Williams, Linda. “Power, Pleasure, and Perversion: Sadomasochistic Film Pornography.” Representations. 27 (1989): 37-65.

Yet elsewhere in his writing Bazin has celebrated documentary realism in fictional contexts, and he is honest enough here to acknowledge “a critical contradiction,” which he notes “without resolving.” 38

Our complicity as viewers of the act is different from what it would be if we were actually in the room with the “object”; it is connected to the fact that we are watching (whether with fascination, pleasure, horror, or dread) an act that seems to be really taking place but with which we have no spatial or temporal connection ourselves. 38

-proximity / distance = greater distance because we know there’s a frame, greater proximity because it’s often presented in an unmediated way. Might want to look at Wood’s article on art vs. exploitation.

[about Snuff]: Nevertheless, added signals of documentary evidence—the director’s speech to and “look” at the camera, the indication of film “run out,” the shocking transition from sex scene to violence—all operated to convince some viewers that if what they had seen before was fake violence belonging to the genre of horror, what they were seeing now was real (hard-core) violence belonging to the genre of pornography. 41

. . . especially in the context of the hard-core genre’s perpetual quest for documentary evidence of involuntary pleasure in female bodies that do not give as ready evidence of this pleasure as male bodies. 41

. . . perverse pleasure of witnessing the involuntary spasm of death. 42

Snuff probably became the “case” that it did because it did not, like the horror film, simply displace the sexual desires of characters onto violent acts; rather, its mix of soft-core sex and sexual desires of characters onto violent acts; rather, its mix of soft-core sex and violence was more messy, interrupting expectations for pleasurable sex with violence and vice versa. Snuff, both the film and the idea, exists at the contradictory intersection of the spectacle of pleasure (generally assumed to be real in hardcore pornography) and pain (generally assumed to be faked in horror films). 42