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[Editor’s note: This article was originally published in February 2022 and has been updated multiple times since.]

Sex on film is nothing new, and yet unsimulated intercourse in non-pornographic movies has raised eyebrows and drawn eyeballs for decades. From Vincent Gallo’s controversial directing for “The Brown Bunny” to Robert Pattinson’s masturbatory method acting in “Little Ashes,” genuine intimate encounters captured on film — however staged they may be — can pull audiences into the bigger stories their writers and directors are trying to tell.

Catherine Breillat’s first film in 1976, “A Real Young Girl,” adapts her own controversial novel about a 14-year-old exploring her newfound sexuality. Breillat’s later work, 1999’s “Romance,” tells the story of a woman desperately seeking human connection and featured similar scenes, including sadomasochistic sex play.

“Actors are prostitutes because they’re asked to play other feelings,” Breillat told IndieWire. “This prostitution is not profane; it’s a sacred act that we give them.”

John Cameron Mitchell set out to “honor” sex as a pastime for real people,...

The 1980s horror film Spookies was a notoriously troubled production. Filming began in 1984 with Brendan Faulkner and Thomas Doran at the helm… but then creative and legal issues arose during post-production, so that version of the film (which was going by the title Twisted Souls) was never completed. Instead, an investor hired Eugenie Joseph to shoot new footage – involving a different cast and a lot more monsters – that was then mixed together with the footage left over from Faulkner and Doran. This mish-mash was released under the title Spookies in 1987, and over the decades it has developed a cult following. And that cult is now so large, Spookies producer/co-writer Frank Farel is moving ahead with Spookies 2!

Farel dropped the sequel news into an interview with The Barrens Hideout Podcast at the Dark Arts Festival in Lincoln, Rhode Island last weekend. He said (with thanks to our friends at Bloody Disgusting for the transcription), “Remarkably,...

Mubi's retrospective, Catherine Breillat, Auteur of Porn?, is showing April 4 - June 3, 2017 in Germany.Sex Is ComedyThroughout her career, Catherine Breillat has provided viewers with a long-form meta-cinema experience. While metacinema is as old as the medium itself, since her debut feature A Real Young Girl in 1976, Breillat has developed a distinct form of it: one that collapses ‘autobiographical’ material, various artistic sensibilities, and the process of filmmaking itself.Like dozens of other English words—such as ‘aesthetic’ or ‘abject’—the word ‘meta’ has been largely misused or misapplied with regard to the film and literary criticism. Regarding the consumption of fiction, the appropriate use of the term 'metafiction,' 'metafilm,' et cetera, has its basis in the Greek meta, which does not translate directly into English but can be understood as a preposition similar to the English word ‘about’ (‘having to do with,’ or ‘on the subject of’). Metafiction is therefore,...

Polish provocateur Walerian Borowczyk remains one of the great obscure artists who managed to successfully blur the lines between definitions of high art and pornography. Directing short films as early as 1946, he would begin a career making feature films in 1967 and experienced his most prolific period in the 1970s with a variety of infamous French language projects, the most notorious of those being 1975’s The Beast. Just prior to that film, however, Borowczyk premiered his first venture into erotic exploration with the vignette film, Immoral Tales (a structure the director would return to time and again). Initially a quintet of five separate tales spanning across various periods of time, the film is modeled after several historically based figures who’ve transcended into a realm of mythological urban legend. Playing at the Locarno Film Festival, it would go on to win the Prix de L’age D’or, but Borowczyk would...

Your chances of enjoying Immoral Tales, an alternately amusing and unpleasant omnibus porn-comedy, increase exponentially if you treat the film like a series of softcore shaggy-dog jokes. All four of its horny heroines are mockingly led on, and consequently punished, by members of pseudo-civilizing institutions, including family members, clergymen, and even a patron of the arts. Thankfully, Polish writer/director/agitprop-pornographer Walerian Borowczyk's cruel attempts at social commentary are mollified significantly by his probing fascination with the female body.

"Thérèse Philosophe," the sexiest and funniest of the four segments, unfortunately climaxes when Charlotte Alexandra's title character is raped after she masturbates furiously with a cucumber whi...

Writing a series focused on the depiction of gender and sexuality in films, it would be a massive oversight not to talk about the work of French director Catherine Breillat. Few other directors have as consistently explored these topics as directly or as interestingly. The next few articles will explore Breillat’s 13 feature films in detail.

One can get an idea about Breillat’s filmmaking philosophy through some of her contributions outside of directing in the 1970s. She has a small acting role in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris. She contributes commentary on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Sálo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which is featured in the Criterion release of that film. She is a screenwriter on David Hamilton’s teenage coming-of-age/erotica film Bilitis. All three directors provoke controversy through their work and the open depiction of sexuality, whether due to the graphic nature of the sexuality,...