Linda Williams,
Screening Sex.
A John Hope Franklin Book,
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4285-4
US$25.00 (pb)
412pp
(Review copy supplied by Duke University Press)

Linda Williams is Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. She is known for her breakthrough 1989 book, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (University of California Press, 1999). She is the founding mother of academic “porn studies”. In her new work, Screening Sex, the reader is taken on a “magical mystery tour,” of the history of sex in the cinema. From the first filmed kiss by Thomas Edison in 1896, to an analysis of sex and cyber space, Williams leads us through the multiple landscapes of cinema erotica and hard core sex.

Williams tells us that the book “began as an amateur movie.” She goes on to explain that, “in the 1990’s, I bought a video camera and amused myself by asking friends and colleagues – mostly people who knew and cared about film – to tell me about the most erotic moments they had encountered at the movies” (p. 1X). Williams never finishes the video project but it inspires her to ask herself the same question that she posed to her informants. She goes on to explain, “… I could think of no more important question to ask than how and when movies had first turned us on” (p. 1X). Out of this, Williams points out that, “the book is my more scholarly and systematic, though no less personal and idiosyncratic answer.”

The book is written in seven chapters which include “Of Kisses and Ellipses: The Long Adolescence of American Movies (1896-1963);” “Going All The Way: Carnal Knowledge on American Screens (1961-1971);” “Going Further: The Last Tango in Paris, Deep Throat, and Boys in the Sand (1971-1972);” “Make Love Not War: Jane Fonda Comes Home (1968-1978);” “Hard Core Eroticism: In The Realm of the Senses (1976);” Primal Scenes on American Screens ( 1986-2005);” and “Philosophy in the Bedroom: Hard-Core Art Film Since the 1990’s.” In these chapters, she discusses a variety of films from those already mentioned in the chapter headings to such films as Casablanca (USA 1942), Warhol’s Blue Movie (USA 1969), Barbarella (France/Italy 1968), Midnight Cowboy (USA 1969), Brokeback Mountain (USA 2005), Matador (Spain 1986) and several independent films. She discusses the work of filmmakers Catherine Breillat and Patrice Chéreau. She interweaves the ideas of Freud and Walter Benjamin with post modernist theorists Bataille, Baudrillard, Foucault, and Leo Bersani with the writings of film theorist Andre Bazin.

In her Introduction, she states that, “this book is about the basic paradox of movies; on one hand, we screen moving images to lose ourselves vicariously in the bigger more glamorous, more vivid world we see and hear on the screen; on the other hand, we screen moving images to reencounter our own immediate sensuality in that more vivid world” (p. 1). She further explains that the book is concerned with, “the dialectic between revelation and concealment that operates at any given moment in the history of moving- image sex” (p. 7). The book is also concerned with the “line between public and private,” which is, “constantly being renegotiated, within the context of ‘cine-sex” (p. 11).

Williams, in her concluding comments, states that, “after more than a century of screening sex, perhaps the most important lesson I would like to draw… … is that the very act of screening has become an intimate part of our sexuality” (p. 326). She further asserts that screening sex has, “proferred an opportunity to see and to know what has not previously been seen so closely” (p. 326).

Williams’ project is personal, idiosyncratic, multilayered and ambitious. There is no doubt that she has done her homework. But her study of sex in the movies is limited in its all too narrow focus on the ever erect, ever penetrating phallus. There is no analysis of lesbian sexuality or eroticism, except for two brief sentences about the television series The L Word (2004). In chapter after chapter, we encounter the trials and tribulations of the “penis,” in its struggles to maintain itself as the center of all pleasure and action. If, as such post modernists as Lacan and Foucault have generally observed, ‘absence configures presence,’ then the lesbian in film remains that, ‘obscure object of desire’ who is ever present in her absence. Not to mention, that it is common ‘carnal knowledge’ that the lesbian and scenes of lesbians having sex remains the biggest turn on for both men and women. So, where is she in Williams’ analysis? She is ‘screened out’.

Williams’ work is handicapped by its phallic fixation. Let’s hope for a sequel wherein all forms of desires and subjectivities, phallic and otherwise are explored.

Irene Javors,
USA.

Created on: Sunday, 22 March 2009