The female form has been a fraught site of filmic meaning – of desire and violence, of sex and death – from the very beginnings of cinema. But how deep do these meanings travel? How are our understandings of gender and sexuality not the stuff of screen representation but shaped by film technology and culture as well?

Published in November 2020 by Fordham University Press, Genevieve Yue’s Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality, “in rich archival and technical detail… 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.”

In this discussion, Dr. Yue articulates her relationship to interdisciplinary research, traces her personal journey from dissertation to book, and argues for the centrality of material culture in feminist film studies.

Genevieve Yue is an assistant professor in the Department of Culture and Media and director of the Screen Studies program at Eugene Lang College, the New School. Her essays and criticism have been published in October, Grey Room, The Times Literary Supplement, Reverse Shot, Artforum.com, Film Comment, and Film Quarterly. She is also an independent film programmer and serves on the Board of Trustees for the Flaherty Film Seminar.

Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Literary Hub, Ms., and Camera Obscura.

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