Welcome to the Cinema of Change podcast with Robert Rippberger and Tobias Deml.
Linda Williams is a professor in the Film and Rhetoric departments at UC Berkeley. She teaches courses on pornography, melodrama, and “body genres.” In 1989 she published a study of pornographic film entitled Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (second edition 1999). More recently she published Screening Sex (Duke, 2008), a history of the revelation and concealment of sex at the movies. In 2001 Williams published Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White, from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (2001, Princeton)–an analysis of racial melodrama spanning the 19th and 20th centuries of American culture.
- 00:27 – Intro: Linda Williams
- 01:04 – How does the depiction of female characters influence women?
- 02:45 – How can filmmakers avoid including their unconscious bias in their films?
- 06:14 – The power play between Hollywood and the serial format
- 10:05 – Can films go beyond entertainment? Do they have a utility in deconstructing ideology?
- 15:07 – How has “The Wire” impacted you and its audience at large?
- 18:30 – How does the viewer’s position in society influence a film experience?
- 22:20 – What’s the relationship between critics, theorists and filmmakers?
- 23:49 – Is Pornography an instructional tool for our personal sex lives?
- 26:02 – Relationships in film – do they influence our own romances?
- 27:44 – What is the role of Film Theory in pushing media?
- 28:40 – Outro: A collaboration between scholars and practitioners?
