Screening Sex (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
Linda Williams
Language: English
Pages: 424
ISBN: 0822342855
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Combining stories of her own coming of age as a moviegoer with film history, cultural history, and readings of significant films, Williams presents a fascinating history of the on-screen kiss, a look at the shift from adolescent kisses to more grown-up displays of sex, and a comparison of the “tasteful” Hollywood sexual interlude with sexuality as represented in sexploitation, Blaxploitation, and avant-garde films. She considers Last Tango in Paris and Deep Throat, two 1972 films unapologetically all about sex; In the Realm of the Senses, the only work of 1970s international cinema that combined hard-core sex with erotic art; and the sexual provocations of the mainstream movies Blue Velvet and Brokeback Mountain. She describes art films since the 1990s, in which the sex is aggressive, loveless, or alienated. Finally, Williams reflects on the experience of screening sex on small screens at home rather than on large screens in public. By understanding screening sex as both revelation and concealment, Williams has written the definitive study of sex at the movies.
Linda Williams is Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Porn Studies, also published by Duke University Press; Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson; Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film; and Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible.”
A John Hope Franklin Center Book
November
424 pages
129 illustrations
6x9 trim size
ISBN 0-8223-0-8223-4285-5
paper, $24.95
ISBN 0-8223-0-8223-4263-4
library cloth edition, $89.95
ISBN 978-0-8223-4285-4
paper, $24.95
ISBN 978-0-8223-4263-2
library cloth edition, $89.95
Liverpool (World Film Locations)
Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor
Sound-on-Film: Interviews with Creators of Film Sound
Claude Chabrol (French Film Directors)
RKO Radio Pictures: A Titan Is Born
film before the late sixties is usually bathed in a glow of “romantic” light. The conventional Hollywood three-point lighting scheme of key (usually slightly from above), fill (a light that evens out shadows), and back (the “halo” effect that comes from behind the head) is the basic formula that creates this glow, but especially on the (white) woman, who is almost universally more luminous than anyone else on the screen. The whiter she looks, the purer she seems, even though her presence in the
represented the convergence of a number of technological, cultural, and economic factors that were making the screening of graphic sex almost necessary to sexual citizenship in the early 1970s. As Gerard Damiano, speaking from his Florida retirement in the documentary Inside Deep Throat (dir. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, 2005), says: “You had to be there. I’m thrilled that I was there. And I thank God I had a camera.” Deep Throat thus differed from the old tradition of the silent, men-only
do not lend themselves to easy visibility. And so, cunnilingus, while certainly part of the repertoire of “diff ’rent strokes” cultivated and legitimated by Deep Throat, is never offered as the climactic scratch, the discharge of end pleasure, despite the fact that the narrative conceit of the film is quite precisely Linda’s quest for clitoral orgasm. The long history of the elisions, and occasional resightings, of the clitoris in medical and pornographic representation offers a fascinating
music to underscore many scenes. Vincent Canby called the film “soggy with sound”—“a nonstop collection of yesterday’s song hits.”54 Pauline Kael agreed, arguing that Ashby “has filled in the dead spaces by throwing a blanket of rock songs over everything.”55 David James, writing in the early nineties, has make love, not war 177 nevertheless made an important case for the film’s use of rock and roll, pointing out that while there have been many American films about the devastation of American
transgression does not defeat, but only suspends, taboo. The truly successful erotic transgression is one that maintains the emotional force of the prohibition. As yet another theorist inherently skeptical of the liberatory claims of sexual revolution, Bataille’s introduction of the relation between fear and desire will prove invaluable to those films discussed in the later part of the book which are determined to probe the relations between sex and death. Embodied Screening and Mimetic Play In
