Leader ladies (also called china girls) are the photographs of (most often) women that sometimes appear in film countdown leader on prints of all gauges. Their images were used by film lab workers setting color timing or black and white density. Often appearing on exhibition prints but rarely seen on screen by an audience, images of leader ladies have long been collected by archivists, projectionists and film lab employees. The below links provide a more detailed history of leader ladies as well as various image galleries.
External Links
Technical Information
Collections and Projects
- Chicago Film Society Leader Lady Project, the largest publicly viewable collection of leader lady images
- Internet Archive collection of Leader Ladies in motion
- "Lost Leaders" a project about countdown leader
- The Moving Image Archive discusses various China Girl exhibitions and projects.
Videos
- Short film from the Harvard Film Archive featuring various leader ladies
- Short film made in 1975 by film lab staff at Colorfilm
- Short film by John Heyn
- The Electric Film Format Acid Test
- Essay and short film by artist An van Dienderen
Publications and online articles
- Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality by Genevieve Yue
- An Essay written for a Metrograph leader ladies-themed film program
- Atlas Obscura piece about China Girls
- Atlantic article on the history of models used in color television calibration.
- Racial bias in the history of color film
- Color Goes Electric
