This article addresses censorship in audiovisual culture from a formal and analytical perspective, drawing on the notion of the scopic regime, understood as a historical configuration of the gaze that organizes visibility, desire, and the relationship to truth. Rather than focusing on censorship as the prohibition of content, the article approaches it as an internal principle regulating visual experience, inscribed in the narrative and expressive forms of cinema. The study is based on a comparative film analysis of Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947), Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997), and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (Jane Schoenbrun, 2021). Through micro-analyses of sequences centered on recurring motifs—confession, eroticism, and crime—the article describes how each film reflects a specific scopic regime. In classical film noir, institutional censorship is integrated into cinematic form through off-screen space and ellipsis, configuring a productive scarcity that sustains a moral articulation of the narrative. In postmodern cinema, the explicitness and fragmentation of the image produce a traumatic excess that destabilizes the relationship between image and truth. In the contemporary context, associated with digital and algorithmic environments, visibility is organized around expectation and the continuity of appearing, neutralizing the possibility for an image to constitute itself as an event. The article shows that the decisive differences between these regimes lie not so much in the themes represented as in the formal conditions that make it possible—or impossible—for an image to produce meaning for the spectator.