Hard-Core Art Film: The Contemporary Realm of the Senses

Linda Williams teaches courses on popular moving-image genres (pornography, melodrama, and "body genres" of all sorts). She has recently taught courses on Oscar Micheaux and Spike Lee, Luis Buñuel, eastern and western melodrama, film theory, and selected "sex genres." Her books include a psychoanalytic study of Surrealist cinema, Figures of Desire (1981), a co-edited volume of feminist film criticism (Re-vision, 1984), an edited volume on film spectatorship, Viewing Positions (1993), the co-edited Reinventing Film Studies (with Christine Gledhill, 2000). She has also edited a collection of essays on pornography, Porn Studies, featuring work by many U.C. Berkeley graduate students (Duke, 2004). In 1989 Williams published a study of pornographic film entitled Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (second edition 1999). More recently she published Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White, from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (2001, Princeton).

In 2007, Linda Williams was invited to give a lecture at MACBA in the context of the seminar Nouvelle vague porn. This lecture was entitled 'Hardcore Art Film' and it is a part of Screening Sex, a book to be published by Duke University Press in Fall 2008.