Description
Book SynopsisAs many critics and theorists have noted, non-pornographic films, documentaries, and quality television series have increasingly included explicit sex scenes since the 1990s, some of such scenes featuring the performance of actual sex acts. The incidence of sex in narratively powerful, resonant visual media can no longer be dismissed as a trend. What was once an aesthetic weapon in the arsenal of provocateurs is now frequently integrated seamlessly into the mise-en-scène and exposition of widely viewed and culturally significant films and television series. Intercourse in Television and Film: The Presentation of Explicit Sex Acts analyzes the aesthetic and narrative contexts for the visual media presentation of the sexual act, both those which are non-simulated and those which are explicit to that point that their simulation is brought into question by the viewer. In this book, questions involving the performance choices of actors, the framing and editing of the sex act, and the direct
Trade ReviewLong overdue, this brilliant anthology asks exactly how and why we are seeing explicit sex acts, not in pornography, but throughout visual culture. Like a previous era’s attention to censorship and the Production Code, Intercourse in Television and Film offers rich historical, material, and cultural frameworks for its close-ups of sex scenes and provocative analyses of their meanings. Beautifully written and rigorously theorized, these essays comprise a bold and important new overview of a phenomenon that demands interpretation. -- Linda Mizejewski, The Ohio State University
Table of ContentsIntroduction PART ONE: Sex and Cinematic Traditions Chapter One: Fine Arts and Ugly Arts: Blue Is the Warmest Color, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Corporeal State of the Nation Tim Palmer Chapter Two: The Heroine’s Journey: Taboo Sex and Characterization in Dogtooth Lindsay Coleman PART TWO: Sex in Queer Cinema Chapter Three: Blurred Lines: The Case of Stranger by the Lake Connor Winterton Chapter Four: Documenting Everyday Male Intimacies in Contemporary Queer Cinema Sarah Janssen PART THREE: Sex Documentary/Docudrama Chapter Five: Cruising the Interior. Leather Bar: Gay Sex, Then and Then Again Evangelos Tziallas Chapter Six: Heterotopias of Confession: Whores’ Glory, Sex, and Dispossession Kyle Sittig PART FOUR: Sex on Television Chapter Seven: “Monsters all, are we not?”: Sex and the Human Connection in Penny Dreadful Amber Strother Chapter Eight: Two Funerals and a Wedding: Not So Nice Jewish Girls in Transparent and Broad City Carol Siegel Index About the Editors and Contributors
