In the early twentieth century, the anthropological function of film was carried out on the mimetic dimension of the gesture. Everywhere, from South America to East Asia, intellectuals and theorists addressed the increasing importance of the movies for the transnational transformation of embodied attitudes for modernization, usually highlighting the female body, which became a framework whereby the history of the present could be outlined as desire. Film carried the gestures necessary for modernization. Focusing on the writings by the Japanese modernist Tanizaki Jun’ichiro and avant-gardist Murayama Tomoyoshi, this talk will look into some theories written in and around the 1920s, which conveyed a fascination and dissatisfaction with the medium of film, in order to think the racialized temporality of the female Asian body—a notion that included and excluded the Japanese body.