If you're in the Boston area, and you haven't yet seen the excellent exhibit Girls on Film over at the Sert Gallery, hie yourself over to the Carpenter Center at Harvard before it closes on September 18. The cinetrix regrets only making it there once, because while it is physically a small exhibit, its resonance is more akin to a sonic boom.
Julie Buck of the HFA and Karin Segal deftly take on two of the biggies in the cinematic experience--spectatorship and visibility--in their gallery of 70 anonymous "China girls," culled from discarded leaders from various films.
But what or who are the China girls? Anonymous women of all races and nations, often secretaries or lab techs, who sat for color-timing test strips so that technicians in processing labs could maintain an even color balance or black-and-white density from one reel to the next. Other than that, these women were never meant to be seen by audiences. Now Buck and Segal give them their overdue moment in the spotlight.
Gerald Peary provides a little more history of the practice and the project in the Boston Phoenix:
What you're seeing is a 16mm or 35 mm color-timing strip that juxtaposes a color bar and a female visage. From 1928 to 1992, film laboratories around the globe used women's faces, ostensibly because of a woman's smooth skin, for color balance and tonal density. Digital technology made these tests obsolete.
Some of the images in the exhibit have been manipulated, and all have been digitally restored and color corrected before being cropped to a uniform size. The artists make these enigmatic women the stars they never were.
Here's what the exhibit program had to say:
Buck and Segal have rescued these women from the margins of industrial cinema, recasting them as movie stars with their own glossy publicity photographs. (The artist further demonstrate their solidarity with their subjects by including themselves in the series.)
If you can, try to make an evening of it this Friday, September 16, when a program of found footage experimental films unfurl downstairs from the Sert at the Harvard Film Archive.
The Harvard Film Archive will present a program of experimental films on September 16 at 9 p.m. to complement Girls on Film. Each of the films in the program represents a different artist's engagement with found footage. The program will include films by Boston-based filmmakers Abigail Child and Saul Levine, as well as work by Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, Owen Land, and Peter Tscherkassky.
Tickets:
$8 Regular Admission
$6 Students, Harvard Faculty and Staff, Senior Citizens
