Role:
In Memoriam
Linda Williams, Professor of Film & Media and Rhetoric
December 18, 1946 – March 12, 2025
The faculty, students, alumni, and staff of the Departments of Rhetoric and Film & Media mourn the passing of our brilliant colleague, mentor, and friend, Linda Williams. Williams was a groundbreaking film scholar whose research helped establish and shape the fields of feminist film theory, pornography studies, documentary studies, and melodrama studies. Williams graduated with a B.A. from UC Berkeley’s Department of Comparative Literature in 1969 and went on to earn her PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder (1977). Before her appointment as a Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and the Film Studies Program (now the Department of Film & Media) in 1997, Williams taught at the University of Illinois, Chicago (1977-1989) and the University of California, Irvine (1989 – 1997), where she played a central role in establishing the Program in (later Department of) Women’s Studies. She authored five books—Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film (1981), Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (1989), Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (2002), Screening Sex (2008), and On the Wire (2014), along with several edited volumes and numerous articles on horror, body genres, melodrama, documentary, spectatorship, and surrealist film. Williams researched and partially wrote her most recent book project, Melodrama as Provocateur, while she was on fellowship at the Institut d’études avancées de Paris (2019-2020). Edited by Christine Gledhill, Laura Horak, and Elisabeth Anker, this work-in-progress will be published by Duke University Press as a volume that includes essay responses by scholars in the field.
Williams’ contributions to her fields were recognized with numerous awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Academy of Motion Pictures (2021), and the Distinguished Career Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (2013; see a link to her acceptance speech below). From SCMS, she was also the two-time winner of the Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Prize (1989, 2012). In 2011, she presented the prestigious Berkeley Faculty Research Lecture. Beyond these formal recognitions of the influence and brilliance of her research, Linda Williams was a famously talented, dedicated, and generous instructor and mentor. During her time at Berkeley, she supervised or served on the committees of more than eighty PhD dissertations, and her mentoring of so many students who went on to have successful careers in universities around the world shaped the direction of the discipline of film studies (and beyond) in a lasting manner. Expecting the highest quality work from her students, Williams supervised dozens of dissertations that would subsequently become influential books; and she helped many of her students achieve their first academic publications in her anthologies, as well as by hosting the Visual Cultures Writing Group at her home in Berkeley for many years, where she gave famously forthright advice, always as honest and practicable as it was encouraging of intellectual fearlessness and ambition.
Williams’ seminars were marked by a quality that is also a feature of her writing – an ability to generate a clear discourse that honors the complexity of abstract texts and ideas while cutting to the heart of their significance. Never seeking to reproduce her own approaches or concerns in her students, she trained them instead to sit patiently with difficulty, to pursue the questions that emerge at the limits of comprehension, to approach received assumptions with curiosity—e.g., why is it that some genres of media are assumed to warrant no attention?—and to write in a clear and humble way, seeking to draw as many readers as possible into the journey of thought writing entails. Her brilliant pedagogy at UC Berkeley was recognized with the campus’s highest honors: the Distinguished Teaching Award (2004) and the Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award (2014). Beyond her wider influence, Williams was the heart of the Film & Media and Rhetoric departments for many years, and she and her husband, Paul Fitzgerald (whom she married in 1968) generously opened their home to faculty, students, and alums, fostering a dynamic intellectual community that was singular in its commitment to collegiality, curiosity, and the sheer pleasure of rigorous, scholarly engagement with moving image culture.
Born in San Francisco and raised in the East Bay, Williams planned to attend community college before winning a scholarship to UC Berkeley. Her father was a traveling salesman, and after he fell ill, her mother worked as a nurse at Kaiser Hospital in Walnut Creek to support the family. Swept up in 1960s campus anti-war activism, Williams was a star witness for the defense in the 1967 Oakland 7 Conspiracy Trial, following a week of “Stop the Draft” protests. Earlier that year, on a junior year abroad in Algeria, Williams appeared as an extra in Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Camus’s The Stranger (1967)—on a raft towards which Marcello Mastroianni and Anna Karina swim early in the film. This appearance condensed her lifelong interest in both film and swimming, which led, among other things, to her arrest for skinny dipping in Boulder Reservoir during grad school, and much later, to multiple victories in her age category in open water swim races after her retirement. Linda’s husband, Paul, taught high school social science for forty years. Their son, Quinn, was born in 1983 and is currently the director of the World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA). Williams loved Berkeley, and when she was not lecturing in Dwinelle Hall, she could often be found at the Pacific Film Archive or at Golden Bear Pool or riding her bicycle down (and up) the hill on Bancroft Avenue.
Williams’ research ranged across moving image culture, from proto-cinematic visual culture and early cinema (for example in a riveting essay on Muybridge, “Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the ‘Carnal Density of Vision’”) to contemporary long-form television (On the Wire). On a Fulbright Fellowship in 1975-6, Williams studied with the renowned film theorist, Christian Metz, and her research would be marked throughout her career by an ability to bring a plain spoken approach to the abstractions of French theory, engaging theoretical questions from a more workaday perspective, focusing on gender, genre, and popular culture. As for many of her fellow pioneers in the emerging field of film studies, her early work was shaped by an aesthetic preference for the “highbrow,” which led to her first book on Surrealist cinema. As her intellectual inquiry into film proceeded, she came to seek to understand the “ordinary bedrock of American culture,” a bedrock that lay at the heart of the mainstream and the popular. In her speech on the occasion of receiving the SCMS Distinguished Career Award, Williams offered younger researchers the advice: “Find the thing you most take for granted and then question it.” Indeed, for Williams, each project left unresolved a question that then provided the impetus for another project — from Surrealism to pornography (Hard Core), to racial melodrama (Playing the Race Card), to sexuality as a powerfully shaping force in the history of cinema in general (Screening Sex), to the topic she had long neglected, television (On the Wire). As film scholar B. Ruby Rich observed, Williams was “fearless in following her inquiries wherever they would lead.”
Her final, unfinished, project on melodrama sought to create a larger historical frame for the mode she associated with that “ordinary bedrock of American culture.” Far beyond the so-called “women’s film” as a specific genre of midcentury cinema, Williams came to see melodrama as a mode that drove not only the development of many aspects of cinematic narrative in general, but larger currents of social and political rhetoric in the wake of the French and American Revolutions. In her earlier book, Playing the Race Card (2002), Williams drew on Peter Brooks’ work to identify key features of melodrama: moral polarization (the ”logic of the excluded middle”); characters embodying primary psychic categories (good and evil); the externalization of moral conflict; virtue that is connoted by the suffering of innocent victims; and action that is infused with pathos. Williams showed how melodramatic tropes shape public understandings of race in American culture, and how race itself functions as a “mute melodramatic sign.” In her final project, Melodrama as Provocateur, Williams returns to her career-long interest in French literature and cinema in order to offer a groundbreaking comparative study of the emergence of theatrical melodrama in France and the United States in the 19th century. Among its other important contributions, this book develops Williams’s argument, sketched out across a number of texts, that the supposed emotional and aesthetic “excess” of melodrama is in fact American cinema’s norm — and central to American culture all the way up to the political rhetoric that has enabled the current Presidency. For Williams, melodrama emerged in modernity as the dominant cultural mode of storytelling, characterized by a “dialectic of pathos and action” that stretches from blockbusters like Titanic and superhero narratives to news reporting and serialized storytelling.
Beginning with the aforementioned book on Surrealism, Figures of Desire (a title that foreshadowed her whole oeuvre), Williams’s work famously paid attention to how cinematic forms, organized in systems of aesthetic conventions (genres), not only communicate meanings but work on the body to produce responses—such as shock. The famous shot of an eye being sliced open in Dali and Buñuel’s Un chien andalou, of which Williams gives a striking account in that book, provokes a visceral response in the viewer: perhaps prompting her to flinch, avert her eyes, or generate a feeling of revulsion and/or fascination. These aren’t simply mechanistic reactions, but bodily and affective responses mediated through unconscious structures of fantasy. Indeed, for Williams, the physiological responses bound up in spectatorial mimesis are not transparent or automatic, nor outside of signification; the sensations of cinema are fundamentally mediated by the psyche, at once ideal and material.
Williams would develop this idea in her subsequent work on “body genres,” films that take hold of the spectator at the level of sensation, provoking fear, tears, or arousal (horror, melodrama, and pornography, respectively), in ways that express different structures of fantasy. In the “Film Bodies” essay (1991), Williams develops her idea about body genres through Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis’s (1968) analyses of Sigmund Freud’s three “original fantasies”, which Williams cleverly connects with popular cinema genres: the fantasy of seduction (pornography), of castration (horror), and of the subject’s origin (melodrama). These fantasies, according to Laplanche and Pontalis, inform the questions that subjectivity generates: How did I get here? Why do I suffer? What do I desire? The brilliance of Williams’s reading is to show how these fantasies—indeed, fantasy as such—are not only psychic but also generic, and therefore both textually and technologically mediated. Cinema as a specifically modern technology that aims at producing a knowledge of the body’s secrets is bound up in these structures of fantasy registered by body genres. Williams’s work in this essay and elsewhere conjoins insights about affect (anticipating affect theory) with a rigorous study of fantasy (the psychic life of desire), apparatus (archaeologies of audiovisual technologies, histories of vision), and politics (sexuality as normative dispositif in the Foucauldian sense, the disciplinary production and management of gender).
In her most provocative, and arguably most influential work—the 1989 classic, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’— Williams produced the first major academic study of audiovisual pornography as genre. Even in the title, Williams’ appetite for intellectual provocation was on view in the deployment of a term of high film theory (from French theorist Jean-Louis Comolli) alongside a reference to the lowest of genres, one so pervasive and seemingly devoid of artistic merit as to have been politely overlooked, or actively repressed, by the still-emergent field of film studies. As Williams has explained, the writing of Hard Core took place in the context of what she describes as “a vehement antipornography feminist stance [in the late 1970s and ‘80s] that viewed the genre’s explicit sexual representations as the quintessential example of the male objectification of [women]” (“Pornography, porno, porn: thoughts on a weedy field,” Porn Studies 1, 2014,33). Rather than a polemic, Williams set out to better understand this genre that Stanley Cavell described, in his 1979 book The World Viewed, as embodying cinema’s “ontological” horizon. Cavell’s claim that the “ontological conditions [of cinema] reveal it as inherently pornographic” opens up a dimension of thought that his own book does not pursue. Williams unfolded this thought by arguing that at cinema’s origins lies a dual impetus, a drive to see and through seeing, to produce knowledge; and an eroticism that inheres in the capture of the body by recording technologies, its transformation into image and narrative agent.
To take pornography seriously as a genre required that Williams not simply accept as given that pornography is a genre that oppresses women, an idea most famously elaborated in the work of Catharine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Instead of directly confronting this position, Williams characteristically begins with questions shaped by a curiosity about the historical function of pornography as a genre with a wide range of variations bearing on location, mode of production, audience, and medium—a genre that evinces, like all aesthetic forms, some aspect of unaccountability or creative autonomy. To maintain, as MacKinnon did, that “pornography is sex,” and that it reflects in a coherent and relentless way the social production of gender as hierarchy, is to minimize the significance of the historical and generic variations in pornographic media, and thus to negate the fact that pornography is, precisely, also and always a text—not the real but its mediation. Genres, Williams writes elsewhere, are a “cultural form of problem solving” (1991, 9). Rather than simply exemplifying a closed system (of “sex,”) they respond to something insoluble within any apparently closed system. As Williams wrote in “Film Bodies,” genres “thrive… on the persistence of the problems they address; but genres also thrive in their ability to recast the nature of these problems” (12).
To approach pornography as a genre is thus to approach it as a problem and an attempt to solve a problem: perhaps a problem within sex, the problem of sex (Bataille, in Erotism: “In that he is an erotic animal, man is a problem for himself”). More specifically, Williams approached pornography as an attempt to try to empirically map something ultimately ineffable, which takes the narrative form in mainstream pornography of the mystery of women’s pleasure. The formalization of sexual difference within pornography may be one registration of this problem of/within sex—but rather than reifying sex, its generic expressions may turn out to be revealing of the multiple and frequently contradictory fantasies that subtend the social organization of gender.
Rather than simply castigate or celebrate pornography for this reason, in Hard Core, Williams adapted Foucault’s (1978) history of sexuality in its opposition between an esoteric and exotic ars erotica and a modern scientia sexualis, the latter an empirical framework for producing knowledge about sex that—in Williams’ development—draws on the capacity of audiovisual technologies to document the body and seek the “confession” of its pleasure. In one of William’s most famous analyses—subsequently revisited by other scholars from queer, trans, and racial angles—the so-called “money shot,” however, which at first seems to capture this “confession,” reveals itself to be a complex semiotic entity, standing in for a female pleasure that it also replaces. Like irony as an element of speech, the money shot refers to something it negates (the absent “confession” of female pleasure)—and thus contains this negativity within its ostensibly empirical system of reference. By extension, if a seemingly speechless or flat figure such as an ejaculating penis can be shown to nestle complex layers of signification—including in the linguistic metaphor, “money shot”—this is because human fantasy is bound up in the complexities of signification (beginning with what Laplanche calls an “enigmatic signifier”). While pornography as a genre seeks, in Williams’ account, evidence of the body’s “involuntary confession” of pleasure — an attempt to document the ground zero of cause and effect — it cannot help but find and produce the machinery of signification it aims to escape, which is also to say, its empirical drive is inextricable from the textual and narrative forms, thoroughly historical, of fantasy.
This brief account of Hard Core indicates the complexity—and hopefully evokes the intellectual rigor—of one of Williams’ influential arguments about different body genres, which, while seeming at first to name marginal and minor genres, turn out to lie at the very foundation of cinema as a cultural form. And cinema, in turn, crystallizes and advances larger currents of culture, whose pre- and post-cinematic reach Williams’ final project on theatrical melodrama more fully unfolds. While Williams’s claims were consistently bold, daring to question taken-for-granted and hitherto unquestioned assumptions about the value of different objects of study and their cultural role, her method was extraordinarily humble. Her work was both complex and plainspoken; to the end, it evinced a total abhorrence of pretension. Williams recounts how she never considered herself (nor was considered by her teachers) to be “smart”; instead, with typical humility, she attributed her professional success to a “certain tenacity about the things that I could not understand, things that provoked me in some way.” Thus, in her reflective speech about her own career, she presents the many insights that populate her oeuvre not as evidence of success but, on the contrary, as driven by a “fortuitous failure to understand that provoked more work to try to understand at least some things a little better.” In that attempt to understand without expecting to arrive at any destination, Williams brought many thousands of readers along with her, opening up vistas of thought that continue to energize conversations on film and media, and the genres and fantasies that shape our cultural, affective, sexual, psychic, and political worlds. Linda Williams and Paul Fitzgerald donated Williams’s papers to the Pembroke Center at Brown University.
More locally, at Berkeley, in Rhetoric and Film & Media, Linda Williams was the glue that held us together for so many years, and we will remember her—and miss her terribly—every day.
*Thank you to Kristen Whissel and Damon Young for this lovely remembrance of Linda and her work*
Links:
Obituary in the New York Times
Read a tribute to Williams’ field-defining work in the 10th anniversary issue of the journal Porn Studies by former and current students and other colleagues
Linda Williams’ acceptance speech, SCMS Distinguished Career Award (2013)
Books
