China Girls

I learned about the lore of China Girls four years later, when curators Julie Buck and Karin Segal rescued over fifty China Girl images from the heads of prints that the Harvard Film Archive had discarded. They made their first appearance to the general public in a small gallery above the HFA’s auditorium. A TV in the corner played a short film depicting the China Girl images that Buck and Segal had edited for the exhibit. Boston blogger the Cinetrix described the exhibit as “physically a small exhibit, (but) its resonance is more akin to a sonic boom.”

Standing in the center of this gallery brought me back to that day in the screening from. All the air conditioning in the world couldn’t keep my bare, sweaty legs from sticking to the plastic seats, and I felt incredibly boring as I sat cheek-by-jowl with these industry professionals, who could smell the naïveté coming off of me as though it were some foul pheromone. And then there was that near-subliminal blip of a woman’s face that got me to wondering, “who is she really?”

Even after learning—or having my suspicions confirmed—about the China Girls, the images still held tremendous interest for me. On a superficial level, I loved the way these very regular women looked in their kind-of-fancy everyday clothes and hair, and the way the mandarin-collared blouse looked like a new garment on each of the women who donned it. The symmetry and color and the care with which these shots were composed thrilled me on a purely aesthetic level. I had a strong response to the way the women appeared boxed in, with the color bars and medium grey card crowding them in the frame. It had the claustrophobic effect of a Joseph Cornell box, where all the beauty and attention to detail still overwhelmed the viewer.

Since the exhibit closed in Boston, China Girls have had a bit of a moment among filmmakers and cineastes. Buck and Segal have shown the exhibit at other galleries across the US. As its popularity has spread, they have come into contact with several former China Girls, and are rumored to be making a documentary about this piece of cinema history. Short films from the pre-Internet era, such as John Heyn’s “Girls On Film” video for the Passions’ “I’m in Love with a German Film Star,” have become available for viewing with a few keystrokes. Poet Kevin Young alluded to a winking “screen test lady” in his poem Boogie Woogie. Iconic director Quentin Tarantino gave the girls a curtain call in the closing credits to his feature Death Proof, which featured several original and recreated China Girl images cut to the jaunty, sinister pop song “Chick Habit.”

My own fascination with this bit of cinema obsolescence has been re-rooted. After taking a job in a clip licensing archive, I have started working on my own short film featuring China Girls. I wish I could say it had some highfalutin’ thesis behind it. My appreciation for the mid-century aesthetic—black-and-white tiled soda fountains, Eames furniture, Joan Holloway’s wardrobe on Mad Men, and the like—desire to make a found-footage film, and curiosity about women’s lives in the pre-feminist eras has primed my appreciation of China Girls, and I’m looking forward to working from my love of these images.

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