The genre begins where cinema could not yet speak of sexuality directly. Under the restrictions of the Hays Code, film noir is born – a world of shadows, crime and femmes fatales, where passion, shown through hints, became only more charged and more dangerous: Gilda with Rita Hayworth, and then Hitchcock’s Vertigo, where desire turns into obsession and all the future themes of the genre appear – voyeurism, control, fetishisation.

After the Code was abolished, cinema gained for the first time the right to speak of desire openly. De Palma’s Dressed to Kill combined Hitchcockian tension with explicitness, Fatal Attraction brought the genre into the mainstream, and Basic Instinct became its defining symbol. The golden age lasted until the end of the 1990s and closed with Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut – a summing-up of a film, where what matters is no longer the femme fatale but the very nature of desire, fantasy and the secret life of consciousness.

In this lecture we spoke about the reasons for the genre’s decline and about the new themes of the twenty-first century.