The Art of Pleasure: A Century of Sex on Screen

Some scenes stay with you. I remember the first time I saw a sex scene on screen: it wasn’t arousal I felt, but astonishment. As if someone had dared to say out loud something I had only ever thought. The body, desire, shame—all at once, unfiltered. Sometimes, pleasure on screen is raw, physical. Other times, it’s twisted, violent, or deeply melancholic. And yet, it always speaks to us. Erotic movies, more than showing sex, has portrayed the way we imagine it, fear it, or seek it.

Telling its story means also telling a part of our own: the collective unconscious, the impulses society has tried to repress, the way we’ve changed—or not—when faced with intimacy. It means traversing censorship, revolutions, and scandals. But also rediscovering, in the midst of it all, an act of freedom.

Love, by Gaspar Noé

The Origins

In the early 1900s, cinema was still a budding art form, subject to the moral codes of the societies in which it developed. The first films avoided any explicit depiction of sexual acts, preferring to suggest them through glances, innuendos, and symbolic gestures.

In the 1920s, European cinema proved bolder than its American counterpart. Films like Häxan (1922), by Danish director Benjamin Christensen, tackled sexuality from esoteric and pathological angles, causing a stir with their implicit eroticism. Meanwhile, actresses such as Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks embodied a new kind of sensuality: mysterious, androgynous, magnetic.

At the same time, in the shadows, a clandestine genre was taking shape: American stag films—short, plotless pornographic movies, often homemade, shown in brothels or circulated among private collectors. A primitive form of pornography, already signaling a divide between public morals and private desire.

Eyes wide shut, by Stanley Kubrik

Censorship and the Hays code

In 1930, Hollywood established the Hays Code, a system of self-censorship that, for over thirty years, banned scenes deemed “immoral”: sex, female desire, adultery, and homosexuality were either forbidden or turned into veiled innuendos.

While America was cutting, censoring, and moralizing, European cinema moved in the opposite direction. Directors like Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman approached sexuality with symbolism and psychological depth. Fellini, in films like Satyricon or Juliet of the Spirits, turned desire into ritual and dream, while Bergman, with masterpieces like Persona or The Silence, explored sex as broken communication, trauma, and identity in crisis.

The real earthquake came in the 1970s, with the explosion of counterculture and the sexual revolution. One film above all: Last Tango in Paris (1972) by Bernardo Bertolucci, starring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider. The film shattered all boundaries—eroticism, alienation, pain, and improvisation blended into a controversial, scandalous work that ended up in court and was ordered destroyed in Italy.

Tinto Brass turned sexuality into a libertarian and popular manifesto. Films like Salon Kitty (1976) and The Key (1983) placed female eroticism at the heart of the narrative, mixing provocation, painterly references, and visual craftsmanship. Despite the controversies, his work was praised by Federico Fellini and Gianni Canova for its originality and stylistic flair, making him a cult figure in European erotic cinema.

In The Realm of the Senses, by Nagisa Ōshima

Liberation and Detachment

In the 1980s and ’90s, cinema began to treat sexuality with greater complexity and realism. Films like Basic Instinct (1992) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) explored desire and character psychology without filters, challenging audiences with provocative storytelling.

Meanwhile, sex detached from narrative cinema and became an autonomous industrial product: the porn industry entered homes via VHS. The first porn stars emerged—Rocco Siffredi, Jenna Jameson, Ron Jeremy—and aesthetics became standardized for fast, decontextualized consumption, devoid of plot, direction, or symbolism. The internet did the rest, making porn free, limitless, and instantly accessible.

La Vie d'Adèle, by Abdellatif Kechiche

In auteur cinema, however, sex continued to evolve. Directors like Abdellatif Kechiche (Blue is the Warmest Color, 2013) and Gaspar Noé (Love, 2015) kept redefining the boundaries between eroticism and cinematic storytelling, normalizing the presence of sexuality on screen—without censorship, and without the weight of taboo.

Danish director Lars Von Trier, with films like Nymphomaniac (2013), turned sexuality into a philosophical study: a sprawling erotic confession that challenges the viewer, blending explicit pornography, existential pain, and irony. The body becomes a narrative and political space—not just a spectacle.

Festivals like Cannes, Berlin, and Venice have awarded and celebrated this type of cinema, officially legitimizing the portrayal of sexuality as both art form and human exploration.

In conclusion, erotic cinema has come a long way: from puritan, censored language to (almost) complete artistic freedom. Today, sexuality is no longer just provocation—it is language, psychoanalysis, and above all, part of how we tell the story of the world.

If you love cinema and want to discover new films and curiosities, follow us on social media and on our blog. We’ll be waiting for you at the Andaras Traveling Film Festival in Fluminimaggiore, Buggerru, and Iglesias, from July 14 to 19, 2025.