The Naked Screen: SEX & Nudity In Cinema (Part 1)
Inspiration (1915), the first non-pornographic film made in the USA, featuring a nude scene.
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The story of cinema and nudity on screen go hand-in-hand. Some of the earliest films made contained titillating glimpses of the disrobed female form. Whether for "artistic" reasons, or for all out pornographic exploitation, the naked body captured on flickering celluloid was big business from the moment Edison unveiled his kinetoscope, and the Lumiere brothers their cinematograph in the 1890s. Earlier in the 1880s Eadweard Muybridge was projecting his nude "human motion studies" using his zoopraxiscope for audiences. But one of the first ever risqué or what would be known as "stag films" produced was Le Coucher de la Mariée in 1896, only months after the first public exhibitions of the Lumiere's new innovative cinematograph technology. The 7 minute film featured cabaret artist Louise Willy who recreated a striptease from her cabaret act. The first ever striptease on film. It was released in the United States in 1903. While Edison's films like Carmencita (1894) and The May Irwin Kiss (1896), were causing moral outrage in the uptight United States, for displaying a bit of leg and a peck on the lips respectively, there was no stopping the French when it came to making skin flicks.
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Innovative film-maker Georges Méliès got in on the act early, when in 1897 he made Après Le Bal, featuring a woman being undressed by her maid in preparation for a bath. It could be said that this was the first ever nude scene in a non-pornographic or purposely risqué movie. Probably not the first, but acknowledged as the oldest surviving hardcore porno is "A L'Ecu d'Or ou la Bonne Auberge" from 1908. Many hardcore porn movies were made, but are lost or were destroyed during raids on brothels, where these films were often shown. Most were distributed internationally by the Pathé Brothers, who formed their distribution and production company in 1896. It wasn't just the French however that were churning out erotic films, between 1906 and 1911, Austrian producer Johann Schwarzer released some 52 erotic films via his production company Saturn Film.
However by 1915, the Americans were getting in on the act. One of the reasons America was late in exploiting the lucrative potential of naked flesh and sex on screen was one of technology. The Lumiere's cinematograph was a hand-cranked portable camera, weighing on 5kgs. Whereas Edison's bulky kinetoscope needed a power source, and weighed in at almost half a tonne. Thus making it much more difficult to covertly movie illicit little movies for an appreciative all male audience. A Free Ride (1915) is thought to be the earliest known American stag film, featuring a man having sex with two hitch-hikers by the side of the road. That same year famed female director Lois Weber made the controversial anticlerical 4-reeler Hypocrites, the release of which was delayed for many months due to its content. Hypocrites featured a ghostly (done using a double exposure technique) image of "The Naked Truth", played by the silent screen actress Margaret Edwards, representing hypocritical desires for money, sex, and power. The silent film of the period that is acknowledged as being the first to feature a nude scene by an American film star, was Inspiration (1915). It starred Audrey Munson, a renowned artist's nude model, she recreated her real-life role by posing nude for a painter in the film. Munson, would go on to appear nude in other "artistic films", such as Purity (1916) and Heedless Moths (1921).
However by 1915, the Americans were getting in on the act. One of the reasons America was late in exploiting the lucrative potential of naked flesh and sex on screen was one of technology. The Lumiere's cinematograph was a hand-cranked portable camera, weighing on 5kgs. Whereas Edison's bulky kinetoscope needed a power source, and weighed in at almost half a tonne. Thus making it much more difficult to covertly movie illicit little movies for an appreciative all male audience. A Free Ride (1915) is thought to be the earliest known American stag film, featuring a man having sex with two hitch-hikers by the side of the road. That same year famed female director Lois Weber made the controversial anticlerical 4-reeler Hypocrites, the release of which was delayed for many months due to its content. Hypocrites featured a ghostly (done using a double exposure technique) image of "The Naked Truth", played by the silent screen actress Margaret Edwards, representing hypocritical desires for money, sex, and power. The silent film of the period that is acknowledged as being the first to feature a nude scene by an American film star, was Inspiration (1915). It starred Audrey Munson, a renowned artist's nude model, she recreated her real-life role by posing nude for a painter in the film. Munson, would go on to appear nude in other "artistic films", such as Purity (1916) and Heedless Moths (1921).
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Another early example of a film star appearing nude was Australian-born swimming champion Annette Kellermann, who was known at the time as "the world's most perfectly-formed woman", in A Daughter Of The Gods (1916). Although to be fair most of Kellermann's naked body was covered by her long flowing hair, in the nude scene. It was her second feature film, and at a budget of $1 million dollars, the most expensive film of its time. It was shot on location in Jamaica, with huge lavish sets being built on location. Kellermann was also infamous for wearing and advocating the wearing of the scandalous one-piece bathing-suit, for which she was arrested in 1910 while wearing one in Boston Harbour.
By 1919, even the Canadians were getting in on the act of producing films with nude scenes. Back To God's Country, is one of the earliest examples of Canadian cinema, an exploitative melodrama by actress, writer and producer Nell Shipman, directed David Hartford. The film became the most successful silent film in Canadian cinema history, and is infamous for being the first mainstream feature film to contain full-frontal female nudity. Although Shipman did appear to be wearing some kind of see-through body-stocking. Back To God's Country was advertised with the tag-line "Is the Nude Rude?", which probably helped increase its audience figures, and make it the highest grossing Canadian film of the silent era. |
An advert for A Daughter Of The Gods. Note the "Five Special Children's Morning Matinees".
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Poster for the infamous Häxan (1922).
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During the 1920s stag films were being produced in large numbers in both Europe and the United States, as well as one-reeler imports from South America. The porn industry was now big business, enticing would-be starlets down on their luck to appear in them. They ranged from mild comedic titillation through to hardcore films on all manner of sex-act and perversion that can be seen in today's hardcore porn. Within more mainstream cinema moments of nudity continued to appear. One of the most famous and controversial films of the time was Häxan (1922), known in English as Witchcraft Through The Ages, it was a Swedish/Danish silent horror film. Directed by Benjamin Christensen, who appeared in the film as the Devil, it was a sensationalised history of the hysteria surrounding the with-hunts of the 15th century. Acclaimed in both Sweden and Denmark, the film was banned in the United States, and heavily edited for screenings in other countries due to its depiction of semi-nudity, torture and sexual perversion. It remains a cult classic of early European art-house cinema.
Another film that has since become a cult classic is, Un Chien Andalou (1929), the infamous surrealist short film by the Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí. Most well known for the opening eye-ball slitting with a razor blade scene, the film also featured a surreal moment of nudity. As the hands of a man are seen cupping the clothed breasts of a woman, her clothing dissolves away, so that he is cupping her naked breasts, only to be replaced by a pair of naked buttocks. The film was banned in many countries. |
By the end of the 1920s, film-makers had hit on the idea of what would later be known as "exploitation cinema". Films that purported to be of an educational nature, but were in fact little more than thinly veiled excuses to show nudity on screen without being classified as pornographic. One of the earliest examples of an exploitation film was Is Your Daughter Safe? from 1927, later renamed The Octopus to get around city officials who didn't like the seemingly lurid original title. The film set the bench-mark for later exploitation films. It used stock footage compiled with footage from a number of previous films. In among the nudity, it justified it educational credentials by including footage from medical procedures and or venereal diseases. The film depicted the "white slave trade", which would become a popular subject matter for exploitation cinema. To get around censors, the film was shown as a "cautionary tale", of one woman's journey into prostitution and slavery. The carnies hawking the film around the country employed tactics such as organising lectures on the dangers of venereal diseases by supposed "sexual education" experts. All techniques that would be utilised by exploitation cinema film-makers in the decades that followed.
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