Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.; Annotated bibliography: p. 271-277. Publisher Marketing: 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. Review Citations: Library Journal 04/01/1995 pg. 97 (EAN 9780813521336, Paperback) Library Journal 04/01/1995 (EAN 9780813521329, Hardcover) Contributor Bio:  Williams, Linda Linda Williams is Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric and Director of the Program in Film Studies and of the Center for New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson; Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ???Frenzy of the Visible???; and Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film.