LUST FILMS’s movie FIVE HOT STORIES FOR HER has been awarded with two NINFA awards in FICEB and one E-LINE award in VENUS BERLIN. But those three awards together are less important to me than Linda Williams’s words about the movie. (Thank you so very much for your kind words Linda!)
Five Hot Stories for Her has all the requisite features of hard core: hot women, lusty handsome men, real penetrations, even money shots. But if Erika Lust knows how to obey the laws of hard core, she also knows how to build tension around sex acts and how to construct a sex scene around a woman’s needs, point of view and sense of play. Most importantly, she knows how to give variety and interest to hard-core sex that can so often feel rote. This compendium of short films is rich and various. There’s one about a “good” girl who has to borrow the mind set of her lascivious friend to have good sex with the pizza boy; there’s another about break-up sex, another about being married with children. We needn’t worry about the future of hard-core pornography as long as women like Erika Lust are working in the industry!
Linda Williams is Professor in the Departments of Film Studies and Rhetoric in Berkely Univerity. She is one of the most respect voices worldwide in porn studies. I met her a couple of years ago in Oslo, and then she visited Barcelona last year for a conference in MACBA.
Linda teaches courses on popular moving-image genres (pornography, melodrama, and “body genres” of all sorts). She has recently taught courses on Oscar Micheaux and Spike Lee, Luis Bunuel, eastern and western melodrama, film theory, and selected “sex genres.” Her books include a psychoanalytic study of Surrealist cinema, Figures of Desire (1981), a co-edited volume of feminist film criticism (Re-vision, 1984), an edited volume on film spectatorship, Viewing Positions (1993), the co-edited Reinventing Film Studies (with Christine Gledhill, 2000). She has also edited a collection of essays on pornography, Porn Studies, featuring work by many U.C. Berkeley graduate students (Duke, 2004). In 1989 Williams published a study of pornographic film entitled Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (second edition 1999). More recently she published Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White, from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (2001, Princeton). Her current project is entitled Screening Sex (forthcoming, Duke). It chronicles sex in movies from Edison’s The Kiss to new media.
