Linda Williams, “Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A
Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 507–534, citation on
526. Here Williams responds to Lucy Fischer’s earlier essay, “The Lady Vanishes: Women, Magic and the
Movies.” Film Quarterly 33 no. 1 (Autumn 1979), 30–40, that contends the “commonplace” of trick films
involving male magicians performing often gruesome acts on female bodies. While Williams takes issue
with Fischer’s emphasis on the primacy of female bodies in trick films, she agrees with the governing
assertion of patriarchal power in such films.

54
Ibid., 527–528.

55
Ibid., 528.

56
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London:
Routledge, 1993), 16; cited in Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility, Biopolitics: Medicine,
Technoscience, and Health in the 21
st
Century, eds. Monica J. Casper and Lisa Jean Moore (New York and
London: New York University Press, 2009), 8.

57
Fischer, “The Lady Vanishes,” 30. Karen Beckman describes the enormous success and longevity of the
popular magic trick in Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2003), 46–54. See also John Frazer, Artificially Arranged Scenes: The Films of Georges
Méliès (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1979), 60–61.
159

58
Beckman, Vanishing Women, 8–9.

59
John Frazer notes the orientalist connotations of the “terrible man” theme, and in his synopsis of the film
he writes: “Since the 1890s Turkey had been the unruly child in European politics, providing a convenient
cartoon symbol for all that was violent and venal, an image that continued until the reforms of the Ataturk
during the twenties.” Frazer, Artificially Arranged Scenes, 134.

60
Star Film catalogue cited in ibid.

61
Ibid., 21. Beckman cites concerns about British overpopulation, particularly as signified by single or non-
reproducing women as well as the management of riotous colonial bodies, in the late nineteenth century as
a chief concern fantastically negotiated on the magic stage, and, by extension, through trick films. For
Balides, meanwhile, the eroticization of urban spaces in early cinema, especially in the United States,
reveal anxieties around working class white women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
particularly the ambiguity around the visibility of prostitution. In both cases, cinema, whether in magic or
actuality forms, problematized the visualization of women in public and private spheres. Invisible threats
like female sexuality or women’s bodies in general were visualized onscreen, rendered into spectacle, and
subordinated to the design of male filmmakers. Balides, “Scenarios of Exposure in the Practice of Everyday
Life,” passim.

62
Beckman, Vanishing Women, 6.

63
Linda Williams, “Film Body,” 508 (emphasis in original).

64
Mary Ann Doane, “Technology’s Body: Cinematic Vision in Modernity,” in A Feminist Reader in Early
Cinema, eds. Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 530–551, citation
on 543.

65
Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions, European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought
and Cultural Criticism, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 82.

66
Ibid., 33.

67
Ibid., 32.

68
Ibid., 83.

69
Cavarero, Horrorism, 15.

70
Frazer, Artificially Arranged Scenes, 61.

71
Kristeva, The Severed Head, 121.

72
Ibid., 91.

73
Ibid., 96.

74
Robert M Morgenthaus quoted in “Morgenthau Finds Film Dismembering Was Indeed a Hoax,” The
New York Times (10 March 1976), 82.

75
Georges Bataille, “The Obelisk,” Visions of Excess, 218.

160

76
Kristeva, The Severed Head, 97.

77
Ibid., 105.

78
Ibid., 110.

79
Cavarero locates a Medean survival in contemporary female suicide bombers, particularly those that have
been pregnant, who transform their bodies into weapons: bombs, that, when detonated, mix together the
limbs of the perpetrator and her victims, makes them indistinguishable from one another, their heads blown
clean off. See Horrorism, 97–105.

80
Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques (Paris: Garnier, 1965), 680; cited in Kristeva, The Severed Head, 64.

81
Ibid., 117.

82
Ibid.
161
Chapter Three: Hair Horror

William Friese-Greene used to tell a story about a woman at one of his earliest moving picture
demonstrations who went and poked her fingers at the image on the screen of a girl's face,
convinced that the whole thing was an impossible illusion, and that there were holes in the screen
for the eyes of a real girl standing behind it.

—Michael Chanan
1

Medusa’s face belongs to the realm of horror. Whether envisioned as grotesque or
beautiful, it cannot be seen, at least not until it is too late, already the moment of death. In
this way it is a face that can only be imagined, approximated, transformed into the
gorgoneion: apotropaic talisman, an evil eye to counter the evil eye. It is terrible both for
the way it looks, and for the look another turns toward it. It is a visage par excellence,
intrinsically bound to the act of looking, a face that only exists when regarded by
someone else, but also a face that, for its deadly appearance, cannot be seen. Or, as
Perseus teaches us, it can only be seen in a mirror. It is also a mirror itself: for those who
dare to look, the image they see, the last image they see, is a disfiguring one. Medusa’s
face is inscribed as horrific effect, as a mask, onto her viewers’ frozen stares. This is one
of the myth’s central paradoxes: a face that reproduces itself in the faces of those who
look, but only as destruction, and precisely as disfigurement. Kristeva writes: “The power
of horror is contagious. It figures but it disfigures as well: the source of a resurgence in
our representations that cut through the forms, volumes, contours to expose the pulsing
flesh.”
2
Horror is a mutilation, the severing of a head, the cutting of a face—an
effacement—that turns recognizable figure into undifferentiated flesh. For Cavarero, the
horrific violence both enacted on and by Medusa is precisely this “spectacle of
162
disfigurement…[horror] aims to destroy the uniqueness of the body.”
3
In the work of
both theorists, the aim of horror is not death, but disfigurement, the face dissembled,
gone.
In Nakata Hideo’s Ringu (1998), those who watch a cured videotape are given a
week before their lives are claimed by the malevolent female ghost, Sadako, when she
crawls out of a television monitor. Disfigurement, however, begins well before the
moment of death; when a group of teenagers travel to a remote cabin, their snapshots,
developed later, show their faces grotesquely distorted. The curse is already underway,
and it first marks its victims in the photographic image, the surveillance camera, or any
imaging device. (Figure 32) The smear of the face resembles the photographic aberration
of motion blur, when a figure moves too quickly for a camera to render all of its detail.
There is, in a sense, an implied frenzy of movement, an excess that will be met, in death,
with radical stillness. The photograph, already an uncanny medium, reveals what cannot
otherwise be seen, a curse that has marked someone for imminent death in Ringu, or, for
Roland Barthes, a medium that speaks generally to the eventual death of anyone whose
image it captures. “Whether or not the subject is already dead,” he writes, “every
photograph is this catastrophe.”
4
If television delivers and executes the curse of Ringu’s
videotape, the photograph already reveals its horrific extremes, the disfigurement it
produces first as an image reflected in the camera’s lens, then the terrible, twisted face of
the victim who dies. This final look, the film suggests, comes from the shock of excessive
fright.

163

Figure 32 Still from Ringu (dir. Nakata Hideo, 1998):
Reiko regards her own warped image in a Polaroid photograph

What image was so terrible that it causes one to die? In Suzuki Koji’s novel of
1991, Sadako’s victims see in her visage their own faces radically aged and distorted with
fear; the film and its Hollywood remake, The Ring (dir. Gore Verbinski, 2002),
meanwhile, relocate death in the sight of Sadako’s face, though this is only implied.
While in the films we see the video that brings about the curse, the film never shows us
Sadako’s (or in The Ring, Samara’s) face, save a close-up of one eye bulging from
beneath a thick tangle of dark hair. Though her victims see her, and die because of this
vision, the film audience is spared the reverse shot, the direct view of this medusan
figure. And like Medusa, the questions of who looks, and what one sees, remain
unanswered or at best ambiguous. What is certain is the confluence of a woman’s
disfigured and disfiguring face, a mediating image, and instant death.
Horror cinema, generally speaking, is replete with monstrous, Medusa-like
women: femmes castratrices, malevolent mothers, and evil girls who threaten and haunt
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their victims with curses, violence, and deadly, seductive looks.
5
Where other
manifestations of medusan optics in this study have focused on the mute underpresence
of the woman’s body in film, rendered as fleshy test subjects with the China girl or the
disappeared figures of early trick cinematography, the horror genre is more explicitly
concerned with the monstrous woman’s excessive overpresence, particularly that of her
face, the gorgoneion. Like early cinema’s male magician, whose faltering ability to
control his female subjects devolves into comedic chaos, horror cinema often highlights
the dangers of femininity that colludes with media to terrorize all the more. Beckman
locates the intertwined anxieties around women and media in cinema’s earliest
manifestations, and its legacy is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in contemporary
Asian horror films, or what is commonly referred to as J-horror.
6

J-horror’s central figure is the “dead wet girl,”
7
manifest as Sadako and her
sisters, “China girls” gone bad: the ideal of Asian femininity rendered as only surface
aesthetics in the thick, lustrous hair that covers the face, a monstrosity signaled by the
hair.
8
In Asian horror, the woman is an adolescent, and through her hair she manifests all
that is threatening about mature female sexuality in the moment of its first follicular
appearance. Even in its remake contexts, the signifiers of the “dead wet girl” remain
strikingly durable; though other elements change when Ringu was transplanted to The
Ring’s Seattle, for example, there remains a pubescent girl in a soiled white gown, long
dark hair, and her face obscured. Significantly, these Sadako-like figures are manifest in
and through media, often taking control of or becoming the device itself, and thus linking
the horror of the feminine with the technological anxieties associated with globalization,
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such as the networking of the Internet, cable television, and cellular phone
communications. They recreate the scene of the medusan myth but do so from its
mediated, optical articulation: images that cause death, but also generate other images,
producing new and often transgressive ways of looking.

Border Crossings

As an industrially salient and marketable category, Asian horror cinema emerged in the
late nineties as a regional cinema and almost simultaneously a transnational one. While it
is most frequently considered in generic terms of so-called “Dark Cinema,” one of its key
defining features is the rapidity with which locally produced films were remade in
Hollywood and subsequently distributed globally.
9
Cult devotees outside of Asia had
already been circulating J-horror in an unofficial capacity, and the transnational remake
brought about a new level of mainstream attention and visibility, helping to organize such
films into a coherent, recognizable, and durable genre. Thus, in large part, the formation
of Asian horror cinema’s regional stylistics are inextricable from their transnational
circulation which repackaged them and made them visible on an international scale. The
marketing of region and genre in distribution packages like Tartan Film’s Asia Extreme
make both terms appear coextensive with each other, masking over the nuanced cultural
specificities and contradictions that would otherwise destabilize such neat categorization.
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Even within the regional and generic characterizations of J-horror, however, there
has been considerable debate among scholars and critics as to what constitutes this
distinct group of films. From atmospheric ghost narratives to brutal displays of ultra-
violence, apocalyptic terror to melancholic romance, J-horror encompasses a range of
themes and narrative tropes. Some have attempted to organize it in terms of auteurist
discourse, as with the celebrity directors Nakata Hideo or Bong Joon-ho, though figures
like Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Kore-eda Hirozaku, who sometimes works with supernatural
themes but other times eschew them altogether, are more difficult to incorporate into such
a rubric. Others seek antecedents for Asian horror in folk traditions and earlier moments
in national film histories, like the midcentury kaidan-themed films of Mizoguchi Kenji
and Kobayashi Masaki, to secure a sense of cultural continuity. Most acknowledge that in
this increasingly globalized era, Asian horror represents a unique configuration of
industrial practices, particularly those that operate intraregionally and internationally.
Significantly, J-horror, perhaps owing to the elasticity of the horror genre, has
demonstrated unusual adaptability, its boundaries limited neither by nation nor medium.
Prior to and during the remake boom in the early 2000s, its narratives frequently migrated
across a variety of media platforms including manga, popular literature, videogames and
television. Asian horror is particularly distinctive for the degree to which all of these
media, individually but especially in relation to each other, function to produce it. In a
reflexive way, media also figures prominently in many J-horror films through the motifs
of haunted devices such as mobile phones, computers, cameras, and televisions.
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While calculated to produce maximum benefit for film distributors, the regional
appellation of Asian horror cinema also brings attention to the circulation of media within
Asia, and demonstrates the shortcomings of a national cinema framework, which, despite
recent scholarship that has illuminated the complex flows of transnational cinema,
remains the dominant model employed in Asian film historiography. Though Japan is
arguably the country where the first of these contemporary films were popularized,
thinking of J-horror in terms of a national cinema fails to account for the broader regional
development of the phenomenon, which, in addition to Japan, is most commonly
attributed to South Korea, Thailand, and Hong Kong, though considerable production
also occurs in Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other parts of the
region. Indeed J-horror, as a subset of a broader phenomenon of transnational Asian
filmmaking that includes everything from lavish blockbusters to independent art films,
challenges the notion of a national cinema as a stable or coherent formation.
10
Cultural
influence flows from the West as well, as cinema, from its earliest formations, was highly
international in the scope of its markets and production. In J-horror, East-West cultural
hybridity is readily apparent in the acknowledged influence of American slasher films in
the work of Nakata and Shimizu. A more pointed example for the purposes of this study
includes Ito Junji’s horror manga Uzumaki (1998, adapted into a film in 2000), which, in
a chapter called “Medusa,” explores the motif of possessed and living hair through a
“hair fight” between two schoolgirls. The regionalist designation of Asian horror, as
Christina Klein argues, is intrinsically related to Hollywood production, and for a
regional production company like Hong Kong’s Applause Pictures, which among other
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films released the omnibus Three Extremes (dir. Fruit Chan, Miike Takashi, and Park
Chan-wook, 2004) combing work of directors from Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea,
“their very pan-Asianness is shaped by Hollywood, insofar as it is a calculated response
to Hollywood’s overwhelming presence in Asia and part of a careful strategy for
competing with Hollywood.”
11

Thus the national cinema designation falls short of identifying in Asian horror a
single cultural source. Described at once as appealing to audiences around the world but
also bearing markers of culturally-specific origins, the regionalist framing of the genre
tends to elide identifiable national traits in favor of generalized pan-Asian tropes. Bliss
Cua Lim notes the way in which Asian horror is marketed as something both “culturally
specific and culturally neutral,” a form of cultural packaging that speaks to and also
transcends the local.
12
This is what enables the success of its Hollywood remake both in
the West and its later return to Asia theaters: presenting it as a domesticated form of the
exotic, a familiar incarnation of the unfamiliar. While the industry tends towards a
universalizing rhetoric, however, film scholarship and many fan cultures privilege
presumably “original” cultural specificities, as in the examination of specific folkloric
figures, often ignoring the influence of cross-cultural exchange.
13
Such modes of analysis
often overlook the regional circulation and transnational markets for which these films
were made, ultimately offering a myopic view of the nation without considering the ways
in which it interacts with and is shaped by the region and the world around it. Asian
horror, then, demands a view that incorporates both the cultural particularities of its
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source material as well as the translatable (and some untranslatable) elements that enable
its enduring popularity and market viability in and beyond the region.
How to account for both the specificities of a local culture and the imperatives of
a global market? Critic David Kalat coined the term “Korean J-horror” to describe the
horror boom in South Korea, and the awkward dissonance of his phrasing suggests the
degree to which Asian horror cinema both reifies an idea of a nation and abbreviates it,
rendering it different, a synecdochal sign of itself that is inevitably redacted and
insufficient. As the term “Korean J-horror” suggests, Japan as a distinguishable nation or
culture is but a distant trace, replaced with its alphabetic letter and bound, with a hyphen,
to a generic form of horror. “J-horror” borrows from Japanese journalists’ coinage of “J-
pop” in the early nineties in an effort to distinguish contemporary Japanese popular music
from Western varieties, and also from earlier iterations of Japanese music.
14
The adoption
of “K-pop,” “Mandopop,” and “Cantopop” soon after indicate the degree to which a
recognizable generic musical idiom was circulating throughout the region at the time
(though to be sure, successful popular music was being produced throughout Asia long
before this moment of nomenclatural convergence). Though inflected by language and
cultural particularities, these various “pops,” notably named in Romanized forms,
confirmed the viability and commonality of a form of music that at once signified a
distinctly contemporary and non-Western character.
15
The initial “J,” as a signifier,
denotes Japanese culture and Japanese language, yet its connection to the term “pop,”
which relates it to the other regional and international “pops,” renders it a secondary
status. Nation, first mediated via the English language and then redacted, is relegated to
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style. Moreover, the terms by which nation is evoked in J-pop or J-horror are seen to
already exist on the level of transnational circulation. That is to say, the nation is only
legible as something that is superseded by the regional, with national particularities
suppressed in favor of generic ones.
16

Despite the discrepancies concerning what actually constitutes Asian horror, or
indeed, the manner in which it ought to be constituted, most agree that the emergence of
contemporary Asian horror can be traced to the release of Nakata Hideo’s Ringu in 1998
with its subsequent sequels and transnational remakes. Based on Suzuki’s eponymous
novel, the story was adapted first for a television movie, Ringu: Kanzen-ban, in 1995 and
the Rasen television series in 1999. Nakata’s film was a surprise success; made for only
1.2 million dollars, it dramatically outperformed Hollywood imports in Japanese theaters
and quickly garnered the attention of industry professionals throughout Asia and in
Hollywood. In Japan, Ringu was promptly followed by two sequels, Rasen (1998) and
Ringu 2 (1999); a prequel, Ringu 0: Birthday (2000); another television series, Ring: The
Final Chapter (1999); a radio series; four manga series; and two videogames. In Korea it
was remade into The Ring Virus (1999) and in Hollywood, DreamWorks produced two
remakes: The Ring (2002), directed by Gore Verbinski, and The Ring 2 (2005), which
was helmed by Nakata.
17
Sadako 3D, which depicts Sadako’s reign of terror over the
Internet, was released in May 2012 in Japan. In addition to its positioning as the first
major Asian horror film to gain international recognition, the unusually durable afterlife
of the Ringu franchise also contributes to its emblematic status within the field. Though I
focus here on the initial cinematic incarnation of Ringu, it should be apparent that the
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narrative at the center of what Julian Stringer calls its “series of mutually penetrating
inter-texts” is multiple, heterogeneous, and unfixed in terms of its expression in any
individual media form or cultural context.
18
Thus, to discuss Ringu is to invoke its plural
formations, replications, and deviations across multiple boundaries.
Ringu plays out many of J-horror’s most recognizable features, both in terms of
its stylistics, iconographies and themes, as well as the genre’s increased visibility on a
regional and global scale. The narrative, which centers on a cursed videotape that causes
the death of anyone who sees it, metatextually addresses the proliferation of media and
the spectatorial fascination that impels it. Indeed, Ringu operates by much the same logic
of its haunted videotape; as the only way to avert the video’s curse is by reproducing it
and showing it to another person, the morbid curiosity that compels people to view it
ultimately serves to extend its audience. The mythos of the fictional tape mingles with the
actual film’s notoriety as an exceptionally scary movie: when Verbinski described
viewing a dubbed video copy of Nakata’s film, he admitted being drawn in by the film’s
dark allure.
19

The source of the video’s curse, or in many ways its “author,” is Yamamura
Sadako, Asian horror’s paradigmatic “dead wet girl.”
20
Suzuki, the author of the Ring
novel, has cited as an inspiration Oiwa-san, a well-known yurei of kabuki lore, whose
face was disfigured when her husband poisoned her.
21
Yet Sadako is distinct from such
folkloric antecedents for her pre-adolescent age; unlike the onryo, the vengeful female
spirit that haunts the men who wronged her, Sadako is a girl on the brink of puberty. Her
name, which means “chaste child,” further emphasizes her youthful purity.
22
She is like
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one of her real-life namesakes, Sasaki Sadako, a child victim of Hiroshima who, suffering
from leukemia, attempted to fold a thousand cranes in the hopes of having her wish of
survival granted. With only 644 cranes folded, however, she died at the age of twelve,
and today she stands as a figure of an undeserved and untimely death, as well as a figure
of incompletion, her life ended before she reached adult maturity. Like the onryo, she
bears the motive for societal vengeance, but the particular nature of her wrongdoing is
that she has been denied the opportunity to live a full, natural life. Borrowing this aspect
from the Hiroshima Sadako, Ringu’s Sadako similarly never achieves closure but
continues to insist on the irreparable nature of a past wrongdoing.
The other real-life figure on which Sadako was modeled is Takahashi Sadako, a
medium involved in the parapsychological experiments of Fukurai Tomokichi, a Tokyo
Imperial University scientist who attempted to prove the existence of ESP and
thoughtography, or nensha (“sense copying”), in the early 1900s. In the senrigan incident
of 1911, however, one of his subjects under investigation committed suicide and Fukurai
was forced to resign. Later, he resumed his experiments with Takahashi Sadako and in
1931 published Clairvoyance and Thoughtography, a book based on his studies with her.
Likewise, in flashback, the film reveals that Sadako’s mother participates in a series of
experiments similar to those of Kukurai’s. During Professor Ikuma’s demonstration at a
press conference, however, Sadako’s mother is heckled by an increasingly irate crowd.
The young daughter, who has been sitting in the audience, uses her own psychic powers
to cause the death of a journalist who accuses her mother of cheating. Unable to cope
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with Sadako’s monstrous ability, her mother takes her own life, and Professor Ikuma,
Sadako’s adoptive father, eventually pushes the girl down a well and seals its surface.
In Ringu, the figure of Sadako and the figuration of media are closely linked.
(Figure 33) Manifested in and through the videotape her wrath has generated, Sadako
evokes the plural meanings of medium as a technology of communication and also as one
who acts as a conduit between the natural and the supernatural worlds. As a medium, and
through a specific media form, she connects disparate spaces, relaying, in the film, not
only between the various people marked by her curse, but the spirit realm and that of the
real world. Metatextually, on the level of genre, she also connects the historical
temporality of contemporary Japan to its vague folklore past, and arguably, the local
specificity of the nation to the generalized sphere of the region, or the region to the world.
Sadako is a liminal figure, with her in-betweeness troubling the distinctions of the spaces
that are otherwise kept tidy and separate. Sadako mediates; she enacts an operation, a
ligature that binds and forces into explicit contact that which is meant to be kept apart.
Through her, through her contact—and particularly as something that is seen)—spaces
open and spill onto each other. Yet by its very presence, her mediation also questions the
degree to which such spaces are ever distinct. As the medium is a conduit between one
thing and another, it also opens channels of communication, giving voice to what may
previously have been silent, or making visible what may have been unseen.
23

Yet like the mediating hyphen of J-horror, media also distort and interfere with
the mediation process, rendering one thing partially obscure or indistinct to another. If
Asian horror has a “face,” it belongs to Sadako, though hers is a strange visage. As
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mentioned previously, it is never fully seen; rather, it is obscured by long and unruly hair
that hangs in front of her face, making it difficult to distinguish the front of her head for
the back. In many ways, and very much like Medusa, Sadako is a figure without a face,
or one who does not show her face. Instead of her face, she is identifiable through other
signifiers—most importantly, her dark hair—that become iconographic, not just for this
individual film, but arguably for all of Asian horror cinema.

Figure 33 Still from Ringu: Sadako appears in the television

Because Sadako does not show her face, it becomes in a way possible to locate
her in nearly every contemporary Asian horror film as the generic “dead wet girl” seeking
vengeance. Her unearthly crawl out of the well is mimicked in Kayako’s descent down
the stairs in Ju-on: The Grudge (dir. Shimizu Takashi, 2003); her hair found in the
ceaselessly growing locks of Exte (dir. Sono Sion, 2007) or the strands that wrap around
a girl’s ankles in One Missed Call (dir. Miike Takashi, 2003); her shadowy presence
175
glimpsed out of the corner of the eye in Shutter (dir. Banjong Pisanthanakun and
Parkpoom Wongpoom, 2004) and the aptly named The Eye (dir. Danny Pang Phat and
Oxide Pang Chun, 2002); and her unstoppable self-replication, through the videotape,
echoed in the monstrous regenerations of Tomie (dir. Oikawa Ataru, 1999).
24
Even when
Asian horror is remade in Hollywood, Sadako’s iconographic markers remain largely the
same: though racially white, Samara, the central figure of the American Ring films, has
similarly dark hair and a white dress; The Grudge (dir. Shimizu Takashi, 2004) was
remade in the same Tokyo house of its predecessor and haunted again by Kayako; and
with the remake of Shutter (dir. Ochiai Masayuki, 2008), despite the transposition to a
white couple, the female ghost that haunts them remains identifiably Asian. (It is no
coincidence that these American remakes were also helmed by Asian directors.) The
iconography of Sadako is pervasive to the extent that Shimizu Takashi, the director of
Tomie: Re-birth (2001), Ju-on: The Grudge as well as the Hollywood remakes The
Grudge and The Grudge 2 (2006), created a short film in 2004 entitled Blonde Kwaidan,
wherein a Japanese director brought to the United States to make a horror film is haunted
by a white, blonde-haired ghost. In a sense, Sadako requires no translation, or cannot be
adequately translated: while other aspects of Asian horror are adapted for Western
audiences, either with subtitles or targeted marketing strategies, or are remade, recast, and
relocated in Hollywood, the signifying power of Sadako and her hair, in particular,
remain surprisingly durable.
The imprecise nature of Sadako’s supernatural origins further adds to her
adaptability. Like the oral storytelling traditions, notably the circulation of urban legends,
176
on which much of contemporary horror cinema is based, it is impossible to pinpoint a
first manifestation of this figure. As Carol J. Clover observes of oral modes of
dissemination: “This is a field in which there is some sense no original, no real or right
text, but only variants; a world in which, therefore, the meaning of the individual
example lies outside itself.”
25
In Ringu and other technophobic horror narratives, Sadako
is presented at and as a technological remove, a simulacrum rendered in the form of an
image. Her obscured face is further distorted and deformed through the video medium in
which it appears, in which it can only appear, and following the logic of the video dub,
her form becomes increasingly illegible with each act of reproduction. As successive
generations of the tape are copied and viewed, her power spreads while her image grows
increasingly blurred and indistinct, and we can imagine it slowly giving over to the empty
signal of static. In a medusan sense, there is no “original,” only replications of the mirror
(or in this case, the television) image, itself a representation, and only a representation.
Paradoxically, Sadako’s obscured face is what makes her so recognizable and
determinedly visible within the context of Asian horror cinema, both within the region
and through its Hollywood remakes. Sadako’s permeation of popular culture extends
beyond box office success: in a study on Japan’s high rate of kanshibari, or sleep terror,
among pre-adolescent children. Anna Schegoleva observes that Sadako, more than any
other mass media figure, is cited as the paralyzing presence and even cause of this
phenomenon.
26
The kanshibari sightings exploit the degree to which Sadako is not
merely a well-known figure but one who is perhaps too well-known, troubling borders
between real and unreal, conscious and unconscious, and orderly civic life and the unruly,
177
uncontrollable, and unpredictable forces that lurk within it. While many horror films play
on the distinction between reality and fiction to heighten their fear-inducing effects (one
example being the “found” news clippings and documentary stylistics of The Blair Witch
Project (1999)), the concerns of maintaining societal order are more urgently addressed
with Ringu and perhaps all of Asian horror. Sadako’s own story, from the suggestion of
her illicit conception by sea demon, her terrible and extraordinary power to kill people by
thought, her later persecution and murder in the well, and finally her reemergence via
thoughtographic imprint or channeling on a videotape, exceeds the “natural” order of
ordinary life. Her existence runs counter to what would be considered normal, and she
threatens to undermine order at every stage, being a perversion of order as such.
In this way, her death in the well is pivotal: first as an undeserved death, and
second the radical disavowal of her life by not only covering the well, but building a
guest cabin over it. Indeed, the attempt to “cover up” the crime, an act paralleled in the
hair that conceals Sadako’s face, is the source of her fury, and through her supernatural
abilities, she makes herself known in other ways. The sublimation of her body, in contrast
to her reemergence elsewhere, in other forms, as an image, suggests the underlying
perversity of social order, which forces repression over the assimilation of a radical other.
Thus Sadako, as one whose face is never revealed, becomes an emblem for what is not
only socially unruly but what is deliberately kept out of sight. And though rendered
invisible, her manifestation in other, displaced forms makes it clear that she was there all
along, lying in the deep.
178
To the extent that she can be perceived, it is Sadako's specifically mediated
condition that enables both the sight of her, and, arguably, her own sight. Watching the
videotape means that, seven days later, she, via the videotape, will return the same gaze.
Sadako is a medium that communicates through media; her specific form as a mediated
image thus contributes to her extratextual slippage. Instead of explaining her ubiquity in
narrative terms as a local, iconic figure that somehow crops up in multiple narratives, it is
implied that, as one who circulates via media, she metatextually haunts all media. Given
Asian horror’s emphasis on cursed media, it is no wonder that Sadako’s video-distorted
face is the emblem of this genre.
27
Indeed, as an iconographic figure of Asian horror, she
is also its image, “the generic image” that transcends the visual grammar of any
individual film.
28
And with her ability to replicate herself, her hyperbolized visibility
erupting in disparate cultural contexts, in multiple media forms, and in endlessly
repetitive instances, she may very well be the image of genre as such.

Sadako’s Hair
In Ringu, Reiko discovers Sadako’s hair in the well, which, along with her fingernails
and skeleton, are the last remains of her corpse. The effect is grotesque and uncanny;
because hair and nails appear to grow after the moment of death, an effect of the body’s
shrinkage, they point to an improper, uncontrollable vitality. They seem possessed of
their own life, independent of the body, yet also not “alive” in the same sense as the
body. In this way they threaten the terms by which biological human life is normally
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constituted, neither fully dead nor alive, but something other, excremental. Alice
Macdonald explains the horrific effect of hair in terms of Kristeva’s notion of the abject:
For the concept of the abject can be used to include the argument that hair—since
it can be seen as growing from within bodies and appearing on the outside—can
also be regarded as bodily excreta, which provides one account of the fears that it
may evoke. For, viewed in this way, the appearance of hair on a body surface can
both constitute the animal within, which constantly threatens to overwhelm the
human, and, in gender terms, may trigger anxiety about sexual identity.
29

The dread that hair inspires stems from its uncanny, abject nature. Hair is closely related
to the involuntary bodily response of fear, as the word horror derives from the Latin
horrere, which means to bristle or stand on end. The connection between the outward
physical response and the perceived threat is compounded in a word like horripilation,
which, like its synonym piloerection, designates the stiffening of the follicle, and hence
the raising of the hair, in response to states of extreme arousal, excitement, or fear.
30

“Hair-raising” thrills, of course, are a standard part of a horror film’s repertoire, and they
mark the degree to which a horror film can be deemed successful. That is to say, the
terms by which horror (and other “body genres”) are measured are intrinsically related to
the bodily responses they provoke in the viewer.
At a basic level, hair relates to unconscious physiological responses and resists
conscious control. It must be maintained through an ever-present attention to cutting,
combing (as Sadako’s mother does in Ringu’s video), styling, shaping, and depilating.
Left alone, hair grows long, unruly, and tangled. In this state, like the abject corpse, it
does not “respect borders, positions, rules…[and] disturbs identity, system, order.”
31

180
Tending hair, meanwhile, makes it appear to abide by social codes, its abject nature
conquered or at least sublimated. In this way, hair can symbolically reaffirm social
order.
32
As Gananath Obeyesekere observes of the problem of hair and its subsequent
“work of culture”: “Hair is just there as a product of our biological inheritance; but it
cannot be just left there. Hair must be dealt with; thus everywhere there is cultural control
of hair...”
33

The fundamentally abject nature of hair, however, persists. Hair “cannot be just
left there,” but always grows and threatens the symbolic meanings it is also employed to
reaffirm. Invested with the power to designate social status or cultural functions, hair can
also potentially unravel them; indeed it is because hair is perceived as fundamentally
“wild” or proximate to animal fur, that it can achieve prominence as a symbol of social
order. Thus “tamed,” it demonstrates the effect of societal control in regulating all
elements that would be considered excessive or other, yet for this to be achieved, these
elements must remain precisely uncontainable and uncontrollable.
In Japanese folk culture, an animist belief persists with the idea that hair can be
possessed by an otherworldly spirit.
34
For women that died wrongful deaths in states of
extreme emotion, it is believed that the hair remains unnaturally attached to the skull
during decomposition. Whether Ringu explicitly references these beliefs or merely taps
into the affect of disgust associated with hair in relation to the decomposing body is less
important than their function within the film, as when Reiko discovers Sadako’s remains
in the well. Fishing around in the murky water, her fingers ensnare Sadako’s hair, which,
as Reiko soon discovers, is still bound to the skull. The hair, still dark, is connected to the
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persistent and unnatural vitality of Sadako’s corpse.
35
Hair is both a part of the body and
something that is dangerously other, imbued with its own life that exists in literal excess
of the human body. Particularly among adolescent women whose reproductive
capabilities are just coming into being, the appearance of body hair signifies a generative
capacity at its most mysterious and potentially most threatening. At death, the dark hair
of a young person retains its color even after the body has aged to the point where, in life,
the hair would turn a corresponding grey or white.
Thus Asian horror films abound with youthful Sadako figures, always with long,
black, and unkempt hair. Nakata observes: “[To] Japanese people, long black hair of a
woman has somehow a kind of supernatural power or emotion just by itself… There is a
kind of subconscious fear for women’s long black hair by itself. If they find on a bed an
enormous amount of long black hair, that’s scary by itself.”
36
The cinematic predecessor
for these narratives is the “Dark Hair” segment of Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1964), which,
like the tale from the Konjaku monogatari-shu, concerns a woman abandoned by her
samurai husband. The film begins with a view of the couple’s impoverished home from
outside, and passing through the dark, overgrown yard to the doorway, we first see the
woman from behind, her long hair hanging straight down her back. She sits at a loom
weaving interminably, and when her husband eventually returns many years later, she is
seen in the same position and presumably working through the same strands. Again it is
night, and the plants have grown over the gate. The samurai falls to his wife and breathes
in the fragrance of her hair; in the morning, however, he discovers that she is a corpse
with white hair. As he recoils, the hair turns black and begins to move on its own,
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eventually strangling and engulfing him. Significantly, the threatening aspect of the
wife’s hair is apparent even when she is alive and all is seemingly in order: even in these
moments, there is a tension manifest in the unkempt yard and the wife’s constant
attention to the loom, symbolic displacements for the underlying volatility of her own
hair. When she has passed into the realm of the supernatural, her hair is no longer capable
of being suppressed, or “combed,” and instead entraps the husband in its malevolent
disorder.
In the contemporary configuration of Asian horror, long black hair often precedes
the discovery of a girl’s body, as with Sadako in the well, the shipping container entirely
filled with hair in Exte, the glimpse of hair through the floorboards in A Tale of Two
Sisters (dir. Kim Jee-woon, 2003), and an electrical socket plugged with black hair in
Phone (dir. Ahn Byeong-ki, 2002). Hair grows aberrantly, even after death, and it appears
in places it shouldn’t. Hong Chun Zhang’s drawings of black hair similarly exploit this
uncanny quality of hair, pouring forth on long scrolls, or, in her “Hairy Objects” drawing
series, emanating or extending from ordinary household objects, including media devices
that signal a mysterious and perhaps malevolent source. (Figure 34)
This source, in Asian horror, is the avenging female spirit. Her hair grows
excessively, not just in quantity but also the excessive places where it appears. In Exte, a
film about haunted hair extensions, hair appears on the body in improper places—
wounds, the tongue, even eyes—though what sprouts is always identifiably head hair in
that its texture is straight and silky. What is most monstrous about it is its aberrant
location—that is to say, the body and in nearly all cases, the female body. Exte renders
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the horror of hair on the body, and in doing so suggests that body hair, particularly female
body hair, is by implication monstrous.

Figure 34 Hong Chun Zhang: a. Recording (2005) and b. Power (2005)

Freudian psychoanalysis articulates a theory of displacement between the upper
and lower parts of the female body, whereby the anxieties produced by the sight of the
genitals are displaced onto the head. In addition to “Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality” (1905), which examines how the mouth, described as an erogenous zone in
early childhood, is relocated to the genitals with the onset of puberty, the primary text
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that discusses the substitution of upper and lower body is Freud’s “Medusa’s Head,” in
which the sight of the Gorgon’s face, surrounded by snakes for hair, provokes in men a
castration anxiety. Freud writes:
The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of
something. Numerous analyses have made us familiar with the occasion for this: it
occurs when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of
castration, catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an adult,
surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his mother.
37

With Medusa, head hair indicates pubic hair, and the uncanny vitality of her snake-hair,
which still moves autonomously even after she has been decapitated, attests to the
castrating power of her female genitalia, their coils mimicked in the unruly strands of
pubic hair. While social anthropologists are quick to observe the variation of hair’s
signification across different cultures, psychoanalysis’ upper/lower displacement remains
a pervasive model for explaining the social function and preoccupation with (female)
head hair.
38
Hair relates not only to the abject, animalistic parts of human bodies in
general, but with women, hair also points the way to the pubis, invoking fears centered
around gender, sexuality, and reproduction. Head hair is the repository for the displaced
anxieties surrounding body hair, which, owing to the double meaning of pudenda as both
female genitalia and shame, is “covered up” in an effort to maintain normative protocols
for female behavior and femininity as such. Female bodies in Japan and elsewhere often
appear meticulously hairless; not only does this define, anatomically, the female body
against that of the male, it also suggests, at least in part, an evocation of the child’s body
in the ideal of female beauty.
39

185
While head hair is highly visible and participates in a range of social codes and
significations, body hair is the repressed other, operating at a different discursive register
altogether. At once taboo and marginal, ridiculous and monstrous, body hair exist as
something that demands concealment, though it also fosters the desire for it to be
revealed. Body hair “cannot be shown; it can only be exposed.”
40
It is not meant to be
seen, but its association with female sexuality is displaced through head hair. Thus the
actual sight of body hair, pace Freud, is always transgressive and denies even itself. Body
hair “does not function as either an image or a language, but as no image or no
language.”
41
To see Medusa, as Freud argues, is to be castrated. Body hair can be seen
only insofar that it triggers the breakdown of the normative grammar of (head) hair. The
sight of body hair, rendered obscene by social codes, signals the collapse of the boundary
between acceptable and unacceptable female sexuality, the distinction between upper and
lower body. In a psychoanalytic sense body hair suggests, in its “natural” wildness and
need for concealment, an unbridled and transgressive sexuality hidden just beneath the
sartorial surface of all women.
As women have been anatomically distinguished from men by their genitalia,
however, the pubis must remain partially within the realm of visibility, less something
directly seen than implicitly evoked. In her study of Western art history, Nanette
Salomon discusses the Venus pudica, the classically modest pose adopted by women in
painting and sculpture from Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c1486) to Edouard
Manet’s Olympia (1863). Examining a fourth century Greek sculpture of Aphrodite, she
notes “the hand that points also covers and that which covers also points. We are, in
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either case, directed to her pubis, which we are not permitted to see. Woman, thus
fashioned, is reduced to her sexuality.”
42
Taken from another perspective, the sight of
female body hair was, until the 1990s, expressly forbidden by Japanese censorship laws.
Until recently, then, permissible Japanese pornography negatively fetishized pubic hair as
a purposefully avoided, blurred, or blotted-out absence. The prohibition on pubic hair
may have contributed to, as Anne Alison argues, a generalized infantilization of Japanese
women in erotic imagery since “prepubescent females are lacking, in nature, what must
be shaved or erased mechanically from a postpubescent woman in order to pass the
censors.”
43
Whether or not this has actually been the case, the logic of this concealment
remains compelling in that it suggests the erotic nature underlying all images of women,
and the potential of representation to gesture toward a hidden sexuality. For Freud, the
fear of castration is “linked to the sight of something,” emphasizing the way in which
visuality, or its disruption, is critical to the eros and anxiety implicit in all images of
women. While one can have an understanding of what lies beneath the surface, the play
of seeing and not seeing, of concealment and exposure, is critical to maintaining the
erotic, and by extension potentially horrific, charge of a woman’s body.
44

Following the obscene unrepresentability of body hair, Sadako’s head hair is long,
messy, and pushed to the front much like the pubis. It evokes her emergent sexuality as a
girl on the brink of adolescence, for it is with puberty that hair emerges on the body, itself
an effect of a powerful reproductive force that, in horror films ranging from Ringu and
Tomie to Carrie (dir. Brian de Palma, 1976) and The Exorcist (dir. William Friedkin,
1973) coincides with uncontrollable supernatural abilities. If body hair, a sign of female
187
sexuality, threatens social order and must be repressed, then horror films frequently
imagine the catastrophic consequences of such unbridled feminine sexual energy through
images of uncontrollable, excessive hair, the same hair that, styled differently in another
context, would signal the most ideal and desirable of feminine traits. By connecting
Sadako's head hair and her adolescent age to evoke the mass of hair below, Ringu
articulates the deeper horror of her developing sexuality and reproductive capabilities.
Horror films in the West have frequently been concerned with rites of passage and
in particular, the development of female sexuality. Carol Clover, in her landmark study
on slasher films, observes that sexually active women are frequently met with early
death, while the virtuous “final girl” outlives her perilously promiscuous gal pals and
defeats the killer. Virginity, or the suppression of mature female sexuality, is thus
associated with survival, not just for the final girl, but for the social order she protects and
maintains. As Clover notes, the final girl demonstrates resourcefulness, intelligence, and
strength, traits typically regarded as masculine. Lest she become over-identified with
male adolescent viewers, however, the final girl’s virginity protects them from the
suggestion or sight of her sexuality. “Her sexual inactivity, in this reading, becomes all
but inevitable; the male viewer may be willing to enter into the vicarious experience of
defending himself from the possibility of symbolic penetration on the part of the killer,
but real vaginal penetration on the diegetic level is evidently more femaleness than he can
bear.”
45
Thus frozen into a prepubescent girlhood, at least from the perspective of sexual
activity, the final girl is shielded by the taboo of virginity, which, as Freud describes,
exists out of “some danger…a generalized dread of women… expressed in all these rules
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of avoidance.”
46
Making the final girl a virgin means not having to “uncover” her female
sexuality, the unruly body hair that undoes the rigid binary between hairless female and
hirsute male.
Though Sadako engages in a chaste romance in Ringu 0: Birthday, she remains
effectively a virgin. Yet in her case, the onset of puberty alone is enough to unleash her
libidinal excess. The child Sadako is never seen younger than the age of eleven or twelve
and the film suggests nothing of her powers before she appears in the audience at the
failed psychic demonstration of Dr. Ikuma. Following the disaster and her mother’s
suicide, Sadako is cast in the well by her adoptive father. In a sense, her death coincides
with her adolescence; thrown into the well, she becomes perpetually wet, as if marked
forever by the stain of menstruation, yet this is also the moment in which her monstrously
reproductive powers begin, when she imprints a television signal with her cursed image.
From maiden to monster, life to death, childhood to adulthood, corporeal presence to
immaterial image, Sadako is profoundly transformed when she enters the well. Her latent
supernatural abilities now run rampant, and the pit that was meant to conceal and contain
her becomes a perverse wellspring of her deadly powers. She becomes a Medusa, one
who destroys those who look at her (in the video, and later through the video), a monster
that reproduces monstrosity in others. Her hair, already long, becomes all the more wild,
signaling both the breakdown of normative social order and the excessively sexual nature
of her new, monstrous self.
47

Sadako’s monstrous sexuality is rendered explicitly in her hermaphroditism,
which is present in Suzuki’s novel and the Korean remake of Ringu but suppressed in the
189
film versions. In the novel, Sadako’s death occurs just moments after her rape by Dr.
Nagao at the South Hakone Sanatorium, which also is the moment of discovery of her
hermaphroditic genitalia.
48
This seemingly incidental detail underscores not only
Sadako’s monstrosity but its concealed nature, something only revealed during a sexual
encounter. Following his discovery of “the secret of her body,” Nagao pushes her down
the well both out of horror and a sense of self-preservation, for he is aware that Sadako is
about to exact her supernatural revenge.
49
Whether or not Sadako is also hermaphroditic
in the films (and it is entirely possible that her hermaphroditism is merely a secret yet to
be revealed), her anatomical ambiguity, which brings her dangerously close to the male
gender, is another element that threatens social order, particularly for the way that sexual
difference forms the basis for distinct gender roles. And like the final girl, Sadako’s
virginity is necessary to avoid direct encounter with her sexuality, though indirectly, of
course, it is expressed through her hair and the replicated trail of haunted videotapes.
As Michael Dylan Foster observes of “freakish” bodies, they

challenge traditional categories not just within scientific taxonomies but also with
respect to the basic moral and political structures of society. They blur genders,
distort distinctions between “races,” between animal and human, and even
confound traditional understandings of personhood and individuality. The
monster is the grotesque Other to be kept out of sight, the abject body through
which difference is made manifest. By disrupting complaisant binaries, providing
the unthought-of third possibility of excluded middle, monsters unearth the often
disquieting ideologies at the foundations of social and cultural life.
50

190
Sadako’s otherness, manifest in her hair, her emergent female sexuality, her
hermaphroditism, and, in the Western remake context, the traces of her Asianness, is
threatening precisely for the way that she troubles the order of rational society. Yet she
represents more than the return of a repressed premodern past within the context of
contemporary society; far more threatening is the way she demonstrates the extent to
which such repression has always failed. She is a figure of the abject, an unruly being that
exposes the flimsiness of the boundaries that regulate social difference, for the encounter
with the abject is experienced as a collapse of distance. Kristeva describes abjection in
terms of its horrific proximity:
An extremely strong feeling which is at once somatic and symbolic, and which is
above all a revolt of the person against an external menace from which one wants
to keep oneself at a distance but of which one has the impression that it is only
inside. So it is a desire for separation, for becoming autonomous and also the
feeling of an impossibility of doing so—whence the element of crisis which the
notion of abjection carries with it.
51

Sadako evokes the horror that her disorderliness may not be limited to her, but
present in all who come in contact with her.
52
She generates only one transmission, after
all, and it is others who record it on a tape, copy it, and pass it along. Sadako persists
because of the capacity for monstrosity in others. By encountering the tape, Reiko, a
devoted if distracted single mother, becomes a murderer, ultimately responsible for the
deaths of her ex-husband and her father. Sadako reverses the logic of familial order, for
instead of expanding it outward she causes it to implode. The sexual nature of her
abjection relates directly to her reproductive capabilities in that she produces the opposite
191
of what normative female sexuality is harnessed to do; as a perverse “mother,” Sadako
reproduces not life, but death. In the place of normal reproduction, hers is an obscene
one, destroying human life to make way for monstrous birth. Beyond the family unit, her
transgressivity threatens society itself, as the logical outcome of her “ring,” perhaps an
allusion to the circular pattern of atomic destruction in the wake of Hiroshima and
Nagaski, is a vision of societal collapse.

Media Horror
The widening ring of Ringu’s cursed videotape, constituted by the shared sight of people
who watch it, does not stop at the limits of Japan’s borders. The abject is precisely that
which disregards borders and renders them meaningless, and Sadako’s broadening
expanse, on a metatextual level, also involves her transnational remaking. As Barbara
Creed notes:

the concept of a border is central to the construction of the monstrous in the
horror film, that which crosses or threatens to cross the ‘border’ is abject.
Although the specific nature of the border changes from film to film, the function
of the monstrous remains the same—to bring about an encounter between the
symbolic order and that which threatens its stability.
53

In this way, media—both in terms of the cursed videotape and the film of Ringu itself—
enable and also extend the border-troubling effect.
192
With Ringu, both diegetically and extratextually, the encounter with the abject
takes the form of a medium that spreads outward like a contagion, passed along from
viewer to viewer, across the region, and throughout the world. By figuring media as the
carrier for the abject, Ringu demonstrates the limitations in the notion of a cinema
confined to national or regional boundaries. Produced with international markets in mind
and accelerated by the clandestine practices of bootlegging and peer-to-peer filesharing
which construct alternative spaces for films to circulate and be viewed, moving images in
particular tend not to obey the strictures of border controls. As Rob Wilson and Wimal
Dissanayake contend, film is “still the crucial genre of transnational production and
global circulation for refigured narratives… [it] offers speculative ground for the
transnational imaginary and its contention within national and local communities.”
54

Though the Asian horror remake fad largely fizzled in the late-2000s, the flurry of
production in both Asian and Hollywood attests to the status of the cinematic—film,
television, and other moving image media—as deeply embedded within the organization
of global capital. Moving images occupy more than just a privileged position in relation
to transnational or globalizing forces, but are themselves involved in the shaping of those
networks and the subjectivities produced therein.
In this sense, the mediated nature of Sadako's haunting relates to the “alternative
public sphere” constituted in a global moving image culture.
55
While her physical body
remains sealed in the well, her media image is immaterial, and in the diegetic world of
Ringu it is capable of being conjured anywhere, at any moment. With each new copy of
the videotape, she is called forth when the “play” button is pushed, first as an image,
193
then, seven days later, as a fleshed-out figure. The video presents a series of enigmatic
images: a moon streaked by clouds, a woman combing her hair in an oval mirror, a man
pointing with a white cloth over his head, a blinking eye with the word “Sada” (the word
for chaste, and also a redacted form of Sadako’s name) superimposed onto it, and finally
a forest clearing with a well in the center of the screen. When Sadako appears a week
later, the video picks up where it left off, returning to the image of the well and showing,
now, Sadako as she pulls herself out of the well and grotesquely limps towards the
camera. In this approach, Sadako moves toward her terrified viewers, who, no matter
where they may be located, are paralyzed by the figure approaching them from within the
nearest television. (In the diegetic world of Ringu, there is always a television nearby,
even in the most remote of seaside villages.) In a final act of transgression, Sadako breaks
through the television’s fourth wall, its glass monitor, and physically crawls out of the
television set to show her face and claim her victims.
Sadako appears in media form, though the videotape, like the well, is never
sufficient in fully containing her. The seven-day delay between first viewing and the
second fatal rejoinder—explained in The Ring as the time it took for her to die in the
well—marks a shift in her agency, as she is transformed from the one that is conjured by
her viewer to the one that acts upon her viewer, and from an media image located in a
specific videotape to one that can materialize anywhere.
56
These sorts of temporal gaps
are common to J-horror: One Missed Call plays with the future time stamp of the fatal
call, anywhere from a matter of months to just a few minutes, and in Shutter, the heroine
194
must wait for Polaroid photographs to develop in order to determine the location of her
ghost attacker.
Such delays register a disjunction between a medium and that which it mediates.
Sadako first appears within the normative constraints of the video medium, respecting the
borders of the screen, then later returns to exceed them. Her presence is connected to
media insofar that she ruptures it, asserting her ability to “cross over” and trigger, in turn,
the crossing over of her viewers to the other side, which is their own deaths. Like the
disfigured, blurry faces registered in photographs of the cursed, she is only partially
contained by media; her face is never seen, and the final murderous act is never explicitly
shown. In keeping with the novel’s description of Sadako’s rape, this may be a negative
reflection, or displacement, of the absent sexual violation from which her monstrous life
(achieved through death) originally sprung into being.
Sadako’s movement provides an indication of her incomplete media capture.
Because her hair covers her face, generating a confusion between the back and front of
her head, her directionality is similarly obscured. Yet as Sadako makes her way out of the
well and toward the front of the screen, her approach is marked by a strange and unstable
quality of movement. At times she moves too quickly, or too slowly, and often without
warning; she skips forward from one position to another, or the screen is momentarily
blocked by a bar of vertical roll. Her gestures are uncanny, as every step that she appears
to take is actually a step backward, for the scene was shot with the actress, Inou Rie,
walking backward, with the footage then run in reverse.
57
In addition to her monstrous
body, Sadako’s movement is also registered as aberrant. Even if it can be predicted, it
195
cannot be tracked. Riddled with gaps and inconsistent speeds, it constantly reveals the
medium’s inability to represent a stable movement according to linear time, and thus the
medium’s capability to represent or contain her. While Sadako is always perversely “on
time,” appearing exactly seven days after the first viewing, her manifestation comes at
the wrong time, the untimely deaths of her victims, which repeat her own untimely end.
As Sadako’s emergence from the television monitor indicates, she is always partially
outside the medium though she remains inextricably tied to it, rendered as its excess,
never complete. An excess, furthermore, that conjures a sense of material messiness, like
the fly that Rachel in The Ring first sees imprinted as part of the video, and later picks off
the surface of the monitor (this discovery, additionally, prompts a nosebleed, a
manifestation of excess on Rachel’s own body): “She [Sadako] is the wound that
suppurates through the dressings, denying all claims that she is healed.”
58
(Figure 35)

Figure 35 Still from The Ring (dir. Gore Verbinski, 2002): Rachel is unsure whether
the fly she sees is in or on the surface of the television monitor

196
As with all recorded media, Sadako’s gestures are the same with every playback,
yet her transition into material form troubles the division between an image and its
referent. Here, she appears as both: passing from an immaterial media image back into a
fully embodied, material state, from passive object to an empowered and deadly subject.
The eruption of her bodily form from the television monitor plays on the already unstable
relationship between a photographic image and its referent. Following André Bazin, the
image, marked with an imprint of the “real,” is both the same as its referent, but as an
immaterial representation it is also different from it.
59
Sadako’s transformation
demonstrates a radical “indexicality” capable of reconstructing the whole from the trace.
Additionally, the recurrence of the well in the video, an image of the place where her
actual body is located, suggests that the source of Sadako’s power is similarly capable of
being relocated anywhere. The video image acts as a surrogate, indeed a conduit, for the
physical place. The well, and by extension Sadako, can be anywhere, any place, re-
placed, as it were, by any TV/VCR apparatus, itself a darkened space from which
faraway images are conjured. No matter where her targeted victims go, she can appear
anywhere a television monitor is located, which, in an increasingly globalized and
interconnected world, practically means everywhere. Sadako transforms the ubiquity of
television and other media into a network, linking all televisions together in a manner not
unlike simultaneous cable or satellite broadcast or the virtual space of the Internet, a
medium that Sono Sion has called faceless.
60
Yet instead of transmitting a shared signal,
Sadako uses this network to track her victims, reversing the logic of tele-vision, which
brings to many places a distant sight, to the sight of multiple places at once, as in
197
surveillance practices. By the invocation of an imagined televisual network, Sadako
collapses the divisions that distinguish one space, and by extension, one culture or nation,
from another.
As a metatext, Ringu’s horror exploits the ways in which technology transcends
and even dissolves the boundaries between nations, regions, and individuals. While
Sadako’s bodily remains lie in the well, her real power is located in an immaterial
everywhere, a ghostly space made possible by media. Asian horror narratives that make
use of haunted media, however, do not suggest that the mobile phones or cameras
themselves are cursed but that they are controlled and manipulated by demonic spirits.
Though they may take up residence in a particular device, it is the preexisting networking
of media that enables their spread. Foster observes: “Indeed, perhaps what is so
compelling, and globally translatable, about Ringu is that the film does not concern a
haunted Japanese landscape so much as the haunting of contemporary technologies that
transcend particular landscapes: television, video, film, the very media that allow us to
access the story in the first place.”
61
The territory that is at stake with Asian horror is less
the particularities of Japan, South Korea, or even Asia as a regional entity, but a space
created through media, a simultaneous and pragmatically universal space that collapses
the vast expanses of time and distance through a host of tele-technologies. Sadako
threatens society not only because she has unleashed a deadly curse with apocalyptic
ramifications, but because, by co-opting the means by which society is stitched together,
she exposes the underlying unity and subsequent vulnerability of such structures
altogether.
198
Lim argues that, unlike the subtitled film which preserves an original language,
“[t]he remake seeks to efface the sign of cross-cultural negotiation in order to deliver the
foreign as already domesticated and familiar. In this light we might understand
Hollywood’s feverish spate of Asian horror remakes as deracinating acts of cultural
appropriation.”
62
Though the global reach of the Hollywood remake and its
homogenizing effects remain troubling, I would contend that Sadako is a figure who
largely resists the process of deracination by maintaining a sturdy set of iconographic
signifiers, untranslatable traces of the “original” regional appellation. Despite various
alterations that take place in remake projects, the long-haired female ghost remains
surprisingly unchanged. Instead of being remade, the figure of Sadako remains the same,
only now she has been located in new places, both within Asia and around the world.
Yet without a discernible face, Sadako remains a figure whose identity and
ethnicity were always visibly indeterminate, less markers that could be deracinated than a
figure who could never be clearly identified in the first place. Indeed, she turns this
obscuring effect back onto her viewers; in Ringu, part of the horror she unleashes is the
deracinating effect that occurs in photographs taken of her victims, their faces blurred and
indistinguishable. They are thus marked, but through a form of erasure, much like
Sadako's own faceless apparition. As Scott Bukatman remarks of Videodrome (dir. David
Cronenberg, 1983), a film that also features a corrupting television signal and videotapes
with malevolent effects, “[i]mage is virus; virus virulently replicates itself; the subject is
finished.”
63
In the reproduction of the image, the subject is annihilated; this is, pace
Kristeva, the figuring and disfiguring work of horror.
199
In his reading of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s conception of cinema, Thomas LaMarre
argues that cinema has a fundamentally “underdetermined” character, a dynamic, shifting
heterogeneity that cannot not be reduced to a single cultural source.
64
He observes: “What
is ominous about film is its potential to be produced everywhere and nowhere, and to be
distributed globally.”
65
This unlocatable quality underscores the medium’s phantasmatic
uncanniness, an “experience of pure affect, of a complete loss of origins and of relations
to the real…in which racial origin is at once marked and unmarked, located and
dislocated, everywhere and nowhere. Thus film generates something entirely new,
relations on a global scale, and a terrifying experience of global simultaneity.”
66
Race, in
LaMarre’s formulation, is not an anchor for cultural or national specificity, but a portable,
slippery signifier that destabilizes the fixed certainty of culturally-specific discourses like
the notion of national cinema.
The phantasmatic ominousness of the medium is expressed in Tanizaki’s “The
Tumor with a Human Face,” a short story from 1918 that LaMarre describes as “a film
summary, a commentary on its effects, and an evocation of those effects… it is also a sort
of protoscreenplay.”
67
The story concerns a film that, Ringu-like, allegedly causes anyone
who sees it to suffer mysterious illness. Within the story, no one, not even the actress
who appeared in the lead role, can remember the circumstances of the film’s making
other than vague details. The transnational production, called Vengeance in Japan and
The Tumor with a Human Face in Hollywood, was shot in Los Angeles and combined
both American and Japanese talent. It told the story of a Japanese courtesan who, having
spited a beggar, bears his curse when his face appears as a tumorous growth on her knee.
200
After she arrives in San Francisco, the tumor causes her to murder her American lover
and eventually controls her as she seduces and kills a number of men. She finally
commits suicide but the tumor lives on, laughing maniacally from beneath her skirt.
Purchased by a Japanese production company tellingly called Globe, the film plays in and
around Tokyo, and reports of strange and mysterious effects start to occur: terrible
dreams, illness, and madness. One producer suggests “the ghastly effects of the picture lie
in the face of the phantom,” who, as he notes, no one can identify: “As far as we know,
he’s nothing but a phantom that lives in the world of film, a man not of this world.”
68

Tanizaki’s story ends with the suggestion that the film’s malevolent effects will continue
and spread: “What will become of this film when it becomes the property of Globe?
Because they’re in it for themselves, they’ll surely make many copies and distribute
widely this time. That’s exactly what they’ll do.”
69

Like “Tumor,” J-Horror and specifically its Hollywood remakes mix the
geographical loci of production, alternating between East and West in often disorienting
and haphazard exchanges of scripts, talent, and financing agreements. Notably, despite its
lack of definitional clarity in terms of stylistics, themes, iconographic motifs, auteurs,
nations of origin, media platforms, and the like, the mainstream attention around Asian
horror, largely an effect of its transnational remakes, has produced it as a coherent and
salient genre. It might be that Asian horror is distinguishable less for generic conventions
and iconographies than for the unusual way that it circulates. Furthermore, the genre’s
positioning as one of horror thematizes and produces the medium’s capacity to derange
201
and disorient the viewer. As Tanizaki observes in “Tumor,” the circulation of media,
driven by profit motives, and its deleterious effects are closely tied together.
70

In the end, all that the camera reveals of Sadako's face, at least to the viewer, is a
single eye.
71
When she comes for Ryuji, the camera fixes a close-up on her bulging eye
and then cuts to his frozen expression, the image finally fading out in a negative exposure
that reverses the development process of still photography. (Figure 36) Though Sadako
appears horrifically corporal, the suggestion is that her gaze alone is what petrifies Ryuji
and locks him into a literal freeze frame. We are never granted access to what the victims
see at the moment of their death. Presumably, it is Sadako’s face, though even in its
revelation, its exposure, this forbidden sight maintains its secrecy by killing those who
look upon it. Such a face is inherently border-troubling; like the mirror that Perseus uses
to slay Medusa—a mirror that not only allows Perseus to look but also grants Medusa the
power to look back—it returns an image of the self as other, the woman as monster. Once
a victim of a wrongful death, Sadako in turn creates new victims who subsequently
become new perpetrators. In this way she reproduces herself in others, and at the end
of Ring 2, when a new girl has taken her place in the video, it becomes clear that her
monstrosity is transferable.
72

As Dr. Nagao remarks in the novel, looking at Sadako’s face prompted him to
question how he himself looked when he shoved her into the well, his monstrous act
registering as bestial on his face. “What did my face look like then? What did she see
when she looked at me? The face of a beast, I’m sure.”
73
Fully emerged from the well,
Sadako reveals herself as uncovered and exposed, “the spectral apparition who returns to
202
haunt the real that has excluded her.”
74
Her victims look at her face-to-face, or rather eye-
to-eye, and see themselves. She becomes, in turn, an interface, and a malevolent one. Her
gaze is that of the evil eye, which Lacan describes as
the fascinum…that which has the effect of arresting movement and, literally, of
killing life. At the moment the subject stops, suspending his gesture, he is
mortified. The anti-life, anti-movement function of this terminal point is the
fascinum, and is precisely one of the dimensions in which the power of the gaze is
exercised directly.
75

Figure 36 Still from Ringu: deathly regression to photographic negative

When Sadako’s powerful gaze is met, everything ceases. Like the transformation of
Simone’s vagina into a cycloptic face at the end of Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye,
the castrating view of the pudenda returns a powerful and deadly gaze.
76
The “sight of
something” is indeed another gaze, and between them is registered a form of recognition.
In this final, fatal exchange, we see the impossible: the monster in us, but also us in the
monster, both forms obscured, faces blurred and indistinguishable from each other,
horrified.
203
Sadako, meanwhile, moves on to claim more victims. Lim notes the disturbing
trend in which Asian horror remakes outperform the originals in their home countries,
and cautions that the seeming embrace of Asian cinema within Hollywood may, in fact,
demonstrate its expanded reach, a “cultural chameleonship yet again, this time in generic
guise.”
77
Yet the capacious figure(s) of Sadako may be a site of resistance or counter-
production. Against the flows of mainstream distribution and exhibition, Asian horror
also circulates virally, online, a circuitry that enables Sadako to, as the logic suggests,
manifest everywhere.
Her robust afterlife is prefigured in the film. Ostensibly for research or
journalistic use, Reiko produces another videotape about the urban legend of Sadako’s
curse. She interviews two schoolgirls who tell the story about the deadly video: how it
was made, how people die, and what must be done to avoid the curse. Typical of urban
legends, their details are vague, distant, and sometimes contradictory. This parallel video
also frames the film: immediately after the death of Reiko’s teenage niece, which occurs
early in the narrative, the film cuts to the girls recounting the story of the tape. In the final
scene, as Reiko speeds to her father’s house to save her son (which she does by showing
the video to her father and dooming him to Sadako’s curse), another set of girls are heard
in voiceover discussing ways of circumventing the curse. Bodiless and eerily omniscient,
for they already know what Reiko only realizes at the end, their warning, which exists
both inside and outside the narrative, arrives too late. Their untimeliness makes all the
difference, transforming apotrope into invitation, and ultimately extending the horrific
reach of Sadako's videotape, her inexorably expanding ring.
204
Why, with the girls’ warning so firmly in place, is it also so easy to ignore? The
proclamations of doom affixed to the videotape are, like a chain letter or horror films
themselves, difficult to take seriously, dismissed as stories designed to frighten and thrill
teenagers. The impetus to disavow the story comes also from the moving image medium
itself: as a video, it is purposefully constructed, or as Ryuji scoffs, “It’s a video.
Somebody made it.” Noah, his counterpart in The Ring, similarly derides the object:
“That was very student film.” The actress in “Tumor,” however, is less certain of the
mysterious film she’s investigating, and the man that no one recognizes in it: “But, H,
since there’s no doubt that he’s superimposed, this man must exist somewhere after all.
He can’t be a ghost.”
78
In all of these instances, the materiality of the filmstrip or the
videotape conflicts with the immaterial ghostliness of the figures that haunt them. Yet
film and photography have historically served to both debunk supernatural phenomena
and to reaffirm them, as with the press demonstration of Sadako’s mother’s psychic
powers in Ringu.
It is perhaps not accidental, then, that the cursed videotape takes a form other than
a classical Hollywood film. Instead, it is deliberately incoherent, offering, instead of a
narrative, a series of clues for those who study its construction frame-by-frame. To Noah,
it looks like arty, overwrought student work, and Ringu’s Tomoko, one of the first
victims we meet, describes it as precisely indescribable: “just weird…I can’t really
explain it.” Many scholars have observed the video’s experimental film aesthetics.
Valerie Wee, for example, writes of the video in The Ring: “The Ring video’s close-up
images of eyes, farm animals (particularly dead horses), and various shots of maggots,
205
insects, and dismembered body parts directly recall similarly discomfiting images in the
surrealist film classic Un Chien Andalou...”
79
Like Un chien andalou, the video in Ringu
begins with a shot of a moon intersected with clouds, and this lunar echo might prompt us
to think about the latter in terms of the former’s Surrealist construction, namely the
evocative (rather than denotative) arrangement of images. What, however, are the perils
of understanding these images as mere symbols instead of specific figures? What do we
risk when, like Tomoko, we dismiss the video as incoherent or “weird”? For the majority
of the film, at least, Ringu leads us to believe that Reiko’s quest in interpreting the images
will lead to the lifting of the curse; as she studies the clues embedded in the video, she is
able to identify and eventually locate the body of Sadako. Though she is unsuccessful,
she manages in the process to avert the curse for herself and her son; those who watch the
video carelessly stand no chance. How, then, are we as viewers meant to understand this
seemingly incoherent jumble of images, and what appears to be the metaphoric
significance of a woman brushing her hair in a mirror, a man whose head is covered in a
white cloth, and a view of the moon? How do we read these images, and what are the
limits of metaphors that may or may not preclude real violence? As the next chapter will
argue, while experimental film compels the viewer to read against the conventions of
classical Hollywood cinema, the evocation of metaphor, deployed for aesthetic purposes,
in images of violence, runs the risk of enacting its own violence, a violence of looking,
and one specifically directed against women.
206

Chapter Three References

1
Michael Chanan, The Dream that Kicks: The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain (New
York: Routledge, 1995), 11.

2
Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions, European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought
and Cultural Criticism, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 103 (emphasis
in original).

3
Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (New York: Columbia University Press,
2009), 8.

4
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York:
Vintage, 2000 (1980), 96.

5
While it would appear that this study applies most readily to the horror genre and related manifestations
of monstrous women, I wish to assert a certain critical pressure on the notion of genre itself, as genres and
their representational codes are politicized activities that need to be interrogated for the social and cultural
procedures they mask. More than questions of representation are at stake; the technical and ideological
construction of generic codes must be examined as well, for genres also reaffirm and extend the work of
cinema’s gender-hierarchical, and by extension exclusionary.

6
Karen Beckman: “Within this modern proliferation and circulation of images of women, the threat of
reproduction becomes both feminized and mechanized.” Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 5. Though the confluence of the dangers of women
and media exist previous to cinema, it is arguable that these anxieties proliferate tremendously with the
invention of film.

7
David Kalat, J-Horror: The Definitive Guide to The Ring, The Grudge, and Beyond (New York: Vertical,
2007), passim.

8
Miike Takashi's Audition (1999) exemplifies the duality of ideal Asian feminine beauty in the shy, lovely
Asami (Shiina Eihi) who, after a red herring of a beginning—a bachelor movie producer holds a mock
audition in an attempt to find a girlfriend—turns out to be a cold, psychopathic murderer. I thank Akira
Mizuta Lippit for directing my attention to this deeply disturbing film.

9
See Patrick Galloway, Asia Shock: Horror and Dark Cinema from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and
Thailand (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2006).

10
In his critique of national cinema, Andrew Higson observes that, far from an isolated sphere of
production, distribution and exhibition, national cinemas are always imbricated with Hollywood.
Particularly for popular films, success within the nation is constituted in terms of a film’s ability to adopt or
appropriate the “international” style of Hollywood. This dynamic is made all the more salient in the case of
Asian horror. “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen 30 no. 4 (1989), 36–46, cited in Bliss Lim,
“Generic Ghosts: Remaking the New ‘Asian Horror Film,” in Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and the New
Global Cinema, ed. Gina Marchetti and Tan See Kam (London and New York: Routledge), 2007.

207

11
Christina Klein, “Globalization and Transnational U.S.-Asian Genres,” in American Horror Film: The
Genre at the Turn of the Millennium, ed. Steffan Hantke (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi,
2010), 3–14, citation on 9.

12
Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham and London:
Duke Uinversity Press, 2009), 200.

13
The tendency in Jay McRoy’s two edited volumes on Japanese horror, for example, is to focus on
specific tropes within individual films, all within the context of Japan. And in the two edited volumes by
Steven Jay Schneider, the attention given to Asian horror tends to address auteurs, individual countries or
specific films, rather than conceptualizing the genre across the region. The journal Midnight Eye similarly
organizes its guide to Japanese cinema by filmmaker. See Jay McRoy, Japanese Horror Cinema; Jay
McRoy, Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007); Steven
Jay Schneider, ed. Fear Without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe (Surrey, UK: FAB Press,
2003); Steven Jay Schneider and Tony Williams, eds. Horror International (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 2005); and Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp, The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film
(Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2005).

14
The designation of J-pop is connected to a broader cultural phenomenon of J-culture and J-recurrence,
discussed in Tomiko Yoda's “A Roadmap to Millennial Japan,” South Atlantic Quarterly 99, no. 4 (2000).

15
For a more comprehensive examination of the relation between the various national appelations of pop in
1990s Asia, see Hyunjoon Shin, “Reconsidering Transnational Cultural Flows of Popular Music in East
Asia: Transbordering Musicians in Japan and Korea Searching for ‘Asia,’” Korean Studies 33 (2009), 101–
123.

16
Christine Gledhill’s formulation of genre as having a “double articulation” between historical specificity
as well as broad flexibility reaffirms this point; Bliss Lim underscores Gledhill’s term of “international
exchange” in the operation of genre. See Christine Gledhill, “Rethinking Genre,” in Reinventing Film
Studies, eds. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (New York: Arnold, 2000), 221–243. Cited in Lim,
“Generic Ghosts,” 113.

17
Like the romanized term of J-horror, the titles in the Ringu franchise are similarly implicated in
transliterated English. While they ought to translate to “Ring” (the original title for Suzuki’s novel), the
series is more commonly designated by the Japanese pronunciation of the English word rather than a direct
translation. A more detailed examination of the various remakes and adaptations spawned by Suzuki's
novel can be found in Julian Stringer, “The Original and the Copy: Nakata Hideo’s Ring (1998)” in
Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts, eds. Alastair Phillips and Julian Stringer (London and New York:
Routledge, 2007), 296–307.

18
Julian Stringer, “The Original and the Copy,” 299.

19
Verbinski notes: “They just sent me the tape—a really bad-quality tape, which was horrifying. I don't
know if you've seen the original movie, but I loved it. And that tape came with the offer.” Cindy White,
“Mulholland Drive’s Naomi Watts follows director Gore Verbinski into The Ring,” Science Fiction Weekly
287, accessed 18 May 2009, http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue287/interview2.html.

20
Kristeva observes: “Medusa is abject as primitive matrix of that archaic nondifferentiation in which there
is neither subject nor object, only the sticky, slimy ab-ject.” The Severed Head, 31.

21
Jay McRoy traces Sadako’s distinctively long, disheveled hair and dirty white dress to the kaidan figure
in Japanese folklore, popularized by kabuki and Noh theater: “[L]ong black hair and wide staring eyes (or,
208

in some instances, just a single eye). These physiological details carried a substantial cultural and aesthetic
weight, as long black hair is often aligned in the Japanese popular imagery with conceptualizations of
feminine beauty and sensuality, and the image of the gazing female eye (or eyes) is frequently associated
with vaginal imagery.” McRoy, Nightmare Japan, 7.

22
The adult version of the name Sadako recalls Abe Sada, a “poison woman” who in 1936 infamously
caused the fatal erotic asphyxiation of her lover, after which she cut off his penis and carried it with her
until her arrest. The explicit sexual nature of this gruesome act was treated with varying degrees of
sensationalism in a variety of media, including Oshima Nagisa’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976). See
Christine Marran, Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

23
The ghostly apparition of Sadako relates to the spiritualist claim that certain apparatuses such as the
telegraph and the camera were capable of manifesting the previously imperceptible spirit world. See Jeffrey
Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2000).

24
Elements of the Sadako figure can be found in any number of films: the Locker series, The Grudge
franchise, The Wig, Sick Nurses, Hair Extensions, The Phone, Tale of Two Sisters, Ruins, Shutter, One
Missed Call, The Eye films, Mirror, Pulse, the Tomie films, Uzumaki, Face, Nightmare, Red Eye, and many
more. For a treatment of Ringu’s other horror motifs, including vengeful female ghosts, hair, and wells in
earlier Japanese films, see Valerie Wee, “Visual Aesthetics and Ways of Seeing: Comparing Ringu and The
Ring,” Cinema Journal 50 no. 2 (Winter 2011), 41–60, esp. 43–48.

25
Carol J. Clover, “Her Body, Himself,” in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed.
Barry Keith Grant (University of Texas Press, 1996), 66–116, citation on 70. This definition could apply to
the repetitive nature of genre as well.

26
Schegoleva observes the influence of mass media in “the formation of popular attitudes toward
kanashibari and even influence the manner in which kanashibari happens to sufferers.” “Sleepless in
Japan: The Kanashibari Phenomenon,” Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies (Kenkyu
Proceedings of a Postgraduate Research Seminar in Japanese Studies, Oxford Brookes University Research
Centre, Oxford Brookes University, UK, 28 July 2001), accessed 1 May 2009,
www.japanesestudies.org.uk/kenkyu2002/Schegoleva.pdf, 32. Julian Stringer also notes the correlation
between the 1996 broadcast of the first Ring television movie and the subsequent Pokemon panic in
December 1997, which elicited widespread epileptic responses among child and teenage viewers
throughout Japan. “The Original and the Copy,” 306, FN13.

27
As evidence of the ubiquity of Sadako’s image, www.asian-horror-movies.com, accessed 1 May 2009, a
English-language clearinghouse for Internet-distributed Asian horror films, includes a banner at the top of
the page showing Sadako as she emerges from the well, with the text: “warning: may cause death in 7
days.”

28
Steve Neal, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980), 49.

29
Alice Macdonald, “Hairs on the Lens: Female Body Hair on the Screen,” in The Last Taboo: Women and
Body Hair, ed. Karin Lesnik-Oberstein (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 66–82, citation
on 70.

30
See Walter Kendrick, The Thrill of Fear: 250 Years of Scary Entertainment (New York: Grove Press,
1991), xi–xiii, and James Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 10–11.
209

31
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia University
Press, 1982), 4.

32
Justin H. Smith argues for the centrality of hair signification to social order: “It would not be too
hyperbolic to suggest that keeping the hair in all and only the right places is, in the end, alongside language
and posture, the best means we have of fixing the boundary between the animal and the human, and of
keeping each our own beast hidden from sight.” “Pattern Baldness,” Cabinet 40 (Winter 2010–2011), 71–
73, citation on 73.

33
Gananath Obeyesekere, “Foreword,” in Hair: Its Power and Meaning in Asian Cultures, eds. Alf
Hiltebeitel and Barbara D. Miller (Albany: State University of New York, 1998), xi–xiiii, citation on xii.
See also Gananath Obeyesekere, The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and
Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), which examines the relation between a
psychogenetic origin of a symbol such as a particular hairstyle, and how that comes to have cultural
signification.

34
Gary L. Ebersole notes, “the long hair of young women was believed to have the power to attract kami or
divinities, who would descent into it and temporarily reside there.” “‘Long Black Hair Like a Seat
Cushion:’ Hair Symbolism in Japanese Popular Religion,” in Hair: Its Power and Meaning in Asian
Cultures, eds. Alf Hiltebeitel and Barbara D. Miller (Albany: State University of New York, 1998), 75–
104, citation on 85.

35
In accordance with animist belief, it was thought that such hair could reanimate the body. Ebersole cites
as an example of hair’s continued vitality the 12
th
century Konjaku monogatari-shu, Book 24, Tale 20. It is
similar to Kobayashi Masaki’s “Black Hair” segment in Kwaidan (1965), except that here, the returning
husband learns from a diviner that he “would have to sit on the skeleton all night, grasping its hair firmly in
his hand, never letting go no matter what happened.” The husband successfully follows the diviner’s
instructions and survives the tale. clings to corpse as it said “Let’s go hunt for him.” This is how the man
survived; diviner recited a magical formula, and all lived. “‘Long Black Hair,’” 83 and 100.

36
Nakata Hideo, Ain’t It Cool News, interview with Quint from Jan 26, 2005; 32.
http://www.aintitcool.com/?q=node/19252, accessed 18 May 2009.

37
Sigmund Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” in Elisabeth Young-Breuhl, ed., Freud on Women: A Reader (New
York and London: Norton, 1990), 272 (emphasis added).

38
Though not without its limitations in explaining the nuance of diverse cultural practices, the
psychoanalytic model is frequently employed to account, at least in part, for the pervasive association of
head hair with sexuality and reproductive functionality. See also Alf Hiltebeitel and Barbara D. Miller, eds.
Hair: Its Power and Meaning in Asian Cultures (Albany: State University of New York, 1998).

39
Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, “The Last Taboo: Women, Body Hair and Feminism,” in Karin Lesnik-
Oberstein, ed. The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair (Manchester: Manchester University Press
2006), 12. Alice Macdonald further notes three functions of the hairless female body as “(a) it exaggerates
the differences between women and men, (b) it equates female attractiveness with youth and (c) it connotes
the ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ of a body.” “Hairs on the Lens: Female Body Hair on the Screen,” in Karin
Lesnik-Oberstein, ed. The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair (Manchester: Manchester University Press
2006), 68. While Macdonald’s equivocation of hairlessness with the child’s body is perhaps overly
simplistic, Western aesthetics, particularly in painting, maintains a strong tradition of what Blake Gopnick
calls “[t]he smooth pudenda of Western art [which] may reflect a grounded taste for hairlessness as often
as they mark aesthetic elevation.” “Acomocliticism,” Cabinet 50 (Winter 2010–2011), 85.

210

40
Daniela Caselli, “‘The Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat with’: Body Hair, Genius and Modernity,” in Karin
Lesnik-Oberstein, ed. The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair (Manchester: Manchester University Press
2006), 18 (emphasis added).

41
Lesnik-Oberstein, “The Last Taboo,” 10.

42
Nanette Salomon, “The Venus Pudica: Uncovering Art History, ‘Hidden Agendas’ and Pernicious
Pedigrees,” in Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts, ed. Griselda Pollock (London and New
York: Routledge, 1996), 69–88, 73; cited in Alice Macdonald, “Hairs on the Lens: Female Body Hair on
the Screen,” 71.

43
Anne Allison, “Cutting the Fringes: Pubic Hair at the Margins of Japanese Censorship Laws,” in Hair:
Its Power and Meaning in Asian Cultures, eds. Alf Hiltebeitel and Barbara D. Miller (Albany: State
University of New York, 1998), 195–218, citation on 210.

44
The erotic and horrific dimension of upper/lower displacement is perhaps most gruesomely articulated, in
J-Horror, in Carved (dir. Shiraishi Koji, 2007), one of many films, manga, and television programs based
on the legend of the slit-mouthed woman. The disfigured female ghost, brutally murdered by her husband,
wears a mask over her mouth and carries scissors to cut her victims' faces to match hers. As Colette
Balmain observes, the scissors carried in the hand of this monstrous mother signals the castration anxiety of
Freud's “Medusa’s Head” theory, a cut that is also seen on her face, also a signifier of the vagina dentata.
See Balmain, Introduction to Japanese Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 133–
137.

45
Clover, “Her Body, Himself,” 97.

46
Sigmund Freud, “The Taboo of Virginity,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. and trans. James Strachey (London 1953–74), vol. 11, 191–208,
citation on 198.

47
Sadako’s hair draws attention away from her face, which is never seen in full. Like the autonomously
living hair of the “Medusa” chapter in the Uzumaki manga, in which a girl’s hair begins to move on its own
volition, the hair itself demands attention. It mesmerizes and renders people lifeless: Uzumaki’s
nightmarish motif, the spiral, recreates the twisted coils of Medusa’s snake-hair (this recalls, also, the
curled coif in Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) that is shared between Madeleine and Carlotta, her
ghost) just as Sadako’s victims are terrified by the sight of her.
48
Suzuki Koji, Ring, trans. Robert B. Rohmer and Glynne Walley (New York: Vertical, 2004), 220–225.

49
Ibid., 224.

50
Michael Dylan Foster, Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai
(University of California Press, 2008), 23.

51
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 135.

52
The threat of contagion is manifest in the history of hair as well. Emma Markiewicz notes that in
eighteenth century Europe, wigs were often regarded warily and placed under quarantine to quell the spread
of disease. “Derived from living creatures, these materials were believed to still contain ‘animal juices’ and
to ‘receive and communicate infection.’” “Matters of the Head,” Cabinet 50 (Winter 2010–2011), 92–96,
citation on 92.
211

53
Barbara Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,” in Horror, The Film
Reader, ed. Mark Jancovich (London: Routledge, 2002), 44–70, citation on 71.

54
Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, “Introduction,” Global/Local: Cultural Production and the
Transnational Imaginary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 11.

55
I borrow the term “alternative public sphere,” which describes often unexpected social organizations
formed within the space of a movie theater, from Miriam Hansen in Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in
American Silent Film (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1994).

56
As Valerie Wee notes, this temporal gap is explained in The Ring as the time it took Samara to die in the
well. Wee further suggest that the haunting of the television may have been prompted by Sadako’s
traumatic experience with the media, when she witnessing her mother’s humiliation at a press conference
and subsequently killed a reporter. “Visual Aesthetics and Ways of Seeing,” 57 and 51.

57
Altogether the strangeness of the shot was so compelling that, as Nakata recalls, it was the only scene on
which he was consulted for Gore Verbinski’s American remake, The Ring. Nakata Hideo cited in “Quint
Interviews Original RINGU and Current RINGU TWO Director Hideo Nakata,” Ain’t It Cool News
interview, 20 February 2003, accessed 4 December 2006, http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=14525.

58
Linnie Blake, The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity
(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008), 50.

59
See André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray
(Berkeley: University of California Press, [1967] 2005), 9–16.

60
While Ringu concerns TV/VCR technology, the Internet was the more pervasive medium at the time of
the film's release and proved increasingly important in perpetuating the film's “afterlife.” It could be argued
that the Internet, while not specifically addressed in Ringu’s vision of contemporary Japan, is what actually
haunts the film’s nightmarish vision of networked media. Sono Sion observes: “The Internet is a way of
communication which I think is suicidal. Anonymous words or opinions travel around the world. It has a
freedom, but at the same time it is very dangerous. It weakens the responsibility and originality of the
words. It doesn’t have a face at all.” Cited Travis Crawford, “The Urban Techno-alienation of Sion Sono's
Suicide Club,” in Fear without Frontiers: Horro Cinema Across the Globe, ed. Steven Jay Schneider
(Godalming: FAB, 2003), 305–311, citation on 311, cited in Balmain, Introduction to Japanese Horror,
181.

61
Foster, Pandemonium and Parade, 206–207.

62
Lim, “Generic Ghosts,” 115.

63
Scott Bukatman, “Who Programs You? The Science Fiction of the Spectacle,” in Liquid Metal: The
Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. S. Redmond (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 228–38, citation on 234,
cited in Balmain, Introduction to Japanese Horror Film, 186.

64
Thomas LaMarre, Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichiro on Cinema and “Oriental” Aesthetics,
Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2005), 83.

65
Ibid., 113.

66
Ibid.

212

67
Ibid., 104.

68
Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, “The Tumor with a Human Face,” cited in LaMarre, Shadows on the Screen, 86–
101, citation on 99.

69
Ibid., 101.

70
The producer suggests, “...the goal of making money; when you think about the weird nighttime
incidents and all, there seems to be some secret and powerful affinity between the two....” Ibid., 98.

71
The single eye motif is repeated on one-sheets for the American distribution of Ringu and The Grudge,
and is a common trope within Asian horror in general.

72
A similar transference occurs in Ju-on: The Grudge when Rika, the heroine, looks in the mirror and sees
not herself but the image of Kayako, the ghost who has been haunting her; Rika covers her face with her
hands in horror, then slowly parts them to see Kayako again. In the end, Rika inherits Kayako's curse, not
as her victim, but as the monster.

73
Suzuki, Ring, 223.
74
Linnie Blake, “‘Everyone Will Suffer’: National Identity and the Spirit of Subaltern Vengeance in
Nakata Hideo’s Ringu and Gore Verbinski’s The Ring,” in Monstrous Adaptations: Generic and Thematic
Mutations in Horror Film, eds. Richard J. Hand and Jay McRoy (Manchester and New York: Manchester
University Press, 2007), citation on 217.

75
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1991, rpt. 1998), 118 (emphasis in original).

76
See Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Pornography, Transgression and the Avant-Garde: Bataille’s Story of the
Eye,” in The Poetics of Gender, Gender and Culture, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986), 117–136.

77
Lim, Generic Ghosts,” 125.

78
Tanazaki, “The Tumor with a Human Face,” cited in LaMarre, Shadows on the Screen, 101.

79
Wee, “Visual Aesthetics and Ways of Seeing,” 55.

213
Chapter Four: Sliced-Eyed Vision

Cassandra's is a conundrum of the veil. Where is the edge of the new. Where is the edge of belief.
Is it possible to believe something truly unbelievable. To know something entirely unknown. How
does that begin. Is there a crack of light under the door. How do you know to see it as light. Is
there an edge of light all around the dark mass of your life up to this moment. Can you see the
dark mass as a veil. Can you want it gone. Can you say flic flac it's gone! Cassandra can.

—Anne Carson
1

At the beginning of Salvador Dalí’s and Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929), a man,
played by Buñuel, holds open a woman’s eye and appears to slice it with a razor. The
moment is immediately preceded and followed by shots of the moon being intersected by
a thin, passing cloud, a metaphoric splitting. The momentary relief produced in the
matched movement of the blade with the cloud, however, is soon undercut, so to speak,
with what seems to be a return to the image of the eye. Though the footage actually
depicts the cutting of a cow’s eye, the suggested violence against the woman, and the
assault on (her) vision, is abundantly clear. (Figure 37)
The metaphoric allusion to the cloud, along with its swift subversion, was
deliberate on the part of the two Spanish Surrealists. Dalí declares, “That foul thing
which is figuratively called abstract art fell at our feet, wounded to the death, never to rise
again, after having seen ‘a girl’s eye cut by a razor blade,’—this was how the film
began.”
2
With the title card that precedes the sequence, “once upon a time” (“il était une
fois”), the film, at its very beginning, invokes clichés of storytelling but presents them out
of order, scrambled, and all the more jarring for the violence inflicted on and through
narrative codes. The blade that begins the film, itself a metaphor, acts against the
214
expectations for metaphoric allusion set up by the cloud shot, and furthermore cuts
through the conventions of filmic representation to alter the visual perception of the
viewer permanently in a kind of sliced-eye vision. The opening sequence’s evocation and
destruction of metaphor culminates with an assault on the sight of the viewer. This,
however, is not the end of sight, but the beginning of another kind of vision. As the film
continues with images of mutilated (animal) corpses, seething desire, and disorienting
shifts in time and space, it is as if the viewer has donned distorted glasses. We see with
violated sight.
3

P. Adams Sitney compares Un chien andalou’s structure to the Surrealist
Exquisite Corpse, a form of narrative construction in which each portion, represented by
a body part, is composed by a different author. Hence, each scene of the film is linked
with no rational connection in a “synthetic, radically malformed figure.”
4
Buñuel,
meanwhile, intones that the film’s dream-logic might be decipherable by psychoanalysis,
though he tosses off the suggestion at the end of a longer diatribe against the attempts to
make meaning out of the film’s disjointed parts: “it profits by a mechanism analogous to
that of dreams….NOTHING, in the film, SYMBOLIZES ANYTHING. The only method
of investigation of the symbols would be, perhaps, psychoanalysis.”
5
In both analyses, the
film distorts the logic of the cut, the operation that normally pieces together a film as a
coherent, sutured whole. Instead, the Frankensteined cuts of Un chien andalou, among
other perverted cinematic conventions, links continuous movement across unrelated
spaces, moments in time arbitrarily designated as “eight years later” or “in spring,” and
transformative dissolves that blend together disjointed images such as the shift from a
215
punctured hand crawling with ants, to a woman’s armpit, and finally a sea anemone. It is
as if the seams of an ordinary film were ripped apart and randomly restitched. The film’s
provocation lies not only in its display of violent imagery, but in the violated device of
the cut, both of which unite metonymically, and metaphorically, in the first shot of a
sliced eye.

Figure 37 Stills from Un chien andalou (dir. Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, 1929):
intercutting horror and metaphor
216
The film’s shock effect relies on the viewer’s familiarity with filmic convention
for those expectations for editing, causality, and continuity to be disrupted, disoriented,
and deranged. This effect produces, for Rudolf E. Kuenzli, a dislodging of unconscious
urges, a reading that aligns with Buñuel’s psychoanalytic suggestion: “Only through the
viewer’s identification with the familiar world invoked by the film can the film’s
sequential disruptions of that invoked familiar world have the potential to disrupt the
viewer’s symbolic order and open up the suppressed unconscious drives and
obsessions.”
6
Buñuel, for his part, took the desublimating effect even further in his
proclaimed intention for the film to incite its audience to murder. However seriously
Buñuel meant such a statement, his avant-gardist aims were undoubtedly invested on the
side of disrupting social order, not flattering it with another cinematic novelty. He writes:
“But what can I do against the devotees of all forms of novelty, even if the novelty
outrages their deepest convictions; against a press that has been bribed or is insincere;
against the imbecile crowd that found beautiful or poetic something which was, basically,
but a desperate, passionate call to murder?”
7
More bluntly he states: “This film has no
intention of attracting nor pleasing the spectator; indeed, on the contrary, it attacks
him…”
8

It is not surprising that Georges Bataille, whose interests in erotic violence
famously split the Surrealists into two factions, would seize on the film’s provocative
blend of violence and narrative disorder. He writes:

217

Several very explicit facts appear in successive order, without logical connection
it is true, but penetrating so far into horror that the spectators are caught up as
directly as they are in adventure films, caught up and even precisely caught by the
throat, and without artifice; do these spectators know, in fact, where they—the
authors of this film, or people like them—will stop?
9

For Bataille, the horror of the images, more than their irrational sequencing or
metaphorical import, is enough to seize the viewer with an almost visceral force. It is a
strangulating effect, one that circumvents the cognitive processing of the head to grab the
viewer at the throat, a phrase that recalls Kracauer’s bodily formulation of cinematic
spectacle reaching the viewer “with skin and hair.” It transcends the artifice of cinematic
convention, including metaphor, to unleash seemingly limitless violence. He adds that
Buñuel himself was not immune to the effects of the “slit-open eye,” noting that the
filmmaker was sick for a week following the shooting of that scene.
10
The eye, he writes,
“could be related to the cutting edge, whose appearance provokes both bitter and
contradictory reactions…”
11
Such reactions might be called shock or astonishment for
some viewers, for the eye is both attracted to and repelled by what it sees.
What are we to make of this conjunction of metaphor and horror, and the “bitter
and contradictory” seeing produced in their collision? How to think the images of a moon
and eye, or cloud and knife, which, through a knowing use of the cut, render these objects
equivalent to each other? Sitney suggest that they reflect each other, perhaps perversely:
“The image is both a reflected horror and a relief: horrible in the precision with which it
suggests the cutting of the eye, and a relief in that the viewer for a moment thinks that the
metaphor has spared him the actual slicing. But immediately we see the razor finishing its
218
work and the interior of the eye pouring out.”
12
Metaphor here is invested with a sense of
relief, of a subduing distance, while the horror of the sliced eye is immediate and
assaultive. Buñuel and Dalí exploit the relief that metaphor presents as false, illusory: just
as the viewer expects that metaphor provides a way to escape the violence, the horror of
the real (even if it depicts, quite literally, a different animal) returns all the more abruptly.
Sitney observes that “[t]he strategies of metaphor, synecdoche, and metonomy by which
the illusions of causality and simultaneity in the film are sustained become the structural
models of the film’s formal development,” though, as the filmmakers cleverly
demonstrate, these scaffolding devices can be turned against themselves to collapse the
aesthetic distance they purport to uphold, a distance that elsewhere is valued for
contemplative, critical reflection.
13

This confluence of violence, metaphor, and altered seeing is enacted, not
coincidentally, on a woman’s body or its bovine proxy, that “old cow” Medusa. Like
Linda Williams, Karen Beckman, Julia Kristeva, and Adriana Cavarero, Joan Hawkins
raises the problems of metaphor and violence, and their relative distance and immediacy,
in feminist terms: “There maybe a ‘metaphorical’ significance to the slashing of a
woman’s eye in Un chien andalou—in fact, feminist film theory would argue that there’s
a profound metaphorical significance to such an act—but that significance is very much
bound up with the immediate physical jolt experienced by the spectator.”
14
Rosalind Galt
more forcefully suggests that the aestheticization of women, so prevalent in cinema that it
is taken for granted, itself carries a latent threat against a representational order that
privileges rational, masculine mastery over feminized beauty. In discussing Joachín
219
Jordá’s Dante Is Not Only Severe (1967), she recites the director’s contention that the
image of a beautiful woman, disfigured by ophthalmic surgery, needs to be made ugly or
repulsive in order to be provocative, a statement that forms another variation on André
Bréton’s convulsive beauty maxim, itself another Surrealist valorization of violence.
Galt’s sigh is nearly audible in her response: “once again, slicing up eyeballs is necessary
to guard against the aesthetic danger of women.”
15

The problematic critical and implied political value of destroying beauty, as I will
discuss, is further undercut by the implied erotic pleasure in scenes of sexual violence
directed against women. Indeed the violence of Un chien andalou, as Rosalind Krauss
observes, is erotic in nature. In an essay on Paul Sharits’s T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968), a
flicker film that alternates, on the level of the frame, images of an eye as it is being sliced
(perhaps another animal surrogate), with images of male and female genitalia in the midst
of a sex act, she notes the pairing of these two types of shots, “violence to the eye and
explicit sexuality,” thematically and also formally relating to the earlier work.
16
“Within
the canon of Surrealist Film,” she writes, “Un chien andalou was an early statement of
the intention to create a montage space out of an unconscious reality rather than one tied
to the parameters of external space.”
17
Out of the material and mechanical basis of the
medium, Sharits, like Buñuel and Dalí before him, constructs a “montage space.” And
within this space organized by cuts, latent and desublimated visions arise, namely the
violent erotics of the unconscious.
220

Krauss continues:

The sexual imagery, with its root in the unconscious, mirrors reciprocally the
flicker material with its experiential basis in the involuntary network of
physiological optics—the firing of retinal cells and the muscular movements of
the eye. The film is once again a powerful statement of what it is like to be caught
within the gears of that phenomenological machine of our experience; and,
simultaneously, to have an analytic perspective upon it.
18

If Sharits’s flicker film interrogates the nature of seeing, hinging on the suggested
Kuleshevian bridge between images of violence and images of sex, then it also implicates
the viewer into the machinery of the cinema. Not only is it implied that the eye is
sliced—and perhaps sacrificed for political or pornographic intentions—but it also
figures a displacement onto the viewer. In Un chien andalou, the eye of a beautiful
woman is the target, and, initially soothed by the metaphor of the cloud, the viewer is
assaulted by an image of horror. The horrific image of her sliced eye may only be a
metaphor, but it is one that is hardly tamed or distant from that which it represents.
Paradoxically, it figures itself, a “bitter and contradictory” sight gruesomely inscribed, or
incised, onto the body of a woman. We might call it, after Walter Benjamin, a “dialectical
optics” that alternates between the horror in metaphor, and the metaphor in horror.
19
And
out of this dialectic emerges a medusan optics that invokes specific, real, and most often
female bodies. Mutilated with real and metaphoric cuts, the images of these bodies also
transform those who dare to look at them directly: Jean-Pierre Vernant’s “death in the
eyes,” perhaps, or a different kind of seeing altogether, a sliced-eye vision.

221
Animal Eye

The cow’s slit eye in Un chien andalou recalls another well-known animal optical
dissection, that of René Descartes’s study of the mechanism of the eye in La Dioptrique
(1637). In a repetition of an experiment by Johannes Kepler, Descartes suggests cutting
off the back of the eye of a recently deceased person or that of an animal, and holding a
white sheet of paper behind the exposed area to see what images are projected in reverse
from the cornea. This, as Kepler demonstrated before him, proves that the eye alone can
receive images without the intervention of the brain:

Thus you can clearly see that in order to perceive, the mind need not contemplate
any images resembling the things that it senses. But this makes it no less true that
the objects we look at do imprint very perfect images on the back of our eyes.
Some people have very ingeniously explained this already, by comparison with
the images that appear in a chamber, when having it completely closed except for
a single hole, and having put in front of this hole a glass in the form of a lens, we
stretch behind, at a specific distance, a white cloth on which the light that comes
from the objects outside forms these images… But you will be even more certain
of this if, taking the eye of a newly deceased man, or, for want of that, of an ox or
some other large animal, you carefully cut through to the back the three
membranes which enclose it…
20

Following Kepler, Descartes conceives of the eye as a mechanism, an autonomously
functioning machine. In his experiment, the eye is like the camera obscura, the dark room
that reveals the outside world in its dark interior. Yet Descartes challenges Kepler’s “cold
eye” in probing the translation from passively received image to the conscious sense of
sight.
21
Though he observes that the eye can form “very perfect images” on its own, he
also examines the way that the mind intercepts and processes such images, concluding
222
that “it is the mind which senses, not the body.”
22
Thus, as Martin Jay argues, the
ambiguity of Descartes’s optical theory allowed it to be claimed by both empiricists and
sensationalists, whether to defend the absence or presence of human subjectivity.
The scientific discourse with which Descartes meticulously describes his
diagrams of the eye perhaps obscures the surgical violence he performs on a human or
animal eye. In both cases, the eye must be partially destroyed to reveal its inner sights,
the insight that Descartes gleans and plots. The experiment also advances another
important assumption: the substitution of human and animal eyes.
23
While Jay contends
that “the provocative slitting of the cow/woman’s eye in Un chien andalou is a far cry
indeed from the serene dissection of the oeil de boeuf in Descartes’s Dioptrique,” the
operations of both gestures are the same: the slicing of an animal’s eye.
24
What qualifies
one as “serene” and the other as “provocative”? Is it a matter of context, namely the
separate realms of science and art? Buñuel’s handling of the razor is as calm as we might
imagine the demonstration that Descartes bloodlessly recounts in Dioptrics. Or is it the
implied human eye that renders the act in Un chien andalou provocative, its discomfiting
effect located in the easy and often unnoticed slippage between the woman’s eye and that
of the cow, the assumed proximity between the two? If it is the suggestion of a human
body that makes this “serene” gesture abhorrent, might we not also locate this unsettling
effect in Descartes’s somewhat candid preference for the eye of a “newly deceased
man”?
In both examples, the structural closeness of the human and bovine eye
underscores their interchangeability, where one stands in for the other. In the case of Un
223
chien andalou, however mistakenly, the animal eye has already replaced the human one,
and even in many scholarly accounts of the film, the substitution is taken for granted or
missed altogether. This, following Jay, might be the provocative turn: the lack of
distinction between human and animal at the level of the eye.
The optical hinge between human and animal suffering occurs more pointedly in
the “People are looking at you” passage of Minima Moralia, in which Theodor Adorno,
attempting to account for the rationalization of murder in the Nazi death camps,
contemplates the look of an animal after it has been fatally wounded. Akira Mizuta Lippit
locates “the slippage between mortality and morality, murder and violence” in the
animal’s gaze.
25
This look, a returned gaze, is dismissed by the person who wounded the
animal when he or she says, dismissively, “after all, it’s only an animal.” For Adorno,
this phrase that draws a line from the animal to those that have been deemed inhuman,
from animal slaughter to genocide: “what was not seen as human and yet is human, is
made a thing.”
26
How does a person become a thing? Through the mediating figure of the
animal. And it is precisely the animal’s look, a look back, a look of recognition, that
troubles the ontological divide separating humans and animals.
27
It troubles, indeed, the
one who has just dealt the killing blow, prompting a strenuous disavowal—“it’s only an
animal”—with the implied and unspoken rejoinder: “and not a human being.” This mute,
repressed follow-up, however, does little to sever the connection between the two terms,
a horrific connection drawn across a shared line of sight.
The mediating function of the animal positions it as a metaphor, albeit one that,
like the scenario Adorno gives, exceeds the linguistic terms with which it’s described.
224
Akira Mizuta Lippit names this “animetaphor”: “animal and metaphor, a metaphor made
flesh, a living metaphor that is by definition not a metaphor, antimetaphor—
‘animetaphor.’”
28
The animetaphor, however, is an incomplete metaphor; unlike
Benjamin’s death’s head allegory, it lives. It is not a thing, nor an object, but a being: it
can be made to suffer, and it can be killed. It is not merely an empty-skull vessel into
which allegorical meaning can be poured, but rather resists this literary form of
inscription because it is alive: fleshy, seeing, more than image or text, immediate, itself.
Animetaphor pushes the notion of metaphor to its limit, which is death. “The living
metaphor, the animetaphor, projects its own finitude, always anticipating its own
disappearance.”
29
Its own death, or the death of another: this is the slippery language it
retains of metaphor, the mirror it holds up, the look that shuttles across. Or, as Jean
Cocteau saw in the mirror (metaphor) of cinema, “death at work.”
30

The animetaphor of the cow’s eye in Un chien andalou is related to that of a
human being, and specifically, a woman’s eye. The cuts that slice into them also sweep
across them: in cinematic terms, they are intercut, suturing different diegetic times and
spaces together. The cut that relates them also adheres to the principles of continuity
editing, matching the angle, speed, and position of the blade’s movement so that, despite
the differences between the animal and the woman (and, for that matter, the moon) they
are united in a single gesture. Like the executioner’s axe in The Execution of Mary Queen
of Scots, the cut onscreen rhymes with, but also hides, the cinematic operation behind it.
But here there is no illusion: though the woman’s eye is spared—not only for its
substitution by the bovine eye, but, in the following scenes, marked as “eight years later,”
225
she appears with her eye intact—the animal, however, does not reappear (though it is
evoked in the mutilated horse carcasses that are later dragged along the floor). The shot
stages Adorno’s example in a forceful way: an image of animal slaughter, focalized in the
eye. But even this violence doesn’t completely destroy the animal’s gaze, which, in a
Lacanian sense, still looks. Of this animal, too, we might still feel the compulsion to
disavow its look: as cinematic spectacle, as provocation, as metaphor.
The disavowals that attend the slitting of the animal’s eye carry over to the
woman’s body. Proximate to the animal, she is also regarded as a thing: Buñuel’s obscure
object of desire, Hans Bellmer’s heterotaxic mannequins, and a general Surrealist interest
in fragmented and mutilated bodies.
31
Woman, animal, death: these sites of alterity,
places where male heterosexual desire and anxiety commingle, form a chain of
associations and substitutions that occur at a distance, regarded from the serene vantage
of metaphor. They intersect in Gabriel von Max’s Der Anatom (1869), a painting that
depicts the corpse of a beautiful young woman laid out before a contemplative male
anatomist who rests his chin on one hand while lifting away the pale sheet covering the
woman’s breast with the other. (Figure 38) To his left sits a scattered pile of papers,
books, and human skulls atop a desk, while a moth rests on the table next to the woman’s
feet. She is lit brightly, nowhere as radiant as her white chest; everything else, including
the skulls, the moth, and the anatomist dressed in black, is shrouded in shadow.

226

Figure 38 Gabriel von Max, Der Anatom (1869)

In her analysis of literary history, Elisabeth Bronfen notes that conjunction of
women and death in the aestheticized female corpse offers a screen, or perhaps a shield,
from the overwhelming threat of both.
32
She writes: “what is plainly visible—the
beautiful feminine corpse—also stands in for something else. In doing so it fades from
our sight and what we see, whenever an aesthetic representation asks us to read
tropically, is what is in fact not visibly there. As we focus on the hidden, the figurative
meaning, what is plainly seen may not be seen at all.”
33
In the rendering of the beautiful
feminine corpse, aesthetics offers a means of distancing us from “what is plainly visible,”
the death of an actual woman, shrouded in metaphoric discourse, another medusan figure
hidden in plain sight. In a similar vein, Ludmilla Jordanova describes an economy, and an
erotics, of veiling in Der Anatom: “The other is simultaneously veiled, that is mysterious,
227
threatening and separate, and to be unveiled, that is mastered by seeing and knowing. The
process of unveiling is called science, and it depends on new modes of vision.”
34
The
aestheticization of the female corpse, aided by a veil that enigmatically covers and
seductively reveals, underscores the gendered organization of scientific inquiry, namely
the male subject that scrutinizes, unveils, and dissects the female object. As she is
revealed, opened, and exposed, she disappears into metaphor; her death already marked
by the vanitas signified in the human skulls and the moth that also, at times, bears an
image of a memento mori. (Figure 39) She becomes a work of art, a thing: “The feminine
body appears as a perfect, immaculate aesthetic form because it is a dead body, solidified
into an object of art.”
35

Given its association in European folk cultures with death, night, and graveyard
vapors, the moth’s placement in Der Anatom is not surprising (the moth is perhaps not so
far removed from the fly that appears ominously in The Ring), yet its metaphoric
presence in a painting already overdetermined by signifiers of death is perhaps
superfluous. As animetaphor, however, it bears the living inscription of death, like the
death’s head moth that appears in Un chien andalou or The Silence of the Lambs (dir.
Jonathan Demme, 1991).
The flexibility of the lepidopteral animetaphor, and its inevitable thanatos, is
perhaps best represented in Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight (1963), a film that, like The Act of
Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971), which I will discuss shortly, confronts metaphor
with its own materiality, its deathly limit. At first glance, Mothlight appears akin to
Brakhage’s hand-painted films: a rapidly shifting image of organic matter, striking for
228
momentary patterns and a sense of visual rhythm. (Figure 40) Yet the beauty of the
images gives way to the realization that actual moth bodies were used to make them, that
their broken and translucent wings are what give the film its sense of fluttering
movement. For Brakhage, the weight of this animetaphor, the moths’ inexorable suicidal
drive to the flame, became the impulse to make the film, and indeed the driving force
behind all of his films. “How I love the light and as I move towards the light I am
destroying myself,” he once said.
36

Figure 39 Still from Un chien andalou: the death’s head moth

229

Figure 40 Mothlight (dir. Stan Brakhage, 1963)

230
Aesthesis

In 1970–71, Brakhage shot the Pittsburgh Trilogy, treating an institutional subject in each
film: the police in Eyes (1970), the hospital in Deux Ex (1971), and with the Act of Seeing
with One’s Own Eyes (1971), the morgue. The trilogy is unusual in Brakhage’s body of
work for its urban and social subjects, quite unlike the natural and domestic settings more
common to his films. Its form and look, too, are distinct, having been crafted through the
lens of the camera (as opposed to manipulating the celluloid surface directly), shot on a
distinctive film stock, and containing a surprisingly spare use of cuts, which, aside from
the hand-scratched titles of the films, are the only mark of post-production image
manipulation. The shots are longer, and the frenzied camera movement of a film like
Sirius Remembered (1959) is substantially steadier, especially in The Act of Seeing.
The title of The Act of Seeing is taken from the definition of autopsy, “the act of
seeing with one’s own eyes,” or to “see for oneself.” The OED dates the earliest usage of
the term in English to the mid-seventeenth century, a moment when dissection was at a
height of popularity, though it still carried with it an association of heresy and
prohibition. Throughout his career Brakhage was deeply concerned with the nature of
vision, and he was particularly interested in concept of hypnagogic or closed-eye vision,
which he tried to represented with hand-scratched, animated film. Though it treats a
distinctly social space, the camera gaze in The Act of Seeing is similarly directed inward,
looking into the recesses of the body. The film conflates the figurative sense of autopsis
as the act of seeing with the more concrete sense of the term, a postmortem examination,
by bringing the viewer’s gaze directly to the morgue. The film, which is silent, loosely
231
follows the procedure of an autopsy. For the first third of the film, Brakhage keeps his
camera trained in medium and close-up shots at the level of the bodies being handled and
measured by the medical examiners, whose faces we consequently do not see. The film
then proceeds with more invasive cuts and extractions that are performed on a variety of
bodies first seen at a distance, in wide view, then examined at a closer range. Bodies are
wheeled in and out, covered and uncovered with white sheets. At the film’s end, Cyril
Wecht, the forensic pathologist, records his notes into a microphone, then shuts it off.
Given its subject matter, The Act of Seeing is notoriously difficult to watch. Bart
Testa observes that the viewer is “unarmed interpretively”: “[T]he images are so
relentlessly literal and, in the main, so clearly shot that all there seem to be in this film are
successive acts of seeing, and seeing this.”
37
Hollis Frampton remarks that the spectator
“[stares] with perfect compassion where we can scarcely bear to glance.”
38
Brakhage
himself was well aware of the often strong reactions viewers had to the film, caught
between contradictory impulses to look and to turn away. In the introduction he gave
before a screening of the film at the Cinémathèque Québecoise in 2001, he encouraged
the audience members to step out of the theater if they felt they could not tolerate the
images. He noted, too, his own difficulty in shooting the film, which, in addition to the
sights the viewer shares, included the sounds and smells of the medical examiners at
work.
39

As he recounted in the introduction, Brakhage found, in metaphor, an aesthetic
distance that allowed him to approach the difficult subject matter. “[M]y struggle and my
belief in that form [a poetics of cinema] is that it will keep people at some distance from
232
the screen,” he explained, using the literary equivalents of poetry and prose to explain the
difference between the contemplative aesthetic distance of avant-garde cinema from
mainstream cinema’s absorptive mode of viewing. Unlike the suturing devices of
narrative film that flood and manipulate the viewer’s senses, “aesthetics demand a
distance or try to arrange a situation of distance.”
40
In this gulf created by the aesthetic
view, Brakhage expressed the wish that the film would emancipate the viewer, though
from what he does not say. “I hope you don’t let yourself be entrapped by this film. My
fervent hope is that this film will leave you freer than you were before.”
Yet as with the animetaphor, aesthetic distance collapses at the visceral sight of
death. Brakhage admits the images he filmed still invoke “terror, but not as in a
Hollywood movie where you scream and jump, but where you feel it deeply with one’s
own nerve endings.”
41
Terror, in other words, on the level of horror: that which is
repugnant, as Cavarero insists, and connected to an image, a medusan optics. In her
reading of the Medusa myth, she writes: “this points to an affinity between horror and
vision, or, if you like, between an scene unbearable to look at and the repugnance it
arouses.” Instead of the frenzied, energetic response of screaming and jumping, horror
freezes the spectator like the unmediated, and because of its fatal terminus, impossible
view of Medusa. Cavarero continues: “Gripped by revulsion in the face of a form of
violence that appears more admissible than death, the body reacts as if nailed to the spot,
hairs standing on end.”
42

Thus the central metaphor of The Act of Seeing, the substitution of looking for the
sight of autopsy, collapses in the horrifying view of the severed human forms. Like the
233
sliced and presumably blinded eye of Un chien andalou, the limits of metaphor are here
encountered as the limits of sight, which coincides with the sight of death. Metaphor,
which initially provides a contemplative distance, ultimately routes the viewer back to
that which she is trying to escape, the taboo view into the breached body.
The qualification of metaphor conflicts with the documentary realness of
Brakhage’s filmed subjects. Sitney writes:

several quasi-documentary films from this period—eyes (1970), Deus ex (1971),
more problematically The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971), and The
Governor (1977)—constitute attempts to ground his perception in a firmly
established exterior reality (the police, a hospital, a morgue, the official life of a
politician) as a brake to his excessive and frightening tendency to interiorize all
that he sees.
43

If all of the Pittsburgh films are “quasi-documentary” in that they partially compromise a
view of “exterior reality” with the filmmaker’s “excessive and frightening” interiority,
what additional problem does The Act of Seeing pose? What about the film shot in a
morgue, among other urban institutional sites, demands more rigid differentiation
between exterior, documentary subjects and the subjective, interior perspectives from
which they’re regarded? Is the problem that the film is too documentary, in that it
contains intolerable images of death, or not documentary enough, in that the formal
construction lends itself to an overly subjective, and implicitly aestheticizing, view? Is it
the combination of both exigencies, perhaps incompatible, manifesting in the same
creative impulse?
234
Another critique comes by way of Hollis Frampton’s At the Gates of Death
(1976) section of the Magellan cycle, comprised of two parts, The Red Gate and The
Green Gate. These two installments, in a direct response to The Act of Seeing, include
footage shot at human anatomy lab at the University of Pittsburgh, also in 1971. Michael
Zyrd argues that Frampton “emphasizes analysis over Brakhage’s intense subjectivity.
Frampton assertively manipulated the footage of incised flesh and bone through montage
and color filters, creating a series of metaphors for the fundamental boundaries that death
presents: between consciousness and the void, matter and energy.”
44
Though he treats
similar subject matter, Frampton’s montage is decidedly on the side of aesthetic distance,
with green and red gels literally filtering the image of human remains, primarily skulls,
and adding to the abstracting effect interspersed shots of hexagonal patterns. The skulls,
moreover, are seen already sawed and dessicated, a condition that places them, unlike the
whole bodies brought into the morgue of The Act of Seeing, more on the level of the thing
or object (like the death’s head) than the once-living beings seen in Brakhage’s film. The
quality of the bodies as individuals in The Act of Seeing is underscored by the careful
removal and examination of the deceased’s clothing, sometimes burned or bloodstained,
evoking the moment of death in addition to its bodily effects, as well as the singularity of
each person, who by contrast are anonymous in the dismembered parts examined in At
the Gates of Death. What draws The Act of Seeing into the realm of horror, and leaves At
the Gates of Death on the far side of aesthetic distance, is precisely the eradication of this
individuality, “the spectacle of disfigurement which the singular body cannot bear…
[horror] aims to destroy the uniqueness of the body.”
45

235
For Susan Sontag, the mere hint of aesthetic intervention is ethically dubious. Her
suspicion of artistry in images of violence and human suffering finds validation, even
edification, in the documentary imperative to witness: “For the photography of atrocity,
people want the weight of witnessing without the taint of artistry, which is equated with
insincerity or mere contrivance.”
46
The projection of ethical value, however, and the
subsequent privileging of certain types of images, assumes a viewer’s responsibility for
and complicity in a system that would perpetuate such violence. In what Jacques
Rancière describes as the rhetorical shift from what is intolerable in the image, whether a
scene of violence disfigurement or the aesthetic treatment of such, to the intolerability of
the image itself, or the operation of the image within a broader cultural context, the
question of “authentic” representation, as Sontag would have it, becomes irrelevant.
Rancière writes: “The mere fact of viewing images that denounce the reality of a system
already emerges as complicity with this system.”
47
Rather than locating what is
intolerable within the image, Rancière excavates an economy of images that are
themselves intolerable, provoking outrage not only because they provide evidence of
their atrocities, but because people desire to see them, and thereby bear some
responsibility for their existence.
By way of example, Rancière cites the critiques a number of philosophers gave in
response to four photographs of Auschwitz on view at a Parisian art exhibition entitled
“Mémoire des camps.” He observes, “those who took the images, did indeed have to
tolerate it. But this is precisely why the philosopher criticizes the photographer: for
having wanted to witness. The true witness is one who does not want to witness.”
48

236
Following the line of the philosophers’ argumentation, to resist this desire to witness and
the ethical quandary it presents, means resisting the process of representation of well.
Through the negation of the image, one can avoid the implication of the desire to look.
Here we have arrived at what might be lurking behind the various critiques of The Act of
Seeing, in particularly Brakhage’s aesthetics of interiority, of hermetic subjectivity: the
film presents a problem because it desires to see what is normally kept from view, and
moreover presents the act of looking as a heroic venture. Like Perseus in Siegfried
Kracauer’s formulation of the cinematic Medusa myth, it dares to look. Thus the film is
not only filled with intolerable images, but the film itself is also intolerable for the way
Brakhage desires to see. On the side of an ethical liberal conscience, the French
philosophers reify the original Church doctrine that forbade the dissection of a human
body, and the many taboos that have continued to regulate that forbidden view.
This returns us to the question posed in the introduction, one that has emerged in
many different ways throughout this study: how do we represent what is unrepresentable,
or impossible to see, and are these two the same? If the aesthetic distance gained with
metaphor is either too evasive or too immediate, how do we access the subject? And how
do we do so in a manner that is ethical, responsible, and free from the violence inflicted
by the desire to look, that which makes spectacle out of suffering? If, for Herbert
Marcuse, the head of Medusa is “the eternal and adequate symbol of art: terror as beauty;
terror caught in the gratifying form of the magnificent object,” can contemporary artists
and filmmakers only be caught in the dilemma between what is intolerable in the image
237
and the intolerable image? “Has art become incapable of creating and facing the Head of
Medusa? That is to say, all but incapable of facing itself?”
49

Rancière suggests a strategy of displacement for approaching the unrepresentable.
Neither a substitution nor an avoidance, displacement, often located between media—
film and video, text and image—holds open a space for the unrepresentable to reside
within representation. Displacement retains the aesthetic break fundamental to art, a
rupture between “the concepts of artistic poiesis and the forms of aesthetic pleasure, no
longer any determinate relationship between poiesis and aisthesis,” or what translate to
making and perceiving.
50
Art entails “the collapse of representational logic,” a
dissociation that too often is taken for granted.
51
As Rancière asks, why does Johann
Joachim Winckelmann celebrate the Belvedere Torso as the pinnacle of the artistic
sublime? (Figure 41)

How are we to understand the fact that the paradigm of supreme beauty is
provided by the statue of a crippled divinity which has no face to express any
feeling, no arms or legs to command or carry out any action?...The Torso may
have been mutilated for entirely incidental reasons. But what is not incidental,
what marks a historical watershed, is the identification between the product of
that mutilation and the perfection of art.
52

The mutilation of the torso figures for Rancière a manifestation of the aesthetic break
and, through the severing of poiesis and aisthesis, the ideal of art. Art’s perfection is
embodied precisely in a disfigured, dismembered body, or something literally and
metaphorically severed from the figure it originally strove to represent. The possibility of
mimetic representation in the Belvedere Torso has been eradicated, and for that reason it
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signifies the sublime character of art’s highest value, the aesthetic break. Notably, this
begins with an act of destruction: “The aesthetic regime of art begins with that upheaval
in the very idea of perfection.”
53

Figure 41 Apollonius the son of Nestor, Belvedere Torso, reproduction (2
nd
century BCE)

The aesthetic break opens a space of dissociation, “a break in a relationship
between sense and sense—between what is seen and what is thought, what is thought and
why is felt.”
54
Even in the most didactic forms of art or the most overdetermined uses of
metaphor, these ruptures in sense can emerge, displacements that cannot be anticipated.
Because “[r]epresentation is not an act of producing a visible form, but the act of offering
239
an equivalent,” the potential for dissociation, or dissentuality, exists in the disjunctions
between a representation and the thing it portrays: “The dissensual operation takes the
form of a superimposition that transforms a given form or body into a new one.”
55
And
from the missing limbs of the Belvedere Torso, we imagine new bodies, an entire corpus
of art.
Rancière’s theorization of the aesthetic break, however, encounters a limit in the
realm of film and photography, whose radical realism as articulated by Roland Barthes
and André Bazin breaks through the separateness of representation.
56
What becomes of
the break when faced with what is, in part, the thing itself? When aesthetic distance is
already collapsed, especially in photographic images depicting or inevitably evoking
death? For the photograph, as Barthes contends, contains both the representational order
Rancière describes, the placid studium, and another, eccentric, and excessive element, the
punctum, or those seemingly incidental details of a photograph which unexpectedly and
inexplicably grab at the viewer. Significantly, Barthes’s description of the punctum takes
the language of the cut: “[S]ting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice.”
57
It
arrives unknown, unforeseen and excessive, violently collapsing the hermetic distinctions
between inside and out. It is also an accident, a risk taken, a body in peril: “that accident
which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” The punctum breaks through
the studium’s distance to change not only the way we look, but what we’re given to see.
Barthes observes, “The punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond—as if the image
launched desire beyond what it permits us to see.”
58
If the studium is apparent, the
punctum is latent; it is liberated in strategic cuts, or rather manifest in the cut itself, both
240
on the level of representation, in images of violence, or as a formal operation in cinematic
montage. The screen, for Barthes, “is not a frame but a hide-out,” a vessel for the real
concealed beneath the surface play of appearances.
59

Rancière notes that Barthes’s examples of the punctum tend toward the subject of
death. In the punctum Barthes locates in the image of Danton collar worn by a little boy,
for example, Rancière observes that the make of the collar is in fact difficult to
determine, but the name recalls Georges Danton, a French revolutionary figure who was
guillotined during the Terror. Though this fact remains unacknowledged by Barthes,
Rancière insists that the punctum’s force is borrowed from this extra-textual reference:
“The punctum of the image is in fact the death evoked by the proper noun Danton. The
theory of the punctum intends to affirm the resistant singularity of the image. But it
ultimately ends up surrendering this specificity by identifying the production and effect
of the photographic image with the way in which death or dead people affect us.”
60
Thus
the punctum, instead of affective, immediate force, is determined by knowledge that is
extrinsic to the image; in this way, for Rancière, dissociation reasserts itself, and punctum
falls back into studium. As he argues of another one of Barthes’s examples, Alexander
Gardner’s 1865 photograph of Lewis Payne, who was awaiting execution for attempting
to murder then-Secretary of State William H. Seward: “To make the effect of the photo
and the affect of death coincide, Barthes has had to create a short-circuit between
historical knowledge of the subject represented and the material texture of the
photograph.”
61

241
For Rancière, the directness of photography is still riddled with indeterminacies of
meaning produced by the image, whether by the association, through a shared family
name, with a famous beheading, or the enigmatic expression on a would-be assassin’s
face. The disjunction occurs between the punctum’s orientation toward death, which
seems to occur on a nearly subconscious level for Barthes, and the “raw presences” of the
figures in photographs, who neither resist nor confirm this fatalistic overdetermination.
62

Again, the aesthetic break works to sever the link between what the viewer sees and what
she thinks, and in Rancière’s view film and photography are no different than any other
art or media form. “Film, video art, photography, installation and all forms of art can
rework the frame of our perceptions and the dynamism of our affects,” he writes, and
“they can open up new passages towards new forms of political subjectivation. But none
of them can avoid the aesthetic cut that separates outcomes from intentions and precludes
any direct path towards an ‘other side’ of words and images.”
63
The aesthetic break or cut
operates through strategies of displacement, rerouting an image’s affective energies into
unanticipated spaces.
The question of the unrepresentable, then, in Rancière’s terms, is less something
intrinsic to the image than the notion of the unrepresentable with which the image is
obscured. It is a culture that decides what images are tolerable and imposes restrictions,
indeed investing mythological significance, on how they are seen. Any image, through
the aesthetic cut, might break free of such limiting frames of viewing. Rancière’s
aesthetic pragmatism finds resonance with Hélène Cixous’s insistence that the
prohibitions against looking at Medusa say more about the phallologocentric order that
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mystifies and excludes her than the gorgon herself: “You only have to look at the Medusa
straight on to see her,” Cixous contends. “And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s
laughing.”
64
To return to Rancière’s basic assertion, there is nothing intolerable in the
image, only a culture that renders the image itself intolerable.
There is a significant gulf, however, between Rancière’s concept of the
intolerable and the unrepresentable as evoked in the countless depictions of the
gorgoneion, all of which only approximate Medusa’s fearsome gaze. In these cases, the
aesthetic cut is self-inflicted; representation must be held at bay for fear that her look
might puncture the image-screen, overwhelming the dompte-regard. Indeed Rancière
says little of the punctum’s affective force, and he seems to even long for it to produce
more jarring dissociations: “The screen is a surface of manifestation,” he writes, “but it is
also an opaque surface that prevents identifications.”
65
Rancière’s pragmatic and perhaps
secular view of art does not allow for the ambiguity W.J.T. Mitchell describes in
medusan ekphrastica, which harbors the fear of what lurks inside representation, even
beneath layers of dislocation across media. Yet there is a particular power invested in the
forbidden view, and those that, like Medusa’s face or the interior of the body, point
directly, horribly, to death. From the depths within, whether the body or the photographic
“hide-out” described by Barthes, something still threatens, something we can hardly bear
to see, even in refracted form. In this way, the punctum articulates a medusan optic:
something that emerges from the photograph to strike at the viewer, to break the skin or
surface, to shatter the mirror that separates the figure from its image, or the image from
its viewer. To wound.
243
The Partial Woman

Lacan names the interior view of the woman’s body, seen by Freud in his 1895 dream of
Irma’s injection, as the “real Medusa’s head.” As Freud recounts his examination of his
patient Irma, who so far has resisted his treatment, he peers down her throat, a look that

leads to the apparition of the terrifying anxiety-provoking image, to this real
Medusa’s head, to the revelation of this something which properly speaking is
unnameable, the back of this throat, the complex, unlocatable form, which also
makes it into the primitive object par excellence, the abyss of the feminine organ
from which all life emerges, this gulf of the mouth, in which everything is
swallowed up, and no less the image of death in which everything comes to its
end…
66

Through the mouth, the woman’s body opens up, unnameable, unlocatable, and
unrepresentable: an abyss. To stare into it means, as with the Medusa’s head, plunging
into darkness and death. And it is precisely in that unrepresentable place that Freud, in
Lacan’s view, encounters the irreducible real:

Hence there’s an anxiety-provoking apparition of an image which summarises
what we can call the revelation of that which is least penetrable in the real, of the
real lacking any possible mediation, of the ultimate real, of the essential object
which isn’t an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words
cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence.
67

With the unmediated real, there is no aesthetic break, no opportunity to delimit
and contain it with words and categories. It troubles those who look upon it; when Dr. M
performs the same examination into Irma’s mouth, Freud notes that his colleague looks
244
unwell, pale and limping. Like Bataille’s account of the sliced eye in Un chien andalou,
the image of Irma’s interior seizes its viewer at the throat, specifically before the rational
processing of the head: a chokehold that stops the subject at the neck. Faced with this
vision, “the subject decomposes and disappears. In this dream there’s the recognition of
the fundamentally acephalic character of the subject…”
68
Headless, fragmented,
shattered: the image of the woman’s inside reverses the unifying composition of Lacan’s
mirror stage and returns, instead, a view of the corps morcelé.
Irma also complains of being choked. “You don’t know how much it hurts here
and here, and there, in the throat, belly, stomach.”
69
Her pain chokes her, and Lacan
pauses on the word she uses: zusammenschnüren, a tying together. This is how she
describes the sensation of tightening around her throat, and Freud, presumably, is the one
to pry it open. Though he plunges inward, nothing else escapes: these are the last words
she says in the dream. Irma’s ailments chart a path to the abyss inside, which is already
turning inside out, manifesting on the surface, even through her clothing, “in spite of her
dress.”
70
Zusammenschnüren reversed, untied. Her initial resistance is but another
obstacle to be cleared, another layer to be removed. As a woman examined by a host of
male doctors, a dream interpreted by Freud, the matters of speech are left to men. Irma is
only an object in a state of its unraveling and, with the signs of infection they discover,
well on its way to death and decomposition. Divested of speech, Irma is a woman turned
into an object, and later, a corpse. Freud uses the example of Irma’s injection to
demonstrate the function of dreams as wish fulfillment, and here it reveals his desire to
absolve himself from the real-life guilt of his patient’s death: the insufficiency of
245
analysis, its misdiagnosis, in curing her “organic” malady. He further displaces his guilt
onto his colleague Otto, who in the dream recklessly performs the ostensible injection:
“Probably the syringe was not clean, either.”
71

The injection, of course, is the (lurid and unclean) male probe into Irma’s body,
first by Freud, and then joined by his team of male physicians. The physiological and the
psychological, or what Freud calls the organic and the hysteric, respectively, are
conflated throughout the dream, and they converge in the woman’s body, precisely at that
locus of the female psyche, the uterus. “We knew immediately where the infection
originated,” he asserts, but the doctors’ intervention is not enough to heal Irma.
72
Indeed,
it is Irma’s femininity that is the disease in question, “the abyss of the feminine organ”
for which there would be no proper cure. Irma’s problem is the fact of her womanliness, a
state that no amount of male penetration can alter.
The image of Irma’s insides, her secret self, is horrible not because it is unique to
the woman but because it collapses the boundary between men and women at the
disfigured, and disfiguring, sight of flesh. Lacan writes:

There’s a horrendous discovery here, that of the flesh one never sees, the
foundation of things, the other side of the head, of the face, the secretory glands
par excellence, the flesh from which everything exudes, at the very heart of the
mystery, the flesh in as much as it is suffering, is formless, in as much as its form
in itself is something which provokes anxiety. Spectre of anxiety, identification of
anxiety, the final revelation of you are this—You are this, which is so far from
you, this which is the ultimate formlessness.
73

The body’s interior is forbidden because it reveals this “ultimate formlessness,” a
common, secret flesh that collapses the distinction between men and women, self and
246
others. As the autopsies in The Act of Seeing reveal, the other side of the face shows only
horrific facelessness, the skin pulled over the skull, identity cloaked by its formless verso.
To assuage himself of this horror, the deeper anxiety that hides within his
professed sense of guilt over Irma’s eventual death, Freud reasserts the dreamwork’s
symbolic function, which produces something akin to aesthetic, or at least analytic,
distance. “The object is destroyed, if I can put it like this, and his guilt, which is what is
in question, is destroyed with it.”
74
The subject, moreover, is restored. Freud uses the
interpretation of his dream—a speech not granted to Irma—to reconstitute himself away
from the dissembling view of the woman’s body. Lacan cautions: “The extreme use of
the radically symbolic character of all truth thus makes it lose the sharp edge of its
relation to the truth.”
75
Thus the real capitulates, at least in part, to the symbolism of
dream analysis, blunting its blade and the violence it provokes. The woman’s body, yet
again, becomes metaphor, but its horrific display still threatens exposure.

*

The antecedents for the anxieties that Lacan uncovers in Freud’s dream of Irma’s
injection occurred in the flourishing of anatomical study, and its attendant practice of
dissection, during the Renaissance. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a
proliferation of a “culture of dissection” that went hand in hand with the era’s intellectual
and artistic achievements, a period that also produced an attentiveness to individuality
and, correspondingly, the idea of interiority. Jonathan Sawday writes, “Paradoxically, the
247
very violence of dissective culture was a factor in the production of some of the more
familiar structures of great beauty and vitality with which we associate with the term
‘Renaissance’: epic and lyric poetry, drama, art, and, above all, architecture.”
76
The
visual culture of the period conjoined the aesthetic, scientific, and spectacular nature of
the human body and particularly its interior enigmas, displayed in anatomy theaters and
museums, illustrated in anatomical atlases, and modeled in wax for ostensible medical
purposes. In literature, the blazon genre celebrated the ideal beauty of women by
segmenting their bodies into parts, always at the hands of male authors. More often than
not, the bodies opened to scrutiny were female, and the ones wielding the scalpel were
male. As Cavarero reminds us, the name Perseus means “he who cuts.”
77

Like Lacan, surgeon Richard Selzer compares the inside of the body to the
Medusa’s head: “The hidden geography of the body is a Medusa’s head one glimpse of
which will render blind the presumptuous eye.”
78
The interior view has long been held as
taboo, and Sawday echoes Lacan’s evocation of the “horrendous discovery” in examining
the body cavity, a site of abjection, and a sight of the abject, that “may conceal the source
of the individual’s own dissolution.”
79
This “formless” image is moreover feminized:
though the distinctions between male and female break down at the level of flesh, the
forbidden view of the interior body is also coterminous with the woman’s genitals.
80

Sawday contends that, in addition to the general practice of cutting into female bodies
during the Renaissance, the very idea of the body-core was associated with women,
particularly the uterus. Like Irma’s symptomatic pains, the expelling of the menses
signaled the apparition of the interior body on the exterior surface, the periodic reminder
248
of the womb’s threatening, boundary-crossing tendencies. We will recall, too, that in
Aristotle’s account, a menstruating woman could tarnish a mirror just by looking into it,
again a projective, Medusa-like force of vision. As a result, menstrual blood, like other
taboos, was and is carefully regulated, covered, and isolated.

Figure 42 Menophantos, Aphrodite of Menophantos (1
st
century BCE)

The practice of concealing the interior, feminized body persists to this day. Even
with disinfected and indeed anaesthetic modern surgical practice, the body is still
covered, and the view rendered by endoscopic technologies, from x-rays to fiber optic
cameras, are carefully guarded by the medical establishment. The OED’s definition of
249
patient, Sawday reminds us, means one who can “endure pain suffering with
composure,” and it invokes a sense of modesty that pervades the decorum of the
operating room. It recalls, also, the related term pudica, which means the female genitals
as well as shame. As I discussed in the previous chapter, the hand of the Venus pudica, a
pose common to Western art history, both covers and points to the woman’s pubis.
(Figure 42)
The contradiction of concealment and exposure rendered in the Venus pudica
pose is grotesquely exaggerated in a 1618 drawing by Pietro Berrettini da Cortona,
engraved in 1741 by Gaetano Petrioli, in which the skin around a woman’s abdomen is
cut and pulled back, as if creating an enlarged vagina out of the Venus pudica. (Figure
43) Standing before a column, the woman stands and displays her body, her hands
holding open the giant vulvar cavity for all to see—this woman is nothing but her sexual
organs. The sense of shame, meanwhile, is displaced onto a small fetus tucked into a
nearly identical uterus seemingly grafted into the wall behind her. In what could be
regarded as a bizarre staging of Freud’s Medusa’s Head passage, the infant covers his
eyes from the horrific sight of his mother’s violently exposed genitals.
The paradoxical impulse to conceal and reveal the view of the feminized interior
speaks to a male fascination and fear with the bodies of women, particularly the womb.
“Here was not only the principle of life, but the source of all loss of rational (male)
intellect. Once the uterus was seen, however, it had to be mastered in a complex process
of representation….we can see the ways in which the female body could be
reconstructed… as something both fetishistically adored, and violently suppressed.”
81

250

Figure 43 Dissected female figure engraved by Gaetano Petrioli
(after Pietro Berrettini da Cortona) (1741)

Thus alongside taboos against peering into the recesses of the woman’s body, a
culture of dissection proliferated in the Renaissance and beyond, as the woman’s body
became the refined object of scientific scrutiny in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, and even later, as the mid-nineteenth century painting Der Anatom indicates.
82

Even as the domains of art and science increasingly diverged, the woman’s body
remained central to both. This paradox of fascination and revulsion was moreover
rendered frequently within the same image: as Berrettini’s figure demonstrates, the
woman’s interiority is only partially revealed. While her womb is opened and exposed,
251
the rest of her body is left intact. Significantly, the appearance of her breasts is left
untouched.

*

Brakhage remarks that among all the bodies he filmed in Wecht’s morgue, the one that
affected him most strongly was that of a young woman:

[E]very time that I present this film I wish to warn people about what is probably
the hardest moment for me in the film. I was filming this body and then I
suddenly see in the periphery of my vision this beautiful woman’s breast. I turn to
look and see this beautiful young woman being slit open.
83

In the sequence Brakhage describes, the film first shows the nude woman being lowered
onto a gurney, her torso exposed. The shot cuts to a close-up trained on her left breast,
and the camera gradually zooms out to reveal not the same chest we saw in the previous
shot but the other half of her chest cut open, the red of the exposed flesh a startling
contrast to the pale, untouched skin on the other side. As her ribcage is cut open, the
image darkens: an effect, perhaps, of lowered exposure. The doctors fold a white sheet
over the body and light returns. The woman is wheeled away, her closed eyelid and
forehead visible from beneath the sheet. There is no trace of the carnage that has just
occurred, only the placid image of a woman who otherwise appears to be sleeping. The
shot fades to black. (Figure 44)
252
Brakhage twice mentions the woman’s beauty in his recollection of the scene. Yet
what makes her singularly beautiful? Is it her youth, the tragic nature of her accidental,
overdosed death, or, finally and reductively, her naked breast? Here we might recall that
in Der Anatom, the young woman’s breast is exposed while the rest of her body is
covered, this single body part privileged above the rest as the locus of her feminine
beauty. Brakhage similarly fixates on the woman’s breast, but with the second shot’s
zoom out from it, the camera reveals the horrific view of the woman being “slit open,”
and later, the breast literally cut away from the chest. This, perhaps, is what makes the
scene nearly intolerable for Brakhage: not the carnage, which pervades the entire film,
but its proximity, and notably within the same shot, to the beautiful breast. Here the
idealization of a single part, the blazon, is held up to its gruesome implication of the
dismembered body.
In his examination of the eighteenth century philosophical tendency to gender the
sublime, identifying the female with the beautiful and the male with the sublime, Ian
Balfour locates a passage in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of
our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) that troubles the gender line precisely
in the description of a woman’s torso. While Emmanuel Kant rigidly adheres to the
division of gender in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime
(1763), Burke is more pragmatic in his sexism (Balfour locates, by way of example, a
feminine quality in grandfathers whose roles as authoritative men have dwindled). For
Burke, the beauty of women explicitly accords with the segmentation of their bodies:

253

Figure 44 Stills from The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (dir. Stan Brakhage, 1971)

Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful,
about the neck and breasts, the smoothness, the softness, the easy and insensible
swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same;
the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without
knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried. Is not this a demonstration of that
change of surface continual and yet hardly perceptible at any point which forms
one of the great constituents of beauty?
84

254
In Burke’s prose, the “partial woman,” as Balfour describes it, broken into parts,
amounts to the ideal form of beauty.
85
The torso of the woman breaks down even further
to segments that are “hardly perceptible” from each other. It is a process that reveals even
greater heights of beauty; in other words, the effect of feminine beauty correlates to the
degree of bodily segmentation. Yet Burke’s language betrays him. Far from the cool
exegesis of the philosopher, he is nearly breathless as he describes the sensation of losing
himself in “the deceitful maze” of the woman’s body. Balfour writes: “The sheer
enumeration of parts presents a threat to the unity being described, which is only the
unity of part of a woman in the first place. The choppy sentences rely heavily on
parataxis but more threatening still to the stability of the experience of the beautiful is the
subject’s getting carried away in the process of observation or description.”
86
In the
rapturous experience of beauty derived from regarding a woman’s infinitely divisible
body, Burke slips into the language of the sublime, or what “is supposed to be antithetical
to it [the beautiful].”
87

Against the pacifying tendency of the beautiful, which, for Frances Ferguson,
“leads us toward death without awareness,” the sublime instead “inspires us with fear of
our death.”
88
Yet if lifting the veil of the beautiful reveals the truth about death, why
doesn’t the fragmented feminine torso described by Burke lead to an effect of
overwhelming horror, or what would seem to be produced in the excesses of the sublime?
Balfour begins his essay with a citation from Denis Diderot that potentially conflates the
two:

255
Powerful effects always come from a mixture of the voluptuous and the terrible,
for instance beautiful half-naked women offering us delicious potions in the
bloody skulls of our enemies. That is the model for everything that is sublime. It
is subjects like that which make the soul melt with pleasure and shudder with fear.
The combination of these feelings plunges us into an extraordinary state and it is
the mark of the sublime that it moves us in a quite exceptional way.
89

Balfour isn’t convinced with the tension Diderot posits; as he astutely observes, the
gendered representation depicted in the scene sharply divides the image between the
feminized beautiful and the grisly sublime of the bloody skulls, both of them propping up
the scene’s memento mori allegory. What is truly horrific is missing from this image,
though it is coyly suggested in the “half-naked” bodies of the women: the view of the
woman’s interior, her genitals exposed as the fleshy, formless image that deforms the
distinction between men and women, beautiful and sublime. Though Diderot evokes
horror in the service of the sublime, he avoids its full, medusan view.
The effect of horror, the plunge into the real, thus depends on how the partial
woman is divided: torso from trunk, bare skin from veil, interior from exterior. If the
breast, which is almost always preserved in these artistic, scientific, and philosophical
renditions of female beauty, is used to symbolize the beautiful, then the genitals,
synonymous here with the interior of the woman’s body, represent the irreducible,
horrific real and are typically kept from view. Gesturing toward them as with Diderot’s
example leads to the sublime, but revealing them outright, as in Berrettini’s illustration or
The Act of Seeing, renders the image intolerably horrific.
The parceling of the woman’s body—with parts variously beautiful, sublime, and
horrific—bears a suppressed violence. The woman is sacrificed in more ways than one:
256
cut like an animal, opened to investigation and analysis, she becomes an object, a
passageway into states of dread or excitation to be felt primarily by men. Her identity
disappears, and she becomes an anonymous collection of parts: limbs, breast, womb, and,
as the head alone, the gorgoneion. The truth that comes at the cost of violated beauty is
too often located on the female body, and as Galt insists, we need to interrogate “the
rhetoric of blood and guts” to understand what is precisely at stake in these sacrificial
acts, and to be mindful of the distancing effects that come with making metaphors out of
female bodies.
90
Without renouncing violence altogether—for that would only reproduce
the culture of prohibition against the intolerable image—we might dare to look all the
more closely at what makes the woman beautiful or repulsive, and especially, when she’s
made to disappear, how and why she’s excised from the image.

Suture

Cinema is founded on the cut, a metonym that also carries with it a contranymic force:
the cut means to sever as well as to join together. Similarly the splice contains its own
opposite, forming a line of division as a suture of tape or cement. The cut constructs
through destruction, conjoining different strips of film to construct a whole out of
heterogeneous fragments.
The physicality of the splice, as well as its paradoxical nature, is explored in
Jennifer Montgomery’s Transitional Objects (1999), an experimental video that
257
assembles found footage from the last stand of Django (dir. Sergio Corbucci, 1966), an
array of severed and restitched stuffed animals, shots from a video being edited on a
laptop computer, and, framing the entire work, the image of Montgomery’s bare feet as
she struggles to tape-splice two strips of 16mm film. The audio track features, in addition
to the halting gasps of the wounded and hand-crushed Django, a young girl offering
questions and commentary as she watches some of the film’s footage (though her voice
precedes the images we see, as in Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia (1971)), and two adult
voices, a man and a woman, that read aloud from D.W. Winnicott’s theory of the
transitional object. Thematically and literally, the film is centrally concerned with the act
of joining together diverse elements, and crossing gulfs of material and psychical
difference, as made metaphoric by the construction of a film. The process is not without
pain and difficulty, as Montgomery’s toes, nicked by the blade of the splicer, readily
make apparent.
Winnicott’s theory accounts for the infant’s separation from the mother’s breast to
construct a sense of itself as an autonomous entity. To do so, Winnicott argues, the child
uses a transitional object, usually a blanket or a toy, which, as a substitute for the breast,
allows the child to undergo this transformation. The object is typically destroyed in the
process; as the voiceover reads, “This change (from relating to usage) means that the
subject destroys the object…after ‘subject relates to object’ comes ‘subject destroys
object’ (as it becomes external); and then may come ‘object survives destruction by the
subject’. But there may or may not be survival. ”
91

258
In Winnicottian fashion, the objects Montgomery depicts are stuffed toys that she
cuts open with a razor blade, taking the head off a bunny or slicing down the middle of a
giraffe. She then assembles new figures out of the parts of the old: half a face here, an
extra set of legs there. This “may or may not be survival,” or to use Krauss’s description
of similarly reconstructed objects in Bellmer’s work, “construction as dismemberment.”
92

(Figure 45) In Bellmer’s case, however, the life-size, and, as mannequins, more life-like
dolls or poupées are bound up, once again, with the impulse to assert a male subjectivity
through the destruction of a female body. As Hal Foster contends, “castration seems
almost staged, even prosecuted, as if the poupées not only represented this condition but
were punished for it as well.”
93

Figure 45 Hans Bellmer, La Poupée (The Doll) (1935)

259
The fetishistic and violently erotic dimension of Bellmer’s poupées is all but
absent in Montgomery’s restuffed animals. (Figure 46) In Bellmer’s dolls, the
“anagrammatic” logic of mixed and multiplied parts evokes what Freud, three years after
the “Medusa’s Head,” called the boy’s “horror at the mutilated creature or triumphant
contempt for her.”
94
The decidedly unsexed toys of Transitional Objects, meanwhile, are
anthropomorphized animals onto which children can shift their desire for the breast, an
object that, in a presexual state, signifies and provides warmth, safety, and sustenance. As
transitional objects, these animal forms allow us to, in Montgomery’s words, “access
emotions or affects that we can’t otherwise.”
95

Figure 46 Still from Transitional Objects (dir. Jennifer Montgomery, 1999)

They are animetaphors, animal metaphors deployed for human psychical use, but
here they indicate something beyond, or in addition to, death; for the child, for
Montgomery, they are used less to provoke a sense of horror and fascination at the
260
mutilated forms than to forge new connections across different bodies. Here the process
of re-membering becomes a positivist practice, a means of recognizing commonality
across division, of recognition itself. As the girl exclaims, “It’s a little bit of cat, and a
little bit lion, a little bit… what else? That’s all. Hey! A little bit of person! Yeah, because
look, we have the same skin.”
This shared skin, like the skin of the film, is visceral, sensitive, and vulnerable to
violence: specifically, the violence of the cut. In an interview, Montgomery explains that
she made Transitional Objects as a meditation on the vanishing presence and materiality
of celluloid in the context of proliferating digital technologies. She asks, “[I]s the splice
an object? If deprived of its physical objecthood, what about the residual human need to
fix ourselves in the world of things?”
96
Shot on video, Transitional Objects contemplates
various images of vulnerable physicality, of skin: the image, seen in Avid editing
windows on a computer screen, of a child suckling a breast, the severed and stitched
stuffed animal pelts, and Montgomery’s belabored attempt to splice film with her feet.
“Why don’t you do it with your hands?” the child asks in voiceover. “Then you won’t cut
yourself.” (Figure 47) Montgomery doesn’t offer an answer, but the close-up display of
her reddened toes implies the value of using one’s body, especially at its most feeble and
vulnerable, to feel through the process of creation and to risk the dangers it entails. Or as
Montgomery describes, “the loss of mastery and the experience of being like a child in
that space of obsolescent technology.”
97

261

Figure 47 Still from Transitional Objects

Unlike the neat cuts provided by editing software, the splice Montgomery labors
over involves real physical peril and pain. Transitional Objects was one of the first
videos she made, and it reflects the experience of vulnerability she shared in relearning
the tools of moving image construction through the Avid software. The video reflects on
her career of 8- and 16-milimeter film, and literally, in the video, she renders a splice for
what was then a film-in-progress, Troika (1998). Here video, in the displaced sense that
Rancière suggests, offers a way of seeing the operation of film as a transitional object
itself, or one as the Winnicottian voiceover explains is “excitedly loved and mutilated.”
98

It allows us to see what film cannot show, which is film’s limits, the space of its cuts. We
not only relate to films, finding identifications within them, but in watching them we also
use them, wearing them out as a means of forging new understandings of ourselves in
relation to others. Too often we dwell on the mutilated remains of what our desire to see
has wrought, but what if we considered the affection that has worked its way over the
262
object? What if, instead of arriving at Lacan’s “final revelation” of horrific
“formlessness,” we begin from that place of vulnerable, undifferentiated commonality?
Of what might even be considered attachment? From the wound of the cut that
Montgomery, Brakhage, and Buñuel and Dalí expose, the wounds, or vulnus, we share by
virtue of having, being bodies?
99
Seen from the far side of psychical distance, the
mutilated Medusa-image may appear gruesome, but if we consider it the effect of fervent
love, like a child’s matted, worried toy, we might understand its destruction, and lopsided
survival, differently. We might see the object, the metaphor, the woman not as something
distinct, but derived from ourselves, and its worriment as that which enables us to bridge
the gulfs that separate us.

Caesura

Kracauer concludes his preface to Theory of Film with an anecdote of the first film he
ever saw. The experience affected him profoundly and prompted his first “literary
project,” titled Film as the Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life. What stood out to
the young Kracauer, however, was not the narrative presented onscreen, but the details of
ordinary life that surrounded it. He recounts:

Several trees stood about, and there was in the foreground a puddle reflecting
invisible house facades and a piece of the sky. Then a breeze moved the shadows,
and the faces with the sky below began to waver. The trembling upper world in
the dirty puddle—this image has never left me.
100

263

The puddle’s open, skyward view likewise affirms, for Bazin, photography’s and
by extension cinema’s capacity to reveal the ordinary, and ordinarily unseen,
characteristics of the world. In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (an essay that
begins, perhaps not incidentally, with a meditation of the survival of the corporeal body),
he valorizes the camera’s ability to capture “a reflection on a damp sidewalk” to present
“the natural image of a world that we neither know nor can see.”
101
From the everyday, or
the profane, comes an image of the sacred, the unseen: Kracauer’s “the upper world,” or
what Bazin simply leaves at “reflection,” the very potential for image creation.

Figure 48 Still from The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes

A similar puddle appears in The Act of Seeing. Toward the end of the film, after
the swift and indelicate removal of organs from a body cavity, Brakhage trains his
264
camera on a small, quivering puddle of fluid that has formed in the partially-dissected
remains of an elderly man. (Figure 48) Against the reds and browns of the cadaver, the
puddle catches the blue of the sky, and Brakhage adjusts his focus to linger on the image.
Against the onslaught of gruesome images that came before it, this shot offers a moment
of pause, if not escape: a caesura, a space carved within the image. Though it resembles a
metaphor, perhaps one like the sky view of Un chien andalou, it does not turn us away
from the image, but allows us to rest inside it.
The puddle is a mirror image, a medusan optic. It opens a space between the too-
immediate view of flesh and the unseeable upper world, the marvelous and the everyday.
And in this liminal space, it generates the possibility of new images, of iconopoesis: “[I]f
artists manage to avoid being Medusa’s victims,” Kristeva writes, “it is because they
reflect her, even while being transubstantiations of her blood. The Medusa myth already
prefigures an aesthetic of incarnation.”
102
To incarnate: to make flesh. Medusa is indeed
looking in this mirror, looking through and beyond the cut. She sees herself, and others,
in dazzling, ever-shifting forms. The fragment of an uncreated creature.
265

Chapter Four References

1
Anne Carson, “Cassandra Float-Can,” unpublished manuscript.

2
Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, trans. Haakon Chevalier (London: Vision, 1968), 212;
cited in P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000, 3
rd
edition (London:
Oxford University Press, [1974] 2002), 4.

3
Jenaro Talens writes: The spectator thus becomes the subject and the object of the action: someone
looking at the slitting of an eye, someone whose eye is slit, and someone who symbolically slits and eye.”
Jenaro Talens, The Branded Eye: Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou, trans. Giulia Colaizzi (Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 1993), 43.

4
Sitney, Visionary Film, 3.

5
Luis Buñuel, “Notes on the Making of UN CHIEN ANDALOU,” trans. Grace L. McCann Morley, Art in
Cinema (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1947), 29–30.

6
Rudolf E. Kuenzli, “Introduction,” Dada and Surrealist Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 10.

7
Luis Buñuel quoted in Hanne Bergius, “Zur Wahrnehmung und Wahrnehmungskritik im Berliner
Dadaismus,” Sprache im Technischen Zeitaler 55 (June–September 1975), 242–44; cited in Kuenzli,
“Introduction,” 9.

8
Buñuel, “Notes on the Making of UN CHIEN ANDALOU,” 30.

9
Georges Bataille, “Eye,” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl,
Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 19, FN 1 (emphasis
added).

10
Bataille cited in Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth- Century French
Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 257. Jay notes preoccupation with the eye in
Surrealist imagery: “there can be little doubt that the eye seemed to many Surrealist artists less an object to
be revered, less the organ of pure and noble vision, than a target of mutilation and scorn, or a vehicle of its
own violence” (260). This violated eye represented a “violent denigration of the visual that culminated in
Bunuel’s slashing razor” (259). A.L. Rees similarly traces a lineage of “the assault on the eye (or the visual
order)” back to Cezanne’s modernism, through Benjamin’s optical unconscious, and through the visceral
shocks of Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty.” A History of Experimental Film and Video: From the Canonical
Avant-Garde to Contemporary British Practice (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 48–49.

11
Bataille, “Eye,” Visions of Excess, 17 (emphasis added).

12
Sitney, Visionary Film, 5.

13
Ibid.

14
Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000), 24.

266

15
Rosalind Galt, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 2.

16
Rosalind Krauss, “Paul Sharits,” Film Culture 65–66 (1978), 89–102, citation on 99 (rpt. from Paul
Sharits: Dream Displacement and Other Projects, exh. cat., Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York,
1976).

17
Ibid.

18
Ibid., 99–100.

19
Writing on the Surrealists, Benjamin describes a “dialectical optics”: “we penetrate the mystery only to
the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optics that perceives the
everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.” “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European
Intelligentsia,” in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986),
177–92; 180–90; cited in Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National
Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (Columbia University Press, 2005), 19.

20
René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, trans. Paul J. Olscamp
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1965), 91.

21
Jay, Downcast Eyes, 76.

22
Descartes, Optics, 87; cited in Jay, Downcast Eyes, 75.

23
Bovine eyes are commonly used in ophthalmic research and pedagogical dissection exercises as a
substitute for human eyes because they share many structural similarities. For practical reasons, obtaining
human eyes are significantly more challenging than finding animal substitutes at the local butcher shop or
eye bank. Descartes’s preference for the “newly deceased” likely stems from the effects of postmortem
deterioration.

24
Jay, Downcast Eyes, 261.

25
Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000), 167.

26
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London:
Verso, 1974), 68; cited in Lippit, Electric Animal, 167–168.

27
In discussing John Berger’s essay “Why Look at Animals?,” Lippit underscores this point of recognition:
“human beings recognize something in the animal look, something that reminds them of themselves.”
Lippit, Electric Animal, 173.

28
Ibid., 165.

29
Ibid., 169.

30
Orphée (dir. Jean Cocteau, 1950). The limit that metaphor finds in death is also, paradoxically, death via
metaphor. In wrestling with the unrepresentability of death, Ludwig Wittgenstein argues that death, which
posed the limit of the knowable world, can only be evoked through metaphor. As Stan Brakhage remarks of
Wittgenstein, “And the limitation of finding the images for a concept of death only in life itself is a terrible
torture, i.e., Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.” Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, cited in
267

Tyrus Miller, “Brakhage’s Occasions,” in Stan Brakhage, Filmmaker, ed. David E. James (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2005), 174–195, citation on 189.

31
See Amy Lyford, “The Aesthetics of Dismemberment: Surrealism and the Musée du Val-de-Grâce in
1917,” Cultural Critique no. 46, Trauma and Its Cultural Aftereffects (Autumn 2000), 45–79, and Sidra
Stich, Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art, University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley (New
York, 1990), exh. cat. While Lyford’s and Stich’s analyses focus mostly on the critical uses of the
fragmented male body, particularly that of the returning soldier in the postwar reconstruction era, the
Surrealists’ interest in the dismembered body was also frequently concerned with women, as in the case of
Bellmer’s femmes-enfant dolls and illustrations.

32
Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1992), xi.

33
Ibid. In Bronfen’s discussion of Max’s painting, she observes two axes of eyeline matches connecting the
moth with the skulls, on one hand, and the gaze of the autopsist and the woman on the other. The two
vectors intersect at the anatomist’s hand peeling back the cloth covering the woman’s breast. For her, this
compositional logic underscores the male anatomist as subject and master of the female object: “However,
while the corpse is positioned as the thematic subject, the anatomist is the subject of the action, because he
functions as the internal focalisor of the picture, who guides the spectator’s view of the depicted object”
(5).

34
Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth
and Twentieth Centuries, Science and Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 110. For
a thorough discussion of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century popularity of representing a woman’s
body in the process of being dissected, with male anatomists presiding over female corpses, see Jordanova,
Sexual Visions, 87–110.

35
Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 5.

36
Stan Brakhage, introduction to The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes at the Cinémathèque Québecoise,
Montreal, 27–28 January 2001, accessed 29 April 2012,
http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/brakhage_montreal.html.

37
Bart Testa, “Seeing with Experimental Eyes: Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes,”
in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, ed. Barry Keith Grant,
Contemporary film and television (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 269–285, citation on 277.

38
Hollis Frampton, “The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes,” Film-makers’ Cooperative Catalogue no. 7
(New York: The Film-makers’ Cooperative, 1989), 48.

39
Brakhage, introduction to The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, 2001.

40
Ibid.

41
Ibid.

42
Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (New York: Columbia University Press,
2009), 8.

43
Sitney, Visionary Film, 388.

268

44
Michael Zyrd, “Magellan: At the Gates of Death, Part I: The Red Gate 1, 0,” A Hollis Frampton
Odyssey (The Criterion Collection, 2012), 36, DVD liner notes.

45
Cavarero, Horrorism, 8.

46
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 26.

47
Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliot (London and New York: Verso,
2011), 85.

48
Ibid., 91.

49
Herbert Marcuse, “Art in the One-Dimensional Society,” in Art and Liberation: Herbert Marcuse,
Collected Papers, vol. 4 (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 113–122, citation on 120.

50
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 64.

51
Ibid., 65.

52
Ibid., 65, 66.

53
Ibid., 66.

54
Ibid., 75.

55
Ibid., 93, 66.

56
Bazin writes: “The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time
and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in
documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of
the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.” “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,”
What is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, University of California Press, [1967] 2005), 9–16,
citation on 14.

57
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York:
Vintage, 2000), 27.

58
Ibid., 59.

59
Ibid., 55.

60
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 111–112.

61
Ibid., 112.

62
Ibid., 115.

63
Ibid., 82.

64
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in The Medusa
Reader, ed. Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers (New York: Routledge, 2003), 133–134, citation on 133.

269

65
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 128. Even when Rancière mentions the affect of the punctum, he
does so by explaining the transitive quality passed over from the photographer: the punctum is “an affect
produced directly on us by the body of the one who faced the lens, who is no longer there, and whose fixing
in the image signifies death’s grip on the living” (113).

66
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique
of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York and London:
Norton, 1991), 164 (emphasis in original).

67
Ibid (emphasis added).

68
Ibid., 170.

69
Freud cited in Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory, 153.

70
Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. Joyce Crick (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999), 90.

71
Ibid., 94.

72
Ibid., 92.

73
Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory, 154–155. For a discussion of the paradoxical visuality of the view of
Irma’s interior, see Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light: Shadow Optics (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2005), 35–42.

74
Ibid., 168.

75
Ibid (emphasis added).

76
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture
(London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 2.

77
Cavarero, Horrorism, 15.

78
Richard Selzer, Confessions of a Knife: Meditations on the Art of Surgery (London: Triad/Granada,
1982), 16; cited in Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 8.

79
Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 8.

80
Sawday notes that individuality among bodily interiors does in fact exist, and medical examiners have
observed highly particular differences in the look and arrangement of organs in different cadavers. “The
crucial difference is that these interior marks are largely unknown—signatures of difference that we cannot
hope to observe in ourselves, and rarely in others” (Ibid.). Such markers of distinction, therefore, fall back
into the indistinct, unknown, and secret space of the interior body.

81
Ibid., 222.

82
By way of example, Ludmilla Jordanova writes of eighteenth century anatomical illustrations:
“Anatomical illustrations linked medical knowledge to sight, and, in the case of eighteenth-century
depictions of women, to seeing parts of nature previously deemed private, thereby forging additional links
with sexual-cum-intellectual penetration and with the violence of the dissecting-room.” “Gender,
Generation and Science: William Hunter’s Obstetrical Atlas,” in Nature Displayed: Gender, Science and
270

Medicine 1760–1820 (London and New York: Longman, 1999), 183–202, citation on 194. See also
Michael Sappol, Dream Anatomy (Bethesda, MD: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, National
Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, 2006).

83
Stan Brakhage, introduction to The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes at the Cinémathèque Québecoise.

84
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed.
J. T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, [1756] 1958), 115; cited in Ian Balfour,
“Torso: (The) Sublime Sex, Beautiful Bodies, and the Matter of the Text,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39
no. 3, New Feminist Work in Epistemology and Aesthetics (Spring 2006), 323–336, citation on 330.

85
Balfour, “Torso,” 330. He notes that Frances Ferguson describes the woman of this passage as
“beheaded,” the decapitated figure that serves “as the epitome of beauty.” Frances Ferguson, Solitude and
the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York and London: Routledge, 1992),
51.

86
Balfour, “Torso,” 331.

87
Ibid. In Winckelmann, too, the writing, and one could say ekphrasis, of the male torso also leads to the
sublime, which, in his formulation, is not directly opposed to the beautiful as it supposedly is for Burke.
Balfour notes, “the writing of what remains, the torso, turns what is potentially beautiful, the heroic male
body, into a sublime and now allegorical character” (Ibid., 333). Rather than getting lost in the fragmentary
details of a woman’s body, however, the incompleteness of the Belvedere Torso leads Winckelmann to the
imaginary and idealized construction of the missing parts.

88
Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime, 52.

89
Denis Diderot, Correspondance, vol. IV, ed. Georges Roth (Paris: Minuit, 1958), 196; cited in Balfour,
“Torso,” 323.

90
Galt, Pretty, 2.

91
D.W. Winnicott, “The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications,” in Playing and Reality
(London and New York: Routledge, [1971] 2008), 115–127, citation on 120.

92
Rosalind Krauss, “Corpus Delicti,” in L’Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism (Washington and New
York, 1985), 86, cited in Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty, October Books (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1993), 103.

93
Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 106.

94
Ibid. and Sigmund Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the
Sexes” (1925), in On Sexuality, ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 336; cited in
Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 106. In the Freudian view, of course, women are already mutilated, which is to
say castrated (albeit symbolically), and Bellmer’s work could be understood as exploiting this a priori
condition of femininity. Foster also observes an ambiguity of death and sex in the poupées and suggests
that their grotesque deformations posed a critique of the perfect body espoused by the Nazis. See Foster,
Compulsive Beauty, 114–122.

95
Jennifer Montgomery, phone interview with author, 19 May 2012.

271

96
Jennifer Montgomery in Amelie Hastie, “Female Redundancies with Jennifier Montgomery,” Afterimage
27 (July/August 1999), 6–7.

97
Jennifer Montgomery, phone interview with author, 19 May 2012. Montgomery’s willingness to cut
herself differs substantially from the plastic surgery performances of an artist like Orlan, who, firstly, is
anesthetized to the pain of incision, and secondly uses reconstructive surgery to reveal the horrific
underside to Western conceptions of feminine beauty. Instead of cutting to reveal the grotesque
consequences of aesthetic pursuit, Montgomery aims away from destruction toward the clumsy, messy, and
fleshy creation of new forms.

98
D.W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” in Playing and Reality, 1–34,
citation on 7.

99
Jean-Luc Nancy imagines the revelation of bodies precisely through their contact: “It is by touching the
other that the body is a body, absolutely separated and shared [partagé]….The body exposes—the body;
bodies expose each other.” “Corpus,” in Thinking Bodies, ed. Juliet Flower MacCannell and Laura Zakarin,
Irvine Studies in the Humanities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 17–31, citation on 29.

100
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, li. Louis-Georges Schwartz
observes, “The paradigmatic image of the reflecting surface of a puddle rippled by the wind blows the word
“life” towards the notion of quality, towards the marvelous, inflating its semantics to include more than
mere daily biological survival.” Louis-Georges Schwartz, “Cinema and the Meaning of ‘Life,’” Discourse
33 no. 2 (Spring 2011), 135–155, citation on 142.

101
Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 15.

102
Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions, European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought
and Cultural Criticism, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 36.
272
Conclusion: Eyes without a Face

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to the scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

—Adrienne Rich
1

In Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face (1959), the surgical grafts performed on
Christiane’s disfigured face fail. As each new face rots and peels away, however, her
eyes remain intact, staring hauntingly from behind an expressionless mask. (Figure 49)
She sees everything, more than she’s supposed to, namely the young women whose faces
will be sacrificed for hers, which was ruined in a car accident. Christiane sees them lying
on the operating table, anaesthetized, covered in a sheet, already reduced to faces lined
with ink, their eyes circled in black: the scalpel’s path. Soon their bodies will join the
others in the morgue, their faces cut like “an open wound,” as the coroner observes.
Christiane sees all this and, until the last moment, submits herself to her father’s quest.
She, too, images a new face for herself, a gift “come from the beyond,” as she excitedly
says over dinner. But the new skin does not take, and Christiane disappears behind the
mask once more. All that’s left are her eyes.

273

Figure 49 Eyes without a Face (dir. Georges Franju, 1959)

Christiane’s face—its concealed depth and the enigmatic look that punctures its
surface— is matched in cinema’s paradoxical materiality, the celluloid surface of the film
that contains an illusory depth. There, immaterial visions of bodies and forms fill and
stretch across a screen, and their eyes, like Christiane’s, appear to look out, at us,
perhaps, or to figures still further out. The scenes of medusan optics I have sketched
likewise concern the materiality of cinema in its cuts and excavations, its surreptitious
sutures and fractured secrets. This means, too, looking to the places where cinema’s
gazes are not met, or at least not yet revealed to us: to the beyond. Following Rancière,
we might start to see cinema differently, as we began, by locating its ends and
possibilities from the perspectives granted by other media.
Medusa is one who is evoked through a look. A willingness, or dare, to look: we
risk the transformative dangers of her gaze in order to see her, and, in the commingling of
274
gazes, to envision the new, the not yet apparent. What do we see, through or with
Medusa, on the other side of the mirror?
As a painting of the eye alone, the lover’s eyes portraits, a variety of “sentimental
jewelry” made popular during the mid-eighteenth century in France and England, speak
to a vision in search of a form, one either remembered or imagined.
2
(Figure 50) Set in
necklaces, brooches, rings, and toothpick cases, and, in the Victorian era, sometimes
paired with hair ornaments, eye portraits were tokens of departed loved ones, whether in
death or as with the famous example of George IV, then the Prince of Wales, sending a
portrait of his eye to the Catholic Maria Fitzherbert, a gift to confirm a forbidden
romance.
3

Figure 50 Memory box, ca. 1830

275
Lover’s eyes were miniature, secret, sometimes cached in snuff boxes or lockets:
an eye, a look, that would only be recognized by one who knew it well. This isolated part
could conjure a face, an entire person in the eyes of the one for whom the look was
intended. Like the locket, the eye portrait was carried close to the body, close to the heart.
Susan Stewart writes, “Within the body is both the heart and the heart’s content—the
other. The heart’s state of contentment, we must remember, exists only in its interior
plenitude.”
4
The lover’s eye isolates vision in search of a form, a form, no less one of
plenitude, that can only be fulfilled in the matched gaze of the beloved. An eye that sees
through the eyes of another, and in doing so conjures its own fulfillment, the shaping of
its bodily presence.
Another view of isolated eyes occurs in Alfredo Jaar’s The Eyes of Gutete
Emerita (1996), in which Emerita’s eyes, each one photographed and set in a lightbox,
seem to stare back at the viewer. (Figure 51) As part of the artist’s installation “The
Rwanda Project: 1994–1998,” the image of Emerita’s eyes are accompanied by text that
describe Jaar’s encounter with this woman who witnessed the murder of her husband and
sons, and fled the genocide with her daughter. Instead of viewing images of the victims,
Jaar gives us Emerita’s eyes, which, for Rancière, exemplify “the politics of metonymy,
which gives the effect for the cause or the part for the whole.”
5
The metonym’s power of
evocation, of incarnation, is perhaps most potent, most haunting, when fixed in the eyes.

Rancière continues:
However, for all that they have seen, these eyes do not tell us what Gutete
Emerita thinks and feels. They are the eyes of someone endowed with the same
276
power as those who view them, but also with the same power that her brothers
and sisters have been deprived of by the murderers—that of speaking or
remaining silent, of showing one’s feeling or hiding them.
6

Emerita’s eyes forge a link, an eye line, between those lost to the genocide and to the
witnesses of its horrors. Yet her look is enigmatic—indeed, as Rancière notes, we do not
know what Emerita thinks and feels, only what Jaar tells us she has seen. The ambiguity
of the eyes without a face open room for other representational and political
manifestations, for others yet acknowledged to find themselves also implicated in, or
sharing, this multiplicitous look.

Figure 51 Alfredo Jaar, The Eyes of Gutete Emrita (1996)

The Eyes of Gutete Emerita takes several forms in Jaar’s installation. In addition
to the wall-mounted lightbox photographs, there is also a large lightbox on top of which
roughly a million slides of Emerita’s eyes are piled and scattered. Their mass—
277
approximating, in some sense, the devastating numbers of the Rwandan genocide—both
multiplies and obscures the image of Emerita’s eyes, which are often darkened in the
shadowed pile. In another version of the piece, made for the Internet in 1997, the text and
imagery are translated into sequential frames online.
7
The first six frames of the
slideshow contain only Jaar’s account of meeting and learning about Emerita. The viewer
advances each with a click. The final frame, which depicts Emerita’s eyes alone, is unlike
the others in that it immediately cycles forward, back to the beginning slide. The viewer
does not have control over this image’s duration, which flashes by like a blink. As with
the China girl, we are denied a prolonged view of Emerita’s eyes, forced to return to the
absent and imagined scenes that she alone saw. The split-second duration of the Internet
piece reminds us of the tenuousness of Emerita’s look. It also returns us to our frustrated
look, a reminder of all that we do not see, the horrific views invisibly inscribed into her
eyes. Though her eyes are what linger—as Jaar solemnly observes, “I remember the eyes
of Gutete Emerita”—they leave us to imagine the rest, the beyond, for ourselves.

*

Two poems frame this study. The lost stanza of Percy Pysshe Shelley’s “On the Medusa
of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery,” announces, in the epigraph, the
“uncreated creature” who might surpass her death in some way. (And might we not
imagine this Percy as another Perseus, a poet-hero who left behind scattered pieces of his
Medusa?) It is worth repeating Shelley’s words here:
278
It is a trunkless head, and on its feature
Death has met life, but there is life in death,
The blood is frozen—but unconquered Nature
Seems struggling to the last—without a breath
The fragment of an uncreated creature.

However severed, or rather because she is severed, this Medusa finds “life in death,” a
different kind of survival, her remains to be discovered, like the lost stanza itself, by
someone else. Someone unforeseen.
I imagine Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck,” which forms the epigraph to
this conclusion, as a faraway rejoinder to Shelley’s fragment. It tells of an underwater
expedition, perhaps heroic in the style of Greek mythology. Rich and her reader return to
the scene, “by cowardice or courage,” armed, like Perseus, with a set of gifts: “a knife, a
camera / a book of myths / in which / our names do not appear.”
Earlier in the poem she states her aim of her search:

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun

So too have I tried to bring the tools of cameras and cuts to this medusan quest. To see,
and to find others in that dare to look.
Let’s go back. To the strewn seaweed wreck turned to coral blossoms, to
Medusa’s dark cave, to see it all for ourselves. To find the fragments we didn’t realize
we’d lost, the creature still uncreated, a look that might strike us with unexpected
279
familiarity, unfrozen. Let’s go back, again. And let’s see if our names might now, this
time, be inscribed in the book of myths.
280

Conclusion References

1
Adrienne Rich, “Diving Into the Wreck,” in Diving Into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972 (New York:
Norton, 1973), 22–24.

2
Graham C. Boettcher, “Symbol and Sentiment: Lover’s Eyes and the Language of Gemstones,” in The
Look of Love: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection, ed. Graham C. Boettcher (Birmingham, AL:
Birmingham Museum of Art, 2012), 31–53, citation on 47.

3
See Elle Shushan, “The Artist’s Eye,” in The Look of Love: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection, 15–
29, esp. 15–18.

4
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 127.

5
Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliot (London and New York: Verso,
2011), 97.

6
Ibid.

7
See Alan Moore, “Alfredo Jaar’s Rwanda Project,” Artnet.com (21 May 1998), accessed 1 May 2012,
http://www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/reviews/moore/moore5-21-98.asp.
281
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Creator Yue, Genevieve (author)

Core Title Medusan optics: film, feminism, and the forbidden image

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 07/10/2012

Defense Date 06/01/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag avant-garde film,China girl,decapitation,feminist film theory,hair,J-horror,Medusa,Medusan optics,OAI-PMH Harvest,sexuality,Violence,visuality

Language English

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Advisor Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee chair), James, David E. (committee member), Keeling, Kara (committee member)

Creator Email genevieve.yue@gmail.com,genevieve@lettresauvage.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-55235

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Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA