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
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caught up in the new viewing machine’s ability to deliver increments of knowledge about moving bodies that, not accidentally, happen to be in the form of the cinema’s first sex act. The title of this long news feature is “The Anatomy of a Kiss,” and the opportunity for an anatomization of the forty-two-foot sequence seems to have been paramount. As Musser notes, the kiss may or may not have been the actual highlight of the play (the final act in which it occurred has not been found), but when
(Warhol himself was rarely in the room when his films were shot.) By slowing down, by skipping the beginning and the ends, by taking Edison’s original fixed close-up and just holding it there, Warhol bypasses all the coy business—dialogue, twirling mustaches, telephones, cigarettes—used to motivate the oral relation. Instead he lingers on the perverse essence of the kiss’s orality, the fixation on mucous membranes designed for digestion, showing neither beginning nor ending. Yet despite all the
violence, always faked in fiction film, sex bifurcated into two radically different forms: hard core (explicit, unsimulated) and soft core (simulated, faked). Not until the early seventies would hard-core sexual displays become familiar viewing to large numbers of Americans, male and female alike. Another way of looking at this difference between the status of sex and the status of violence is to say that a certain spectacle of violence revealing the aggression to or penetration of one body by
sex people actually had, there was, as the sociologists Kristin Luker and Anthony Giddens and the historians John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman have all argued, a loose agreement that sexual intimacy was a private matter, best relegated to the marriage bed.5 However, this secluded arena soon began to undergo change partly due to the new ease of birth control by women. Though we cannot attribute the sexual revolu introduction tion to anything as simple as the new technology of the “pill,”
deli watches in amazement and appreciation. After Sally has resumed her sandwich, an older woman voices the punch line to a waiter: “I’ll have what she’s having.” Never mind that Sally is a repressed obsessive whose character would never do such a theatrical thing in a deli; the scene clinched the film’s reputation as a classic romantic comedy in the post–sexual revolution era. Most of all, it clinched the by now wellknown fact, here delivered in the mode of comedy, that women can often fake