Book Description
Publication Date: September 2, 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 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

Publisher: Duke University Press Books; 1St Edition edition (September 23, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0822342855
ISBN-13: 978-0822342854

Editorial Reviews

Review
“Screening Sex is a truly remarkable follow-up to Linda Williams’s groundbreaking book Hard Core. It reaffirms her place as the leading feminist scholar of the history and theory of on-screen sex. Not that it was ever in doubt.”— Jane Gaines, author of Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era


“Linda Williams is a terrific storyteller about sex, and, as she tracks the growth of her own cinematically mediated sexual consciousness, we go to the movies with her, imagining as though for the first time new encounters with explicitness, new sexual knowledge, and new spectatorial sensations.”—Lauren Berlant, author of The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture


“With Screening Sex, Linda Williams establishes herself as not only the preeminent scholar of cinematic eroticism, but also the most significant voice in cinema studies of her generation.”— Eric Schaefer, author of “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!” A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1958

Review

"There's an impressive amount of research here, and Williams casts a wide net to draw examples from mainstream fare such as Casablanca and The Graduate, controversial titles such as Last Tango in Paris and Blue Velvet, foreign art films, and varied selections within the hard-core sector. She provides a close, critical analysis of the plot, treatment, symbolism, and technical approach of individual films in terms of their sexual content, discussing these elements in relation to contemporary culture and offering thoughtful commentary about the various components of the audience experience. This is an informed and thoroughly frank study of an expansive array of sexual themes on film, with numerous explicit film stills and graphic narratives tightly woven into the scholarly text."

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Movie Sex Affects Real Life Sex
By R. Hardy HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER on November 3, 2009
In 1896, actor John Rice lifted and smoothed his extensive moustache and planted kisses on the mouth of actress May Irwin, and Thomas Alva Edison filmed it. The fifteen second _The Kiss_ was a bit of a scandal. "The idea of a kinetoscopic kiss has unlimited possibilities," gushed the _New York World_, which had used the film as a publicity stunt. It was supposed to depict part of a musical play that was then in New York, but the kiss was the only thing in the movie. In other words, the film was of a sex act purely for the sake of a sex act, a particularity with which those interested in films would become familiar over the next decades. The movie became the most popular of the projected short films of the time, although a literary magazine protested that a kiss so monstrously enlarged and shown repeatedly became "positively disgusting." No one had made such an objection about the original kiss in the musical play itself. The Kiss is the first film discussed in _Screening Sex_ (Duke University Press) by Linda Williams, who teaches film studies and who in 1989 wrote _Hard Core_, a book that took pornographic films seriously and showed there was no reason to avoid an academic study of pornography any more than any other field of human activity. In some ways, _Screening Sex_ continues the themes of the previous book, although the world of sexual activity on screens is far different from what it was twenty years ago. The book is serious (and completely referenced) but not solemn, and Williams tackles some dense theorizing with gusto and an appealing sense of humor that nicely fits her subject.

Kisses were the limit of movie sex, at least officially, for decades, but there is much Williams has to say about them. The best parts of her book are analyses of specific films.

Williams is, as always, brilliant
By Katherine B. Crawford on January 30, 2013
Anyone interested in the development of sexual expression on film needs to read this book. Williams lays out a compelling history of sexuality on film that ranges from Edison to Japanese art house to the internet