SOURCE: "Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions," in Cine-Tracts, Vol. 3, No. 4, Winter, 1981, pp. 19-35.

In the following excerpt, Williams asserts that Méliès 's treatment of the human physical form in his films is an attempt to grant it magical and mysterious qualities—in contrast to Eadweard Muybridge who depicted the human form as sculpture.

In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault writes that ever since the seventeenth century there has been in the West an increasing intensification of the body both as object of knowledge and element in the relations of power.¹ This intensification has emerged in a proliferation of discourses of sexuality which have produced a whole range of sexual behavior now categorized as perverse. For Foucault this "implantation of perversions" is the result of the encroachment of power on bodies and their pleasures.

The implantation of perversions is an instrument-effect...