Histoires de cinéma : histoires de sexe

For a long time, in the movies, people turned the lights off to make love. Films “with explicit content” were reserved for very private circles of connoisseurs or for the arousal of brothel customers. From the early years of cinema, censorship was established and the few erotic audacities of the 1920s became a distant memory… The famous, or even infamous, “open fire” shot, supposed to represent the flames of passion while shocking no one, was used for many long years.
Audiences had to wait for the audacity of Ingmar Bergman and Louis Malle in the 1950s and the sexual revolution of the 1970s for the cinema to conquer one of the last territories that resisted it: human sexuality.
For this third instalment of Histoire de cinéma, Frédéric Bonnaud looks back with Paul Verhoeven, Bernardo Bertolucci, Catherine Breillat, Bertrand Bonello, Alain Guiraudie and Bertrand Blier at the representation of sex on the screen.