Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible", Expanded edition - Softcover

Williams, Linda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520219430 ISBN 13: 9780520219434

Publisher: University of California Press, 1999

Synopsis

In this now-classic study, Linda Williams moves beyond the impasse of the anti-porn/anti-censorship debate to analyze what hard-core film pornography is and does—as a genre with a history, as a specific cinematic form, and as part of contemporary discourse on sexuality. For the 1999 edition, Williams has written a new preface and a new epilogue, "On/scenities," illustrated with 25 photographs. She has also added a supplementary bibliography.

About this title

About the Author:

Linda Williams is Professor of Film Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film (California, 1981) and editor of Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (1995).

From Publishers Weekly:

In academic prose, film professor Williams of the University of California offers a graphic analysis of hard-core porno movies such as Deep Throat , as well as early, anonymous stag flicks. She finds that the newer, "softer" X-rated rental videos "show a more genuinely adult quality" than earlier videos. She ponders the "utopian problem-solving intent" of the hard-core genre and makes specious comparisons between blue movies, Hollywood musicals and films like Dirty Dancing . Sadomasochistic porn films, she claims, let viewers experience "a clearer confrontation with the oscillating poles of our gendered identities and the role of power in them." A critic whose professed goal is to understand film pornography, and who opposes those who would censor it, Williams begins this obfuscating study by analyzing the portrayal of women in the 19th-century kinetoscope, prototype of the motion-picture projector.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0520219430
• ISBN 13: 9780520219434
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 380