Linda Williams (film critic)
| Linda Williams | |
|---|---|
| Born |
December 18, 1946 United States |
| Website | filmmedia |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Colorado |
| Thesis title | Figures of desire: an analysis of surrealist film |
| Thesis year | 1977 |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
| Main interests | Film studies |
| Notable works | Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible |
Linda Williams (born December 18, 1946) is an American professor of film studies in the departments of Film Studies and Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley.
Williams graduated from University of California, Berkeley with a B.A in Comparative Literature in 1969, and then earned a PhD at the University of Colorado for her dissertation subsequently published as Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film. Her main academic areas of interest are: film history, film genre, melodrama, pornography, feminist theory and visual culture; all with an emphasis on women, gender, race, and sexuality.
With respect to film genres, she argues that horror, melodrama, and pornography all fall into the category of "body genres", since they are each designed to elicit physical reactions on the part of viewers. Horror is designed to elicit spine-chilling, white-knuckled, eye-bulging terror (often through images of blood); melodramas are designed to elicit sympathy (often through images of tears); and pornography is designed to elicit sexual arousal (often through images of "money shots"). Williams believes that much pornographic expression, and the form that expression takes, is due to the distance between the audience and the actual performers, and so, she concludes, much of what pornography becomes is a type of compensation for the distance between viewer and viewed.
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