The Owens Valley, a slender stretch of high desert in Eastern California, is a place of origins. It has played a major, if underrecognized, role in the industrial development of Los Angeles, particularly for the silver extracted in the late 19th century and the water diverted into the Los Angeles Aqueduct in the early 20th. These and other histories have been inscribed, though often miswritten, in film, including in the nearly 500 Hollywood productions shot in the region’s Alabama Hills. But look closer into these beginnings and one will find traces of the lives and labors of dispossessed Indigenous peoples, Mexican settlers, and Asian immigrants. This talk focuses on the latter group: Chinese miners killed in a devastating accident at the Cerro Gordo mine, Japanese-Americans interned at Manzanar, and the minor characters that, through their background expressions in films, point to a different direction for the Hollywood imaginary. The history of film, in its most basic, material composition of silver nitrate, is conditioned by these half-buried figures, however incidental they have been to an already neglected landscape. As the experience of “film” has become all but entirely digitized, the retrieval of these foundational elements of the film image reveals a representational form whose geographical and material origins are still largely unexplored.

A conversation and screening event exploring the aesthetics and politics of first-generation Asian American cinema. Featuring Isabel Sandoval (Artist-in-Residence, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU), Devika Girish (Co-Deputy Editor, Film Comment; Talks Programmer, New York Film Festival), and Genevieve Yue (Associate Professor, The New School).

recording

Zoom-In is a thesis showcase presented by the MA Film and Media Studies Class of 2023. The sixth annual Zoom-In takes place at the Lenfest Center for the Arts. This year, the event included individual presentations, discussion panels, Q+As, and supplemental screenings. The program continued to investigate classical problems of our field (documentary, theory, exhibition), as well as issues arising from today’s emerging new media. Genevieve Yue, Associate Professor of Culture and Media at The New School serves as Keynote Speaker. Also featuring Daniella Shreir, editor Another Gaze, and a screening of Carnal Knowledge (1971).

How does criticism help sustain independent cinema? How should it evolve to address the increasingly complex forms of funding, exhibition, and distribution that shape what we watch on screen?

With Genevieve Yue, Juliano Gomes, Chloé Trayner, and Girish Shambu

Register (free)

The “China Girl,” sometimes called a “China Doll” or “girl head,” is a type of reference image used in commercial film laboratories since the late 1920s and continuing in limited use today. The China Girl has appeared in more films than any actress, though, outside of the film laboratory, she is rarely seen. Behind the scenes, however, she is essential to setting the appearance of a film, determining exposure, image density and color balance. While the China Girl is a crucial part of the film production process, her essential role in film history has been most often overlooked. This program gathers a selection of experimental films that consider the China Girl from various perspectives, including that of celluloid materiality, the behind-the-scenes workings of the film industry, and the often marginal role of women in film history. The screening will be preceded by a talk by film scholar Genevieve Yue to discuss her book, Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality (Fordham University Press, 2020) and present a program of films that exemplifies her research. All short film notes below were taken from Yue’s new book with the exception of Ein Bild, which was taken from the filmmaker’s website and is presented below in his own words.

followed by discussion with Morgan Fisher and Mark Toscano

register here: https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/2022/04/22/girl-head-feminism-film-materiality

Film program:

China Girls (U.S., 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.

16mm, color, 3 min. Director: Michelle Silva.

Standard Gauge (U.S., 1984)

Morgan Fisher’s film is organized as a kind of show-and-tell of various film strips he had collected working in stock footage libraries and as an editor on low-budget features. Winding strips of 35mm film over a lightbox, Fisher pauses on several examples of China Girls to comment on them.

16mm, color, 35 min. Director: Morgan Fisher.

Ein Bild (Germany, 1983)

“Four days spent in a studio working on a centerfold photo for Playboy magazine provided the subject matter for my film. The magazine itself deals with culture, cars, a certain lifestyle. Maybe all those trappings are only there to cover up the naked woman. Maybe it's like with a paper-doll.”

Digital, color, in German with English subtitles. 25 min. Director: Harun Farocki.

Releasing Human Energies (U.S., 2012)

For a little over five minutes, the woman in the China Girl image sits in real time, visibly uncomfortable and blinking. The woman’s discomfort is underscored by the narration of Morgan Fisher, who once again speaks over the image of the China Girl.

16mm, color, 6 min. Director: Mark Toscano.

Total film runtime: 69 minutes.

UCLA Film and Television Archive event page

Writing has always been central to the practice of experimental film. In addition to essays, criticism, and manifestos written by filmmakers like Germaine Dulac, Maya Deren, Jonas Mekas, and Stan Brakhage, critics like P. Adams Sitney, Annette Michelson, Amy Taubin, and Peter Wollen have helped to shape the contours of a constantly changing field of practice. Critic and scholar Genevieve Yue leads this master class on the role of critics in experimental film. We will examine the formal, institutional, and often surprising dialogues that have taken place between critics and experimental filmmakers historically. We will also explore how the relationship between writing and filmmaking might be reconfigured for the present moment.

register

A talk and discussion on the global politics of European film festivals, in collaboration with World Records. With Genevieve Yue, Jason Fox, Juliano Gomes, and Stefan Tarnowski.

https://2021.visibleevidence.org/keynotes/the-exceptions/

Girl Head book talk and discussion with Professor Sarah Rebecca Kessler.

For decades, feminist film criticism has focused on issues of representation: images of women in film. But what are the feminist implications of the material object underlying that image, the filmstrip itself? What does feminist analysis have to offer in understanding the film image before it enters the realm of representation?

Girl Head explores how gender and sexual difference have been deeply embedded within film materiality. In rich archival and technical detail, Yue examines three sites of technical film production: the film laboratory, editing practices, and the film archive. Within each site, she locates a common motif, the vanishing female body, which is transformed into material to be used in the making of a film. The book develops a theory of gender and film materiality through readings of narrative film, early cinema, experimental film, and moving image art.

This original work of feminist media history shows how gender has had a persistent role in film production processes, well before the image ever appears onscreen.

Register here.