They ought ve been in pictures: Forgotten women of film exposed
05.03.2010, 12:00
Female pinups are as old as the world of art.
Even the outwardly repressed Victorians considered photography a grand new invention with which to capture women’s images for private consumption.
Wellness hétvége akciók
And from pulp-fiction covers to Playboy’s glossy centerfolds, the pinup is alive and well today.
A relatively obscure genre of pinup girls is exposed in an exhibit at the Columbus College of Art & Design. ‘‘Girls on Film" collects images retrieved and archived from leaders, the protective film at the beginning and end of a celluloid spool.
The attractive women were called ‘‘China Girls" for reasons not entirely clear.
They were fully dressed but photographed in cheesecake poses and juxtaposed with a color-control strip to be used as a guide in film laboratories. Digital technology has made the test obsolete.
Because most movie projectionists and lab technicians were male, the images remained part of a private domain until Julie Buck, a conservator with Harvard’s Film Archive, decided to put them under public gaze. She was assisted by fellow conservator Karin Segal in salvaging the stills and using computer programs to retouch them to their former glory.
Columbus is the third city, after New York and Boston, to be privy to the pictures. The exhibit is set up as a single row of consecutive images, resembling a film strip.
The anonymous subjects of the photos, mostly secretaries and lab technicians, might have been called ‘‘China Girls" along racist lines; in some photos, their hair is pulled straight back to make them look Asian.
The mystery of their identities adds an aura of sadness: Were they hoping to become stars but relegated instead to a private world of voyeurism?
The exhibit, one of the more unusual this year, posits notions about women and their objectification in Hollywood.
In our post-feminist era, as we watch these women stare directly at us, are we simply observing something historical, or are we complicitous in their objectification as well?