4:00 pm
Communications 120
Mega-Melodrama! Vertical and Horizontal Suspensions of the ‘Classical’
Film scholar Linda Williams analyzes the American television series, The Wire, as melodrama, contextualizing the importance and function of this popular mode on big and small screens.
Linda Williams is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches courses on popular moving-image genres including pornography and melodrama. Williams is author of the landmark 1989 study of pornographic film, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (second edition 1999) and Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White, from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (2001), an analysis of racial melodrama spanning the 19th and 20th centuries of American culture. Recent work includes Screening Sex (2008), a history of the revelation and concealment of sex at the movies, and an edited collection, Porn Studies (2004), featuring work by many Berkeley graduate students.
Moving Images - Graduate Interest Group 
i will attend.