Linda Williams
Film Studies & Rhetoric, UC Berkeley

The Forcible Frame: Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure
Friday, February 27 / 12 PM / Humanities 210

Linda Williams is the author of Figures of Desire (Illinois, 1981); Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible (California, 1989); and Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to OJ Simpson (Princeton, 2001). Her most recent book, Screening Sex, chronicles the trajectory of sexual representations on American screens from the “era of the kiss,” to the time when American cinema “grew up” and “went all the way.”  She tells the story of a general tendency towards revelation, a greater graphic imagination of sex. But she also shows that every revelation is also a concealment. Her presentation at UCSC is also interested in the graphic imagination, this time of torture. Errol Morris’s film, more than any other of the Iraq documentaries, raises the question of the frame of reference within which we view the gruesome images of the acts of torture committed by our government. In this film that is also about revelation and concealment, she is interested in discovering the work performed by the frame.

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