2025 (in post)
digitized 16mm colour, sound, 15’47”
‘China Girl’ was a term that was used since the 1920s to describe models who held colour swatches for film laboratories to test and control the exposure and colour balance of the film reels. The role they played were integral to the film production process and were used in every commercially produced film shot on celluloid film all over the world. They were “almost always female, young, conventionally attractive, and, despite the racial connotations of the name, white,” with their white skin used to ‘balance’ the skin tone of the entire film. The origin of its name is rooted in orientalist stereotypes; that they appeared as porcelain mannequins, the colourful dresses they wore, the submissive behaviour of the models, and the makeup and hairstyles of models.
This experimental film depicts a fictional China Girl breaking out of the orientalist, patriarchal gaze of film as she examines the role she has played in the history of this medium; a meta exploration of visbility, narrative, racial capitalism and film materiality. This project draws from research within the Austrian Film Museum, studying orientalist and gendered representations within the history of Western cinema, as well as personal meditations on marginalisation and experiences of creating within the genre of experimental film.