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
Fonda, or the anal sex of two cowboys in Brokeback Mountain,
Williams illuminates the forms of pleasure and vicarious knowledge
derived from screening sex.
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
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