Description
Book SynopsisAs film and television become ever more focused on the pornographic gaze of the camera, the human body undergoes a metamorphosis, becoming both landscape and building, part of an architectonic design in which the erotics of the body spread beyond the body itself to influence the design of the film or televisual shot. The body becomes the mise-en-scène of contemporary moving imagery. Opening
The Space of Sex, Shelton Waldrep sets up some important tropes for the book: the movement between high and low art; the emphasis on the body, looking, and framing; the general intermedial and interdisciplinary methodology of the book as a whole.
The Space of Sex's second half focuses on how sex, gender, and sexuality are represented in several recent films, including Paul Schrader's
The Canyons (2013), Oliver Stone's
Savages (2012), Steven Soderbergh's
Magic Mike (2012), Lars Von Trier's
Nymphomaniac (2013), and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's
Don Jon (2013).
Trade ReviewAs part of the team that helped create
500 Days of Summer, I would confess that we were not necessarily trying to make a work of art that would busy cultural critics and academics a decade later. Rather, we were trying to take a beloved genre and turn it on its head. To do so, our writers, directors, editors, and actors reinvented the narrative structure of the romantic comedy, bent (to a degree) the gender expectations of the form, and utilized architecture, music, and California's urban landscape to invoke an earlier generation of films--
Annie Hall and
The Graduate--but also to signal something new. What is so exciting about reading Professor Waldrep's work is that many of the decisions that we made that were instinctual, he makes explicit. It is almost surreal to learn so many new things about the film that I was honored to help make, and to understand better its place within the culture. * Jessica Tuchinsky, Producer, 500 Days of Summer *
In this wide-ranging, illuminating study, Shelton Waldrep shows how pornography has thoroughly infiltrated mainstream cinema and television, influencing visual representation formally as well as thematically. “Pornification,” rather than the object of jeremiad, is subject in
The Space of Sex to thoughtful critical analysis. A most welcome book. * Tim Dean, James M. Benson Professor in English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Part One: Topographies of Desire 1.Framing the Image: The Female Body in Late Kubrick 2.The Spy Who Loved Me: Bond and the Playboy Aesthetic
Part Two: The Pornographic Imaginary 3.Theorizing Pornography 4.Body of Art
Part Three: The Space of Sex in Contemporary Film and Television 5.Porn as Form and Content 6.Spatializing Desire Bibliography Index
