Director of Film Studies Linda Williams sku-10080562

Screening Sex, listed under Performing Arts Books as sku-10080562 with the brand Director of Film Studies Linda Williams, examines how sex acts have appeared in American and international film and how audiences have watched them. Williams traces a shift from kisses to more explicit scenes during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

She draws on her experience as a moviegoer, film and cultural history, and readings of films to discuss the on-screen kiss, Hollywood sexual interludes, sexploitation, Blaxploitation and avant-garde film. Her examples include Jane Fonda's on-screen orgasms, the cowboys in Brokeback Mountain, and Last Tango in Paris and Deep Throat, both from 1972.

She also discusses In the Realm of the Senses, which combines hard-core sex and erotic art, the provocations of Blue Velvet and Brokeback Mountain, and art films since the 1990s that depict aggressive, loveless or alienated sex.

The book considers what changes when viewers watch on small screens at home instead of large screens in public, and treats screening sex as both revelation and concealment. Linda Williams is Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her other books include Porn Studies, 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.” This is a John Hope Franklin Center Book. The listing says November, 424 pages, 129 illustrations and a 6x9 trim size.

It lists ISBN 0-8223-0-8223-4285-5 for paper at $24.95, ISBN 0-8223-0-8223-4263-4 for library cloth at $89.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-4285-4 for paper at $24.95, and ISBN 978-0-8223-4263-2 for library cloth at $89.95.