Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film

Rutgers Depth of Field Series

by Linda Williams

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.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

304 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

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Linda Williams was an American professor of film studies in the departments of Film Studies and Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

[Col]

read for school

[Donna]

Read especially essay by Vanessa Schwartz.

[Camille · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collection of essays on film. Incl. work by Crary, Hanson and Williams. Also an essay by Tom Gunning that I hadn't seen before.

[Victoria Timpanaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Important works reevaluating ideas of looking, gaze and gender in feminist cinema studies and the horror genre.

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was (is) a big influence on my work. A great collection of essays on visual culture. I reference this book often...

[Mary Billyou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tom Gunning's Cinema of Attraction!

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love pretty much everything Williams has written on film theory. This is no exception.