Viewing Positions
Ways of Seeing Film
Edited by Linda Williams
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Book Presentation:
The essays in this volume represent some of the best new thinking about the crucial relations between visual representation in film and human subjectivity. No amount of empirical research into the sociology of actual audiences will displace the desire to speculate about the effects of visual culture, and especially moving images, on viewing subjects. These notions of spectatorship, however hypothetical, become extremely compelling metaphors for the workings of vision within the institution of cinema. Viewing Positions examines the tradition of a centered, unitary, distanced, and objectifying spectator's gaze; investigates the period when film spectatorship as an idea began; and analyses gender- and sexuality-based challenges to the homogeneous classical theory of spectatorship. It makes available critical understandings of spectatorship that have, until now, largely eluded cinema studies.
About the Author:
LINDA WILLIAMS is professor of film studies at the University of California, Irvine. She has won a number of awards for her work as a film producer and director, and is author of several books, including Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible.
See the publisher website: Rutgers University Press
> From the same author:
Melodrama Unbound (2018)
Across History, Media, and National Cultures
Dir. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams
Hard Core (1999)
Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible", Expanded edition
Subject: Genre > Porn films
> On a related topic:
Audience Sociology and Consumer Behavior in the Film Industry (2025)
Dir. Azime Cantaş
Subject: Sociology
How Popular Culture Destroys Our Political Imagination (2024)
Capitalism and Its Alternatives in Film and Television
Subject: Sociology
What Film Is Good For (2023)
On the Values of Spectatorship
by Julian Hanich and Martin P. Rossouw
Subject: Sociology
Watching Films (2013)
New Perspectives on Movie-Going, Exhibition and Reception
Dir. Albert Moran and Karina Aveyard
Subject: Sociology