Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality | Genevieve Yue, Morgan Fisher, Mark Toscano

it is now my honor without further Ado to introduce our guest tonight Genevieve you you is an assistant professor of culture and media at the new school and uh where she also directs the screen studies program she is also an author and critic and is currently working on a documentary film she serves on the board of directors of the Flaherty and is a member of Princeton University's cpuc ad hoc committee on sexual climate culture and conduct and now for a talk on her book girl head feminism and film materiality published in November 2020 by Fordham University please join me in welcoming to the stage Dr Genevieve you [Applause] okay um thank you so much KJ for bringing me out here um very excited to be here this is my first in-person book event so it feels like it's very new and exotic so I'm just thrilled to be here um thank you Jim up in the booth thank you Mark and Morgan for being here tonight too I'm very excited to talk with you later um my voice is in a kind of weird State Post covid so I'm all clear but I may be coughing a little bit so apologize for that as well um I'm going to talk tonight about um the China girl uh which is the kind of foundational um object an image in my thinking around materiality and gender and film and I'm going to tell a bit of the story of how I came to even recognize this object and how it shaped my thinking in this area um and I want to be very intentional in describing it as an it um rather than a she I noticed in my own writing that I would often slip into she or when other people would talk about the figure talk about as a she but first and foremost I think it's very much an object that's used in quality control procedures in the film laboratory and its appearance is standard so you what you see here is an image of a woman in close-up positioned next to color swatches and patches of white gray and black it's a tool used for calibration of film images and film processing equipment and it helps to maintain a standard and some would say ideal appearance for the film image and specifically it maintains an ideal appearance for the human figure and the appearance of Flesh um but the temptation to employ the pronoun she persists when discussing the China girl and to start the figure within the image is almost always a woman a face and an enigmatic one at that the China girl image is a kind of portrait by which under the right circumstances we are invited to gaze upon the subtly smiling woman who is she how does she come to be here we might ascribe to her a mysterious power of the sort that transfixed Madeleine Ulster and vertigo and in this way she carries with it a sense of excess when I was conducting research for my book several lab technicians many of whom were retired or nearing the end of their careers admitted to me a strong attachment to the China girl figure what other laboratory device could evoke such strong emotion other than a face as an excess she's more than a mere tool more than an immediate context like the most beguiling of Andy warhol's screen tests her look pulls away from its surroundings we meet a gaze and risk getting lost in it so in a way the China grows both an IT and a she something in between it marks a conjunction of technical object and gender and is an indication of the degree to which these aspects are often Inseparable from one another my book extends this analysis of technicity and gender to various sites of Film Production that like the film laboratory laboratory occur prior to representation as we most commonly encounter it so for this evening's presentation I'll be focusing specifically on the China girl in the film laboratory its history and its secondary appearance in a number of experimental films several which we'll see later on tonight before delving into the history of the China girl I'd like to address the particular issues of looking that are raised won't when we consider this figure for those of us who have watched projected analog film it is very likely that we have seen some China girls before and this is because anytime a projectionist fails to switch over a film reel at the appointed time allowing the end of the reel to run out a viewer might catch a few frames of China girl on the film leader John pitlak the Kodak engineer who developed the laboratory aim density system or lad in 1976 opined that quote she has probably been more in more movies than any other actress in the world end quote but even in these cases we in large part fail to take notice even when we might see a China girl image this way we may not properly register it rather it is something that is hidden in plain sight it wasn't until I saw Morgan Fisher's standard gauge which we will watch together later on this evening that I became aware of the China girl figure 's film is organized as a kind of show and tell of various film scraps he'd collected working in stock footage libraries and as an editor on low budget features winding strips of 35 millimeter film over a light box he pauses on several examples of China girls to comment on them he explains their function in film Laboratories where they are crucial to calibrating a film's final appearance yet little is known about their provenance who the models were and how in the United States at least these women came to be named China girls though Fisher describes the China girl as a quote figure who in some quarters is emblematic almost a film itself end quote The Smiling women in the film leader remain largely enigmatic so the China girl has been an enduring if mostly imperceptible figure in film history as well there's been little scholarly attention paid to it and it also does not feature in technical literature rather its history is vernacular the result of practices handed down among technicians and remaining largely outside of official written manuals in my research I've been able to glean a history of the China girl from accounts of the procedures and instruments with which it is associated this includes for example the densitometer an instrument for measuring the density of film images and the first reference to quote a close-up of a girl that I was able to find in Journal of the smpe which was the chief and still is professional journal for the film industry this occurs in 1933 in an article on the usage of the densitometer and though the densityometer first appeared in the journal in 1923 the early 1930s mention of a close-up of a girl Accords with the arrival of sound Technologies and film and with them the need for more stringent quality control measures to maintain consistency in audio quality also from the 30s is the earliest example of a China girl I've been able to find which you see right here and similarly according you know by this logic of pegging the appearance of the China girl to technological developments later appearances of the China girl in the technical literature things like girl head or China Doll the other names that are often used um coincide historically with developments in color processes television so these kind of major technological shifts often Mark the the need the renewed need to have more precise Quality Control Instruments and technological developments worldwide Then followed the work being done within the U.S context including at the Kodak Research Laboratories which was closely aligned with the society for motion picture Engineers of the industry's main Professional Organization therefore every country to have a major Motion Picture industry also ended up producing its own China girls from what I believe to be its emergence then in the late 1920s and early 30s the China girl as such continues in limited use today and this happens wherever the processing of film stock continues to occur as for example in the conversion between film and digital Technologies it has analogs in digital media as well here's an example of an actual Asian woman used for a printer reference chart other uses include images for monitor calibration reference sheets as the name suggests the China girl encodes attitudes about race one of the many questions I was unable to satisfactorily answer in my research concerns the origin of the name why is it called a China Girl various explanations I encountered had to do with China as a material as in porcelain or the preciousness of China dolls we see in the various names of China girls a slippage between material and race the models for example are often adorned with orientalist details in dress hairstyle and as reported in one case a straw Coulee hat in the 1970s Kodak posed many of its China girl models in the same Mandarin colored blouse and you'll see this woman in the lower right hand corner again tonight in Mark toscano's releasing human Energies the linking of race gender and material is confirmed in the China girl's name outside of the U.S context in France is known as Lily lashinois kodaket and La Pride with the latter referring to the Slanted shape of Asian eyes in Thailand Muay or arm way is used also referring to the appearance of a Chinese girl Japanese technicians employ China girl as an English language phrase as do laboratory workers in India and Slovenia Mexico uses muneca or Mona both of which refer to dolls um and Laboratories in Austria refer to them as Conchita which in Spanish means little shell and is also slang for little [ __ ] more broadly this orientalism is suggested in the stereotypical notion of Asian femininity that women be subordinate and submissive qualities that would be useful for the technological function the image serves given the fact then that nearly all China girls in Western countries are racially White the woman's idealized appearance as means an index based on her white skin the notion of perfect or ideal skin tone of course is routinely conflated 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 neutral and to a great extent invisible or inconspicuous this is like the China girl herself the aim for an ideal is also measured as a norm in his study of whiteness and photographic media Richard Dyer observed an inherit a what he called racial character of Technologies that reveals itself in the use of white skin tone as a measure for all others as a racial trait whiteness might be ideologically neutral or invisible but in fact in color analysis it never live less registers a range of chromatic values this racial character means that these Technologies are designed according to perceived markers of racial differentiation even if they are not themselves tantamount to racism dire writes quote 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 film and photography have seemed to work better with light-skinned peoples that is because they were made that way not because there could be no other way end quote against the presumed neutrality and objectivity of Imaging Technologies racial biases nevertheless have governed the development of film stocks chemicals and other machines that produce the very conditions by which representation can even occur returning to the question of how to look at the China girl then it is important to understand that the figure appears within the material construction of film and not at the level of the projected image the result of this conceptually is that it exposes a gap between the Surface appearance of a film and the complex orchestration of its materiality in terms of gender Labor and Industry the China girl is then the opposite of the women who appear on screen it is not a figure in film but one used for film in other words it shows how the functioning of the film laboratory requires for it to be understood only as material and never a person in the sense of its Leading Lady counterparts Additionally the anonymity of China girl models they're almost never credited indicates how the woman's Vanishing into brute material is necessary to the transformation of her into an instrument fundamental to the operation of the film Laboratory I turn now to the China girls curious appearance and experimental film and this is both a conclusion and an invitation the figure has been especially compelling for filmmakers associated with structural film or that tendency within experimental film to reveal a project of revealing different aspects of the Cinematic apparatus including light projection or the film strip itself many filmmakers um with a examine the function of Film Production practices and Link the China girl um a link these practices to the enigmatic appearance of the China girl as a woman so broadly speaking I see the appearance of the China girl and experimental film as a kind of test case for the various modes of looking that the figure involves this can mean moving it from the margins to the center of the frame or maintaining its supposedly natural appearance which would be inserted in the midst of film leader miscellany as in the case of Michelle Silva's film as we will now begin the screening portion of the evening I invite you to be mindful of the way that the China girl model appears in the films that you see to attend to what is being revealed what might otherwise Escape notice and what obstructions might still remain following the screening please stay for what promises to be a very exciting conversation with Morgan Fisher and Mark Toscano thank you for your attention and enjoy so thank you for sticking around and um a hand one more time for the film program that Genevieve put together I'm going to introduce uh our other guests you were introduced to Genevieve earlier um please join me in welcoming to the stage Mark Toscano and Morgan Fisher Mark Toscano is a curator film preservationist and educator and as we saw tonight an occasional filmmaker uh based in Los Angeles since 2003 he has worked at the Academy film archive where he especially specializes in the curation conservation and restoration of independent and artists films he is a programmer with Los Angeles Film Forum and since 2015 has taught in the experimental animation program at the California Institute of the Arts Morgan Fisher received a ba in art history from Harvard College then moved to Los Angeles to attend Film School in 1968 he began making short films which have shown at the oberhausen Berlin London and New York film festivals and in at mocha the Museum of Modern Art the Whitney just to name a few his most recent film another movie from 2017 was shown at the Berlin and London film festivals among others toward the end of the 90s he extended his practice to include painting drawing photography and installation he has been a visiting teacher at Brown calarts and here at UCLA and he lives and works in Los Angeles please join me in welcoming to the stage our panel this evening foreign I just grabbed them from work because when you're a film preservationist you encounter a lot of these so afterwards if anybody wants to check these out I'll be in the lobby that was a really amazing talk I haven't read your book yet so I only finally got it tonight um but yeah that was fantastic and I love the inclusion of the faroki film could you could you talk a little about that actually um yes um well I programmed a series of a two-part series of films at metrograph in New York during the early stages of the pandemic um and it was Loosely based on my book and it was a program called implicit movies and the idea was that I wanted to draw out things that were hidden but there in film processes but I suppose in in any phenomenon so um I I think the Froakie film is kind of funny and it's like so anti-erotic right it's like it's a construction of an erotic you know a Playboy shoot and it's there's so much fussing over the image and there's so much work involved it's so banal in a way and I wanted to it's just you know I I didn't I didn't find a place for it in the book but I I put in the metrograph program and then I thought when I was putting a program together for tonight um I didn't want to just do China girl films um that just seemed a little like too obvious but I so I wanted to bring in another um realm of Labor of like of image production and to describe the tedium um the Precision the the process um of setting that up and one thing I think is really amazing about the faroki is there's so little talking um they're like little murmurs and things but that these the people who are putting this shoot together know so well what they're doing that they don't really have a whole lot to say to each other um that it's so just you know a routine thing so I don't know I wanted to bring that into the picture I'm interested always and process and and labor and um and just imagining you know um what what it's like to be oh I've never been like a model so I don't always like to just sit there while other people just kind of like fuss over you um and your film brings that out so much um of like the labor of sitting there and evidently being told to smile and like to look pretty and um that's an aspect of even the China girl that we don't typically see so moving from Michelle Silva's film which is like you know the typical way that we might encounter a China girl which is in the midst of all this other kinds of countdown leader and things like that um to get to the point where you're confronted with what is it like in this like the full you know Central way of just having to sit there while in all the other work that goes into making that so there's a long-winded answer but to get to that when I when I first stumbled on the footage that I used for my movie it was in maybe 2008 or nine and um the thing that I think blew me away the most was that clearly she had she is being told to smile or she knows she's supposed to smile at certain intervals and but that's not necessary for her image to function as this control image like The Smiling is from this other place this idea of portraiture and um but a certain kind of portraiture and a certain kind of objective objectifying portraiture and it's I just thought that was so unreal that like why why does she need to smile I mean everything about it is excessive right like it doesn't need to be a woman it doesn't need to be a smiling woman it I I mean and there are there are exceptions right we've seen China girls that are dogs or there was the doll the mannequin the BBC mannequin um I've seen a baby a baby one yeah and I've seen only one man have you seen I've seen others I think you sent me this the China boy yeah the China boy it's from a Cinerama movie yeah and my theory was this my colleague Andrew Bradburn at the Academy of Hallmark I found that because we have the Cinerama collection at the Academy and my theory was that it's such a it was such a small company initially that was doing this experimental three-camera process that they probably just had a small staff and this is probably just one of the technicians like or just get in front of the camera or something and then I mean what a find though I have to really thank Andrew for that prove the rule I think um but um I mean no I I remember when you brought in that piece of film um to the Getty Research Institute and that was that was a revelation for I mean there are various Revelations for me in this project but just to see her a live person it's kind of squirming a little bit um and for it to be durational just and just to not see that as like a flat image but she's like sitting behind some cards it's always kind of shocking to me and I'm curious to know about um when you first became both of you beat first became aware of this figure because I learned from both of your works um to pay attention to it so I'm curious just to hear where where that came for both of you well Morgan we were talking in the lobby we we perhaps we first became aware because of the same film right except at different times but I um the film that the film that Mark is talking about is a film by a filmmaker who at the time he made it was known as George Landau but later became Owen land and it's called a film in which there appears dirt particles Edge lettering Etc yeah so it has this deliberately um elaborate title and there's a very brief clip of the same China girl that is the first that I show I think it's the same one isn't it I think so um it's a very brief clip but it is but it was a motion picture scene and so she blinks so this is very brief moment of action and it's repeated so that's probably when I became aware of it and then when I was working in 35 I encountered pieces a film that had the China girl in it and um I had this I mean basically my film is about my obsession with 35 so it's um so those images just I could understand them as being you know contained within that obsession I'm not obsessed anymore uh the film the film I think was actually a kind of exorcism it was like therapeutic how to how to escape from the power of 35. but I wanted could I just comment on something in in your film well I mean we understand that anyone who's being posed for a photograph is being directed as we saw from the faroki film but um so any China girl even if it's just a few seconds long has been directed but this one was like really directed There was sustained Direction someone was telling her something probably a man was telling her from off camera to do stuff so it's as if she were being directed back in the silent period for one thing um but all of a sudden we become aware of um there being a director of a kind that's different if it's just a few if it's just a fraction of a second as we see in the in the George land down film where it's a motion picture scene but so short that we don't really think about the fact that someone has set up the shot and has told this person uh exactly you know where to stand how to act how to hold her head and um so it's very different and so all so there's this so there's this other history of the directors of China girls whom I mean I don't know of anyone who yeah I mean if China girls are Anonymous then the directors of China girls are even more so we don't even know what they look like I mean I've talked to a couple really yeah oh my gosh I mean it's in the book as my memory is a little dim but I have five um uh this is another thing you know when I would contact lab technicians or you know usually retirees they they're like pretty active in their little like lists are groups but I would contact people and um they were pretty eager to talk to me about it I mean they wouldn't see it as as directing that's what's interesting they you know it was just kind of like a function of the job um to go set up and now it's time to go set up uh you know a room some Lights and Camera um and it's just part of the practice of doing laboratory work as opposed to obviously like a film director in that sense um are you scandalized that I want to insist that they're film directors no I love this idea okay it makes me think differently about film directing actually I I can't wait to hear what you're going to say next I mean that you know that they're like the image of the film director is this tyrannical figure controlling figure um actually this like undercuts that a little bit it's just like oh this is some of that comes out of just like this the structure of that kind of Labor of um so what I mean by that is like it's not like a personality trait of I mean you know we have like these like myths of like people like Hitchcock um I just want to control everything but um to imagine a film director as being more akin to a laboratory workers like is fascinating you know it's like it kind of brings us back to the studio system yeah I'm not saying they're all tours but they're off camera and they're telling the person yes in front of the camera what to do yeah that's directing well I guess in the footage that I used in my film yeah there's clearly some choice is being made by one or more people on how this woman should behave in front of the camera for whatever reasons they have it's not germane to the purpose that she's being filmed for but yeah it is kind of funny like what yeah why and why the outfit and why any number of other things as you mentioned um I actually love too in in that footage sometimes she's smiling just being told and On Cue and it's obviously a very artificial kind of forest smile but there are one or two moments where she seems to smile genuinely and laugh a little bit and responding to who knows what um if somebody's deliberately trying to make her laugh somebody said something or who knows what and I love that and actually that's the sort of implicit presence of the director I suppose to or the crew is that we're we're aware of them because of her reactions in a way and what she's being for what she's performing well I'm well I'm footage with an incredibly like overbearing like you know it's like manager manual kind of voice that's that's your voice but like brought into um from this this book that you have about like telling managers how to manage things so when I thought of Insidious like kind of uh authoritarian voices I thought of Morgan instantly I wanted him to no I'm just kidding Morgan I'm just kidding but it's also gendered because of course if the person you're speaking of is is he yeah only exclusively that he yeah yeah I mean to say the obvious but can you can you talk about where that came from yeah well I don't mean to be the show and tell guy but I actually brought the book tonight that I have this is it here it's got the weirdest cover too again I'll have to I'm happy to show this to anybody that wants to look at it but in in the late 50s my my dad with his his mom's um second husband my grandma's second husband had operated a Tavern in Hartford Connecticut and then he died and left it my grandmother ended up with it and my dad didn't have a job at that time and and ended up helping her run it and so in the course of doing that and kind of figuring out how to do it I guess he bought a few books on restaurant management and in the in this one's from the early 60s actually um this Edition and at some point I don't know why over 50 years he kept it but at some point in again probably the late odds I uh no it would have been a little later I guess it was around 2011 um because it was encountering this book that I found that essay which is literally called releasing human energies and no joke I opened up the book randomly and that was what was staring at me is this essay about how to manage your staff by aligning their presumed personal goals with your kind of corporate ones and uh it's um I mean yeah immediately I thought of the China girl which I had I had I had thought that would be interesting somehow that could make its way into a film because it's really remarkable footage I mean first and foremost that's just that footage was really amazing to me because I I think like a lot of people I hadn't assumed that that was even live action material always um and then to realize here's five straight minutes of it that that really was um I just never seen it before and I don't think anybody else had ever spoken to had either and yeah somehow it was it just clicked with me that they both had to do with this sort of invisible imaginations behind certain forms of Labor and the way that there's something kind of um creepy about it uh on a lot of different levels I mean I'm simplifying but um but then yeah and I mean I couldn't help but ask Morgan to perform the voice over I mean for a few reasons one I really love Morgan's speaking voice but also um one of my early encounters with the idea of the China girl was of course standard gauge and I just really love his voice over in that and I thought um without wanting to trivialize the film in a way it also I guess ends up being a bit of an in-joke for experimental film fans but the form of first and foremost was I I really loved his his uh the Lucidity and the clarity of his delivery and it's I thought it was just perfect so and I work with Morgan as an archivist to work on restoring his films so I asked him if he would do this he was very very generous to say yes uh and I don't know how did you feel seeing it tonight how do you feel about hearing yourself in a film that's not yours well if it were the only film on the program I would be perfectly happy but um for those of you who might have gotten sick with my voice you have only marked well Genevieve and Mark together to blame but um yeah I mean I'll do it I'll do it again if you want me to if you think it can be no I I noticed I took a couple of breaths you can hear me taking a breath and of course we try to eliminate those in the editing did you did you work on the track did you try to edit yeah it's actually two performances edited together and I did take out some breaths I didn't take out all of them I guess foreign yeah there are some breaths in the track on for standard gauge that I hadn't heard before so it's back to The Cutting Room but not really but well speaking of invisible labor this is maybe slightly off topic but I I've always been amazed and if it's not clear to to all of you even even if you've seen standard gauge before that's all one take that's a real time single take a 1200 foot magazine of film which is roughly 33 minutes and that's quite a remarkable achievement I think because that's an incredibly precisely framed shot as well and the Precision with which you produce the film has always kind of blown me away I don't know how much testing went into that quite a bit I imagine yeah I just wanted to mention yeah thank you for bringing that up I wanted to mention um in 16 00 feet is as Mark said 33 minutes and the take is 30 32 minutes but um the longest taken 35 the longest roll of film in 35 is a thousand feet which is 11 minutes 11 minutes and six into fraction seconds so in 16 you could make a you could do something technically that was not possible in 35 millimeters so Hollywood for all of its resources couldn't make a film like standard gauge because you can't do a 33 minute take in 35 millimeter you can in 16 but not in 35 although Samuel Fuller I I I heard I I think I read about this or I heard him speak about this he wanted to make a movie where it was it was set in the military and there would be a scene where men were marching and it'd be a tracking shot and there would be changeovers between cameras as the shot went on so it was going to end up being in effect three maybe more than two I think but maybe three separate 35 millimeter camera rolls that would do their best to conceal the fact that there were in fact breaks between the reels and um the way he spoke about it the part of what interested him in this was that no matter what the men had to keep Marching In other words the requirement that this be executed as a continuous action would oblige people to keep marching because the camera was the cameras first the one then the other than a third we're going to keep rolling and I thought that was an interesting idea that um in Fuller's conception of the shot there was this there was this connection between um duration and what the duration um obligated on the part of performers yeah the performers had to keep on performing they had no choice in ordinary production you know if something goes wrong you're you know a few seconds into the take you just say cut then you're on to take two or take three whatever it is but that's one of the ways to think about uh to think about Hitchcock is that Hitchcock was very interested with um interested in the material limitations of film as a is something in relation to which to operate and the obvious example is um his rope which consists of very long takes that he does his best to he does his best to conceal the fact that it's in fact separate shots although there are some cuts that are more obvious than others but it's done in order to create the illusion that it's one continuous performance when in fact obviously it's not I mean it couldn't be um but one of again just one of the things that standard Gage is about is about what's possible in a single take we tend to think of single takes as being um I mean this was the this was the beef with Warhol these single take movies were um they didn't tell us anything that just looking at the at the scene in real life would tell us and one of the one of the motives for making standard gauge was to show that single takes films could in fact be complicated so that's why I talked about under Capricorn another Hitchcock film with very long takes I also love that it's a single take film that nevertheless has many shots yeah yeah so you get to have it both ways somehow yes thank you so much but were you were recording your your dialogue over while you were running the phone no it would have been it would have been impossible for me to to speak into a mic and give a perfect performance and at the same time manipulate the film okay so it was done to play back I recorded the narration and then we played it back and I performed the I manipulated the pieces of film in relation to the to the to the playback so it looks as if it's sync but it's not it looks as if it were shot in sync well but it's not really because it's done to playback so it's like it's like a music video in its way but that's a question is it narration or is it just is it off screen is it yeah am I a narrator or am I a character speaking from off screen um this is a series I've asked myself this question am I I lie awake at night am I the narrator or am I an off-screen character I mean if you were to pan over you would see me you would see me you never see a narrator when you have a narrated film the the narrator the narrator is not in the in the diegetic space but then that's interesting you bring up detour that moment where you don't even show anything from detour and yet you reference detour because that actually is doing a similar thing yeah yeah I know the whole the whole point I was so glad to find this little piece of this film by Almer because it gave me a chance to bring up this film by uh this other film by Almer called detour where there's this extraordinary thing that happens at the end of the film so yeah yeah so here's the naked Dawn oh and by the way this gives me a chance to talk about what happens at the end of detour which is a great film of course I hope I'm correct in making the assumption that you all have seen detour it's um and you've all seen um uh the honeymoon killers this is a great film it's a shame that there are people who don't know this film it's a great film Martin Scorsese was the first director but he was fired because he wasn't fast enough so he was it was other people finished it or you know made the film and got the credit it's it's a great film I was wondering I don't know if anybody in the audience has any questions too because if it's such a rich subject and I feel like you're now the world expert on this topic and you've thought about it in so many different ways and from so many different perspectives that I feel like Morgan and I just live here but you're a guest and you're like a rare a rare resource here so I just have a lot of expert uh status except that I've I guess I'm an expert at the questions that you would uncover looking for you know very simple questions actually like why is it called a China girl when it's um a white woman where does that name come from um so in that sense it's been pretty frustrating but I guess that allowed me to do some you know some more theoretical Maneuvers with the material um I actually wanted to follow up Morgan with the question to you which is like are you the same voice as the voice do you see your yourself or whatever you are in standard gauge is that the same Persona that appears in releasing human energies I'm curious to both of you for the answer to that question I don't think I could possibly answer that I'm I'm stumped I just I don't I don't know what to say okay maybe I don't understand Persona am I okay yeah The Voice I mean it's interesting because it's the not for standard gauge so your voice precedes the material you're recording the material to The Voice and then it flips in releasing human energies because there's the footage that pre-exists The Voice and then the I don't know if you recorded the voice watching the footage or how that came about but for my for my film yeah oh no I don't think I showed you the footage I think uh yeah I sh um we we sat in the little movie theater in the film archive where I work and I just had a I just had written up the text and you just gave it a few readings and I just recorded it it was pretty pretty Lo-Fi but um like I'm just imagining the camera drifting off frame and like are we gonna see Morgan there right you know like in like in the faroki would you see like all the technicians like constructing something well one thing I've always loved about standard gauge is how personal it is and how autobiographical it is and the way that it's really becomes this um semi-incidental autobiography that's told just through your reminiscences about these uh pieces of film and some of the reminiscences are extremely anecdotal and personal um and then some of them relate to film history outside of you and and I mean there's just so many layers to it for me I really really love it and I love that it the last um sequence is you're just saying here are some pieces of film I think are interesting to look at and you're inviting us to also find them interesting hopefully and it's like you're sharing a collection with us it's very intimate and so but for my film it's it's deliberately both impersonal but also uh the I think the narration although it has like I said Morgan has a wonderful Lucidity and Clarity to his his delivery it it has a warmth to it for me too and so but I mean in terms of it's it's like a similar Persona I don't think so because I mean when I see standard gauge I'm very aware of it like Morgan is telling us stories about these things and we're learning something about his life a bit I just hear in his narration in releasing human energies your narration a kind of ionizing effect so that text which is very sincere in its way does not come across as you know because it's being voiced by you and because we have standard gauge in our heads it comes across differently than just that you know the surface level understanding of what it means to manipulate your staff Mark you can always find another narrator redo it well it's true and Mike in your case yours needed to be narrated by you because you're really telling you know about your yourself and your experiences didn't have to be but it it makes sense on that level whereas mine it's the deliberately this kind of nearly Anonymous and personal text yeah so yeah and and anyone could be the narrator anyone yeah actually um I'm sure you know the film um Nostalgia by house Frampton and nostalgia uh consists of our being shown a series of still photographs one after the other although it's not one continuous shot they're separate shots but the framing is the same and we see is still photograph and then you'll hear a voice talking about the circumstances in which the photograph was taken and all the photographs were taken by Hollis Frampton and um so when he says so he speaks in the so the voice speaks in the first person saying get her I but the narrator but the voice is not belonged to Hollis Frampton the person who we understand is the eye that is that the text says instead it's Michael snow and I've never understood that I just have always been baffled by that we hear house Frampton in the very beginning oh okay because snow is like is this all right and you hear this like Gruff deep deep voicing from here um but I we're getting the signal also to to wrap up I do I think we've been getting it for a while one audience question anybody has a question oh wait over there yeah I can't really hear it sorry I don't think the microphones on or working and I I can't hear unfortunately yeah instruct you this particular particular prizing or something that you did oh everything was a surprise in time for this book yeah um that's what was interesting about this material I think um and they'll I mean the not just the China girl stuff but just you know like bubbled to the surface in various ways for me and took a long time to like really wrap my head around but all the other objects that I kind of gravitated toward in the book it's actually not so I don't know I feel some Affinity to standard gauge in this way because it was just like yes this is an assortment of things that I found interesting that like stuck with me that didn't make sense at first um that I needed to kind of rearrange and look at and find different ways of yeah approaching so um I guess that's the kind of I don't know like um programmer impulse in me or maybe even I'm not really an archivist I won't I won't say that at all but looking at you um but um I don't think I would write about things that didn't surprise me thanks there are a couple actually here can we do two more KJ yeah yeah who wants to go area [Laughter] oh yeah like a china marker you know like uh like uh which is preferred marking on China right that's why those are called that right like grease pencils editors used to use yeah making word printing oh ladies the lady and there was there was thought maybe there was some in the world which is all not filmed and that goes back really early in the industry too using some kind of Grease Grease marker grease pencil yeah huh yeah I I've never heard that term before so I would I would hunt that down yeah I mean definitely there was a again a retired lab person worker listserv and they were you know throwing out all kinds of speculative origin stories um but none none pointed to the instruments of like marking and um notating those kinds of that would be absolute used in those processes so but I would yeah maybe there's like a follow-up research project here thank you so much and there is some in here okay um no not on not on a set this is entirely a Laboratory um practice Yeah I mean I've seen footage of like the stand-in that has those standard reference colors um but that would appear differently that would be used differently um um actually I think I've seen China girl footage that are not trying to grow footage like footage of like famous actresses I think often so I guess not standards but like um running footage with like Romy Schneider or whoever um so that those kind of measurements could be made before actually like shooting a take but again that's different from this like purely the the thing about the China girl in the lab is it's entirely divorced from anything you're actually shooting whatever film you're making and that was this fascinating piece for me was why is there the sexualized image of a woman attached to whatever happens it's like um and one ways and one way completely separate from that and on the other hand it's physically Tethered to it it's it's like baked into the same film and I found that kind of that doubleness really interesting yeah like in um among other artists I work on Stan brockage's films and he made a lot of films and he worked almost exclusively with one laboratory in Colorado uh that used to be called Western cine and in Michelle Silva's film the very first film there were a few instances of the western City China girl who I recognized immediately because I looked at the brackish films and I see her all the time and I was told by the the guy that later came to own the lab that she had just been somebody that worked in the lab I don't know what she did in the lab but um yeah but it was this idea that I'm guessing that the demographic of the lab staff was probably largely male and so there was presumably this idea that well we have to get the lady that works here like in front of the camera for this purpose and but it's it's funny because in almost every brackish film at least going back a certain um like to the 60s even there's the same person and every single one of the leaders and so every one of the prints of any Stan brackish film for about 40 years like has this person in it and I mean the story I'd heard reference Hall sampton too is Apparently one brackish would show the films sometimes in public he would run out the leaders so you would actually see her on screen and Hollis Frampton supposedly asked him once like why do you show that you know at the end it's not really part of the film and apparently Brockett said to him oh do you mean the muse it's kind of a famous little China girl anecdote there he is yeah so should we leave with The Muse is that yeah I think that's a good way to frame her maybe right yeah