Explicit: A Series Of Erotic Thrillers

Brian DePalma, The Wachowski Sisters, Ang Lee, Paul Verhoeven, William Friedkin, Park Chan-wook…some of the hottest writers and directors in our series who all put a new, more hypersexual spin on classic noir tropes, with some of the most successful and controversial films of the 80’s & 90’s. In director Nina Menkes’s new documentary Brainwashed: Sex, Camera, Power (May 12th), she explores the ‘male gaze’ through 175 clips from over 100 years of cinema, though typically exemplified by the classic films noir with their femme fatales and Hitchcock’s thrillers and his icy blondes. The Erotic Thriller re-emerged as a distinct genre in the 1980’s by making explicit the sexual subtext of those earlier films in sensational detail. Join us for some steamy summer nights in Pálás, as we embark on an exploration of those heady days of the Erotic Thriller starting in 1980 with De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980), through to the zenith of the genre with Basic Instinct (1992) and ending with one of the most celebrated films of recent times to fall under the label of the Erotic Thriller, Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (2016). 

See full line-up below.