Linda Williams (film scholar)

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Linda Williams (born December 18, 1946 ) is an American film scholar .

Life

She obtained a Ph.D. in 1977. at the University of Colorado with the dissertation Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film ( Shaping Desire: Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film ). She is a professor in the Departments of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley . She is a pioneer in academic studies on pornography . Her main subjects are film history, film genres, melodrama, pornography, feminist theory and visual culture, all from the perspective of women, genders, races and sexuality.

position

Regarding film genres, she argues that horror film , melodrama, and pornography all fall into the "body genres " category, as they are each designed to elicit physical reactions from viewers. Horror is often said to induce creepy, high-tension fear (often through the representation of blood); Melodramas are supposed to arouse sympathy (often by “pressing the tear gland”); and pornography is said to induce sexual arousal (often through revealing, detailed close-ups).

Williams believes that the portrayal of pornography and the form that portrayal takes is based on the distance between the audience and the actual performers. She concludes from this that a lot in pornography is a kind of compensation for the distance between the viewer and the viewed.

Fonts

as an author
  • Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film , University of Illinois Press, 1981. Paperback edition: University of California Press, 1992, ISBN 0-520-07896-9
  • Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (University of California Press, 1989). Expanded Paperback Edition: Univ. of California Press, 1999, ISBN 0-520-21943-0 - Translation of the first edition: Hard Core. Power, lust and the traditions of pornographic film , Basel and Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld / Nexus, 1995
  • Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black & White from Uncle Tom to OJSimpson , Princeton University Press, Paperback edition, 2002, ISBN 0-691-10283-X
  • Screening Sex , Duke University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-8223-4285-4
as editor

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ fm.berkeley.edu
  2. ↑ Grant, Barry Keith. Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology . Wallflower Press: 2007.
  3. ↑ Linda Williams: Hard Core: Power, Please, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" . University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1989, ISBN 0-520-06652-9 , p. 78.
personal data
SURNAME Williams, Linda
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American film scholar
DATE OF BIRTH December 18, 1946