China Girls

I blame David Bowie for my current problems. Maybe I'm just lazy too, because contrary to my recent experience, the Internet is much more than just porn and song lyrics, right? So I've been thinking the past couple of days about the film "Grindhouse," especially since reports have suggested the Harvey Weinstein is thinking of re-releasing each film separately, as he will do both in Europe and on DVD. While I could easily fill an entire entry about that idiotic decision, instead I'll focus on something a little smaller and apparently, a little more obscure.

If you're like me and sat through the end credits of "Grindhouse," you'll probably remember the weird images that flashed on screen as the credits rolled. They were always stationary pictures of women accompanied by color bars, like these (all borrowed from an exhibit by artist Julie Buck):

Because many of the early ones featured Asian women, they were given the nickname "China Girls" (or so I've heard, although that origin is still disputed). These girls would allow projectionists to adjust the color settings if necessary by matching the tones on these pictures so when the film ran, the actors didn't appear to be purple or gray or orange or any other odd color. The thing I find most curious about these girls is to a select group of people, they were amazingly common, but even many film scholars have never heard of them, probably because they weren't part of the filmmaking process, only the distribution and exhibition. That's perhaps why I had such a hard time tracking down any reference to these women. If you type "china girls" into Google, it'll spit back lyrics for a David Bowie song, and if you try an image search, you'll get a lot of box covers for Asian porn. Seriously, the only reference I found to these women was an exhibit by Julie Buck at the Harvard University Art Museum, which featured all of the above photos (which can all be found here on Julie's Web site. Even searches on pages of film terms came up empty. I guess China Girls have become just one of those things lost to obscurity...unless you go sit through the end credits of "Grindhouse," of course. The one positive out of the obscurity, though, is that you can go into a screening confident that you'll be the only person who knows what the hell is going on during the credits. It's not funny or flashy or full of Ben Stiller shaking his giant manboobs to Kelis's "Milkshake"; it's just one more of those weird touches that prove that Quentin Tarantino knows more strange bits of film trivia than anyone else in Hollywood today (or at the very least, the only one that feels the urge to broadcast it every chance he gets).

Speaking of the "Grindhouse" end credits, enjoy this youtube video of the song playing over all those China Girl pictures, April March's "Chick Habit."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0fDnZEacmA (embedded file coming later)