Medusan optics: film, feminism, and the forbidden image

This dissertation uses the Greek mythological figure of Medusa, the snake-haired gorgon who possesses the power of turning anyone who looks upon her into stone, as a theoretical lens for probing issues of power, gender and sexuality, visuality, and movement in the cinema. Following Siegfried Kracauer’s medusan model for understanding the spatial and visual organization of film, I argue that “medusan optics,” which comprise instances of prohibited or perilous looking with the violence enacted on female bodies, are intrinsically and insistently cinematic. Medusan optics describe not only the fear and fascination that accompany images of women in cinema, but also the selective exclusions that invisibly structure relations of gender, desire, and power in cinematic representation, and, in doing so, the gendered politics of representation as such. ❧ I examine various configurations of medusan optics through a series of case studies informed by feminist theory, psychoanalysis, classical film theory, and art historical discourse. These include the “China girl” test images critical to industrial film laboratory processes of calibrating density and color, though these anonymous women are rarely glimpsed onscreen; scenes of beheading and dismemberment and the rhetoric of trick cinematography in early cinema; the iconography of hair and its relation to media in contemporary Asian horror cinema; and, in the last chapter, the limits of metaphor and of aesthetic distance that occur when confronted with the image and the materiality of the incised female body as portrayed in Surrealist art and experimental film. I conclude by asserting that, even in the midst of images of destruction and horror, medusan optics bear the potential for iconopoesis, the creation of new images, and specifically the recuperation of figures that have been excluded from cinema’s gendered structure of representation.