Linda Williams

Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism

Linda Williams
Patricia Mellencamp
Mary Ann Doane
1984

Volume 3 of American Film Institute monograph series, American Film Institute PublisherUniversity Publications of America, 1984.

Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film

Linda Williams
1981

Linda Williams examines the theoretical and poetic writings of the Surrealists during the period from 1910 to 1930 and traces the emergence of a poetics of the cinematic image based upon the fluid associations of dreams and the unconscious. Incorporating both Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and Metz's methodology on film and dream rhetoric, she analyzes the structure of unconscious desire in four key Surrealist films by Luis Buñuel: Un chien andalou and l'Âge d'or (both co-scripted by Salvador Dali) and ...

Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible”

Linda Williams
1989

In this unprecedented and brilliant study, Linda Williams moves beyond the impasse of anti-porn/anti-censorship position-taking to analyze what hard-core film pornography is and does—as a genre with a history, as a specific cinematic form, and as part of contemporary discourse on sexuality. Working against tendencies to oversimplify hard core—either as pure abusive power or pure liberatory pleasure—Williams sees the form as inherently contradictory. Hard core claims to speak confessional and involuntary "truths" of sex. However, analysis of its forms (including its spectacular "money...

Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film

Linda Williams
1994

The essays in this volume represent some of the best new thinking about the crucial relations between visual representation in film and human subjectivity. No amount of empirical research into the sociology of actual audiences will displace the desire to speculate about the effects of visual culture, and especially moving images, on viewing subjects. These notions of spectatorship, however hypothetical, become extremely compelling metaphors for the workings of vision within the institution of cinema. Viewing Positions examines the tradition of a centered,...

Re-inventing Film Studies

Linda Williams
Christine Gledhill
2000

This anthology of specially-commissioned essays introduces the film student to some of the central questions and debates that have concerned the development of film studies. Written by a team of noted scholars, the collection focuses on issues that confront us today, assessing the impact on the discipline of recent technological, cultural, and social developments; challenging received thinking, and reinventing film studies for the post-film era. In each of five thematic sections, early essays open up key problems, issues, and debates while a case study offers concrete examples of...

“Playing The Race Card:” Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson

Linda Williams
2002

The black man suffering at the hands of whites, the white woman sexually threatened by the black man. Both images have long been burned into the American conscience through popular entertainment, and today they exert a powerful and disturbing influence on Americans’ understanding of race. So argues Linda Williams in this boldly inquisitive book, where she probes the bitterly divisive racial sentiments aroused by such recent events as O. J. Simpson’s criminal trial. Williams, the author of Hard Core, explores how these images took root, beginning with melodramatic theater...

Porn Studies

Linda Williams
2004

In her pioneering book Hard Core, Linda Williams put moving-image pornography on the map of contemporary scholarship with her analysis of the most popular and enduring of all film and video genres. Now, fifteen years later, she showcases the next generation of critical thinking about pornography and signals new directions for study and teaching. Porn Studies resists the tendency to situate pornography as the outer limit of what can be studied and discussed. With revenues totaling between ten and fourteen billion dollars annually—more than the combined...

Screening Sex

Linda Williams
2008

For many years, kisses were the only sexual acts to be seen in mainstream American movies. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, American cinema “grew up” in response to the sexual revolution, and movie audiences came to expect more knowledge about what happened between the sheets. In Screening Sex, the renowned film scholar Linda Williams investigates how sex acts have been represented on screen for more than a century and, just as important, how we have watched and experienced those representations. Whether examining the arch artistry of Last Tango in Paris, the on-screen orgasms of Jane...