Sex and the Cinema

by Tanya Krzywinska

From the sanctioned to the forbidden, the suggestive to the blatant, evocations of sex have saturated cinema with a heady distillation of fleshly passions. Whether laced in the rapturous rhetorics of romance or seeking to pack a harder erotic punch, cinematic representations of sex and sexual desire have provided cinema with one of its major attractions. Sex and the Cinema traces the numerous factors and contexts – artistic, institutional, political and socio-cultural – that have shaped the way that sex appears in film. How does cinema mediate sex? Why is sex presented often in transgressive terms? What ideals and values inform its depictions? Given that cinematic representations of sex have perhaps caused more controversy than any others, Sex and the Cinema charts the cultural norms and contestations that are often diversely in play and explores forms and themes such as narrative, incest, romance, sado-masochism and 'real' sex. Films discussed include Don't Look Now , Intolerance , The Blue Angel , Now, Voyager , Basic Instinct , Written on the Wind , Evil Dead II , Emmanuelle , A Taste of Honey , and The Night Porter .

256 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2006

Reviews

[Jessrawk · Rating 2 out of 5]

For the love of clarity & sanity, an editor, a copy editor, even a proofreader!! Any book that still relies so heavily on Freud in 2006 (!) is immediately suspect. I allowed some leeway during the discussion of older films, with the idea that Freud held more sway then & had yet to be debunked. But no, the author continues to use his gross ideas as gospel, particularly in the incest chapter.

The first half of text, when she is setting up her formal framework, was a mess. I almost gave up at that point. There was little-to-no actual film analysis there to back up what she was saying, just a lot of film name-dropping without a lick of guidance as to what scene proved what she was saying.

Moving on to the second half, the in-depth analysis of films, I was hopeful that this was where she would prove herself & things would come together. This was not the case. For one, she often continued the film name-dropping. &, after repeatedly insisting that these themes appear in many films, would use the same three films over & over again to prove her point. But that’s not all! She also tries to start cramming in books & television shows to prove her points. This would be fine if they actually did, or even demonstrated the themes she was discussing. But within the text itself, she admits that they do not and are more tangential. So why?

[Karolina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book follows a very traditional academic research essay format. Most of what you read is found in the introduction, and however interesting this topic is, this book somehow manages to slaughter it. There is a lot of repetition in terms of word usage and grammar, and my peers agree that the page count could be cut in half by literally removing chains of repeated transition words and sentences talking about the exact same thing. What I mean is, there is a lot of filler and this book has a pretty shabby writing style.

If you manage to sit through it like I have, the different view points and vast sources of information this book brings together cohesively are great - it is clear why this would be used as an academic text. The book talks about the origin of censorship and its consequences, what and why is something transgressive, and different types of sexuality demonstrated in film. I really wish it dived deeper into each topic in detail - but that is again: a problem with it being mostly filler.

This book exclusively looks at North American cinema - it does not look at European cinema or British cinema.