still from Viens! VR (Michel Reilhac, FR 2015)
Films, talks & events
Cinema Erotica
An ode to lust
1 — 19 June 2017
still from Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, US 1970)
Cinema Erotica celebrates sensuality, squarely faces the embarrassing darker sides of lust like sex addiction and offers a compendium of seductive film history: from Jean Genet’s Un Chant d'Amour (1950) to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), from Bettie Page to Isabelle Huppert.
The erotica collection of Eye Filmmuseum includes no fewer than a thousand titles, but they are rarely taken off the shelf. Cinema Erotica brushes aside cinematic decorum to present an ode to lust featuring historical curios, films by contemporary artists, talks and musical performances.
still from Immoral Tales (Contes immoraux) (Walerian Borowczyk, FR 1973)
still from Les Amants (Louis Malle, FR 1958)
Erotica is always, as the saying is, in the eye of the beholder: there are as many spectators as there are desires to be catered to. No better place, then, to satisfy the needs of the viewer than the film museum’s theatres, where eyes and ears are pampered and the modern laptop voyeur finds a large-screen habitat.
Cinema Erotica's programme ranges from early 20th-century blue movies to titillating virtual reality. There are evenings dedicated to eroticism in design and literature, about the sexual attraction of nuns, and the orgy in ancient times. The history of the erotic film is told in the Sexy Trailer Show; via compilations of explicit trailers from the Eye collection, and filmmaker Jennifer Lyon Bell will give the workshop From Fantasy to Film - Design Your Own Erotic Film.
still from In the Realm of the Senses (L'Empire des sens) (Nagisa Oshima, JP 1976)
still from Querelle (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, BRD/FR 1982)
In the Netherlands, nudity was leading the way in the early 1970s, and Cinema Erotica devotes ample attention to those illustrious years. For example, there is a talk show with Willeke van Ammelrooy and Martin Koolhoven about footage from our collection. There is also music: Tomoko Mukaiyama accompanies Japanese erotica and Djurre de Haan creates a new score for Afgrunden (1910). Plus, there is attention for erotic artist films by Andy Warhol, Marina Abramović and Melanie Bonajo.
Cinema Erotica zooms in on eroticism in film in relation to other arts, and highlights how the cultural and social significance of the erotic imagination has changed in recent decades. The programme spans the entire film history, from 1910 to the present day.
still from Satyricon (Federico Fellini, IT 1969)
still from Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, US 1995)
campaign image Cinema Erotica (still from Viens! VR (Michel Reilhac, FR 2015))
Programme brochure
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