Real Sex Films explores one of the most controversial movements in international cinema through an innovative interdisciplinary combination of theories of globalization and embodiment. Risk sociology, feminist film theory, and critical feminist mapping theory are brought together with concepts of production, narrative, genre, authorship, stardom, spectatorship, and social audience as several lenses of understanding and extension in ways of seeing real-sex cinema. Notions of personal subjectivity and critical distance, disciplinary co-operation and critique, and cinematic perceptions of the utopia and dystopia of love within risk modernity are the tensions exposed reflexively and in parallel, as each chapter focuses different lenses communicating intimacy, desire, risk and transgression. This book substantively, methodologically, and theoretically embraces and engages in its consideration of the images, ethics, double standards, and embodiments of brutal cinema. Crossing the boundaries of film studies, media and cultural studies, the ethnographic turn, risk sociology, feminist psychoanalytical, and geopolitical studies, this is a book for students, academics, as well as general and professional audiences.

John Tulloch is Professor Emeritus of Arts, Charles Sturt University.

Belinda Middleweek lectures in the School of Communication at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia.

List of Illustrations
Introduction

1. Intimacy: the Film
2. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality and Risk in Modernity
3. Intimacy and Romance in Film Theory
4a. 'Intimacy is what hurts when it's gone': approaching social audience analysis (Part 1)
4b. 'A man didn't make this film alone': Intertextual dialogue (Part 2
5. Brutal Intimacy: French Corporeal Cinema
6. 'Desperate for Intimacy': Loneliness and Fun in 9 Songs and Shortbus
7. Intimate Pleasures and the Madness of Love: Narrative in Ken Park and Irréversible
8. Actors and Sexual Intimacies: Trust, Mistrust and the Double Standards of Love
9. Secret Intimacies and Addictions in Le Secret
10. Beyond High Theories of Intimacy: authorship, performance and 'obscenity' in The Piano Teacher
11. Desire, Intimacy and the Gaze in the work of Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay

Conclusion
Bibliography
Filmography
Index