FS30340 Modern Film Studies: Body Genres Revisited

Academic Year 2024/2025

This module examines the contemporary relevance of Linda Williams’s landmark 1991 essay ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.’ Williams’s analysis of cinematic melodrama, horror, and pornography connects the genres on the basis of their shared interest in provoking physical reactions in audience members (and subsequent disreputability as a result of this interest). We will explore the strengths and limitations of Williams’s work by examining it in relation to twenty-first century films with varying relationships to the body genres. After an introductory focus on Williams and other fundamental genre scholarship, the remainder of the trimester will be divided roughly into thirds, with each section dedicated to films that embrace and reject the body genres in a variety of ways. These films will be contextualised with scholarship on the individual films and filmmakers, as well our developing understanding of Williams. Studying this body of work will help students to consider how Williams can help with making sense of the films, and, conversely, what the films can tell us about her foundational contributions to genre theory.

Content Note: Material about bodies often makes us uncomfortable, and rightly so. While such discomfort can arise from representations of the body in any medium, the audiovisual nature of film can be especially confronting. We recognise the importance of students making informed decisions about engaging with potentially harmful material on an individual basis, and no one will be penalised for a decision not to view particular films. Students should also bear in mind how the theoretical tools provided to us by scholars such as Williams can help with making sense of upsetting imagery. The films will be presented in our classroom as works of art with key cultural and conceptual context to be analysed, discussed, and critiqued rather than instructional guides to be consumed uncritically.

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Curricular information is subject to change

Learning Outcomes:

• Use theoretical concepts from Linda Williams and other relevant scholars of the body genres to critically analyse films of those genres
• Write scholarly analysis of what scholarship on the body genres can tell us about individual films
• Analyse how the aesthetics of genre films demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of scholarship on the genres
• Apply genre theory to original arguments about films

Indicative Module Content:

Indicative readings:

Linda Williams, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,’ Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991):
2–13.

Rick Altman, ‘A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,’ in Film Genre Reader IV,
ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 27–41.

Adam Lowenstein, Horror Film and Otherness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022).

David Scott Diffrient, Body Genre: Anatomy of the Horror Film (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2023).

Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).

Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

Jonathan Goldberg, Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

Aaron Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp, Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

Indicative screenings:

Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)
Two Days, One Night (Deux jours, une nuit, Luc and Jeanne Pierre Dardenne, 2014)
Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
The Fifth Reaction (Vakonesh-e Panjom, Tahmineh Milani, 2003)
It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014)
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)
Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)
Blue Is the Warmest Colour (La vie d'Adèle, Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)
Stranger By the Lake (L'inconnu du lac, Alain Guiraudie, 2013)
Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)

Student Effort Hours: 
Student Effort Type Hours
Specified Learning Activities

40
Autonomous Student Learning

70
Lectures

12
Total

122
Approaches to Teaching and Learning:
Lectures and Screenings 
Requirements, Exclusions and Recommendations

Not applicable to this module.


Module Requisites and Incompatibles
Not applicable to this module.
 
Assessment Strategy  
Description Timing Component Scale Must Pass Component % of Final Grade In Module Component Repeat Offered
Assignment(Including Essay): Students will answer 3 short questions. Overall 1500 words approx. Week 7 Graded No

30

 No
Reflective Assignment: Learning Journal, to be completed each week, but due by the end of the trimester. Week 14 Pass/Fail Grade Scale No

10

 No
Assignment(Including Essay): Final Essay (approx 2000-2500 words) Week 14 Graded No

60

 No

Carry forward of passed components
Yes
 
Resit In Terminal Exam
Autumn No
Please see Student Jargon Buster for more information about remediation types and timing. 
Feedback Strategy/Strategies

• Feedback individually to students, post-assessment
• Group/class feedback, post-assessment

How will my Feedback be Delivered?

Not yet recorded.


Indicative readings:

Linda Williams, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,’ Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991):
2–13.

Rick Altman, ‘A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,’ in Film Genre Reader IV,
ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 27–41.

Adam Lowenstein, Horror Film and Otherness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022).

David Scott Diffrient, Body Genre: Anatomy of the Horror Film (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2023).

Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).

Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

Jonathan Goldberg, Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

Aaron Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp, Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

Indicative screenings:

Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)
Two Days, One Night (Deux jours, une nuit, Luc and Jeanne Pierre Dardenne, 2014)
Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
The Fifth Reaction (Vakonesh-e Panjom, Tahmineh Milani, 2003)
It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014)
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)
Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)
Blue Is the Warmest Colour (La vie d'Adèle, Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)
Stranger By the Lake (L'inconnu du lac, Alain Guiraudie, 2013)
Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)