Goya's clothed and nude Maja's come to mind of course.
http://museoprado.mcu.es/imajas.html
and then there was the short fashion craze
I believe in the 17th century though perhaps it was
in the early 18th for women's court dresses to
expose the breasts.. this wasnt among the peasants.
I'm not sure of the reference definitively as to place.
It could have been the Austrohungarian lands, it may
have been Sweden. I can't remember.
In film terms. there's this:
Shortly after the Lumieres conducted the first public screening of a film (in December 1895), pioneering French
film-maker Georges Melies directed the very short B/W 'adult' film Après Le Bal (1897, Fr.) (After the Ball, Bath) with
one of the earliest nude scenes in film history. Reportedly around the same time, "blue movie" pornographer Eugene Pirou
pioneered the risque film (called "smoking concert" or stag party films) when he produced Le Coucher de la Marie (1896,
Fr.) in which Louise Willy performed the first strip tease onscreen -- the short film was directed by Léar (real name
Albert Kirchner).
The very first kiss on film was between a Victorian couple seen in the Edison kinetoscope The May Irwin Kiss (1896) (aka
The Kiss, or The Irwin-Rice Kiss in a filmed scene from the stage play The Widow Jones). This titillating short
20-second film, with a close-up of a kiss, was denounced as shocking and pornographic to early moviegoers and caused the
Roman Catholic Church to call for censorship.
And Eadweard Muybridge's primitive motion studies (from 1884-1887) included test footage with cinematic glimpses of
naked men and women. Lois Weber's and Paramount's 4-reel silent film Hypocrites (1914) featured full female nudity in
the guise of an unclad lady (Margaret Edwards) - 'the Naked Truth' - who occasionally appeared as a transitional plot
element between scenes.
Audrey Munson (a real-life model) first appeared artistically nude in George Foster Platt's controversial Inspiration
(1915) from the Mutual Film Corporation, as a sculptor's model. Munson also appeared nude in another silent film, Rea
Burger's 7-reel Purity (1916), in a dual role as a spirit figure and as an artist's nude model named Purity/Virtue.
Theda Bara: The Vamp and First Sex Symbol
Sex was portrayed in the earliest films as something exotic and foreign. The original vamp and first movie sex goddess,
the full-bosomed Theda Bara, starred in a number of early silents for the Fox Film Corporation - her first lurid, slinky
vamp appearance (and first lead role) was in Fox's melodramatic A Fool There Was (1915), in which she portrayed a
worldly, predatory woman who stole a married man away from his wife and child. Her most famous line in this film was:
"Kiss me, my Fool!" She became known as "the wickedest woman in the world." Although she played other non-vampish roles,
her vamp appearances were destined to be the most lucrative.
Other suggestive, femme fatale vamp roles were in Herbert Brenon's Sin (1915), The Devil's Daughter (1915) - her third
vamp film, and in The Tiger Woman (1917). She was also most notably seen nearly nude with the contours of her breasts
held by two curving gold asps in her first film made in Hollywood - the very successful Cleopatra (1917). Bara's
'come-back' picture, The Unchastened Woman (1925), was a remake of an earlier 1918 film. [Most of Bara's films, however,
are currently unavailable because few of the film prints have survived.]
Other Early Silent Films and Their Sexy Film Stars:
For the most part, the silent years were not known for explicit sexual content.
However, there were some exceptions:
the first American feature-length sex film was Traffic in Souls (1913) (aka While New York Sleeps) - it was a
"photo-drama" expose of white slavery at the turn of the century in NYC, although the film exploitatively promised
steamy sex in its advertisements; this was one of the first films to understand that 'sex sells' although its producers
worried that a 'feature-length' film wouldn't be successful; another vice film with the same historical theme of
revealing the world of prostitution was The Inside of the White Slave Traffic (1913); Damaged Goods (1914) and The Sex
Lure (1916) were similar melodramatic, "exploitation" films advertised as containing the "Shocking Truth"
A Free Ride (1915) was reportedly the earliest-known silent stag ('men only') or pornographic film - with explicit sex
scenes
Australian-born swimming and diving champ Annette Kellermann (the "Esther Williams of the silent era") caused a stir
when she was seen naked with her flowing hair under a waterfall in director Herbert Brenon's and Fox's fairy-tale
Daughter of the Gods (1916) - she was the first major female star to appear nude on screen (see also the next item)
in the same week, another female lead appeared nude for the first time in a feature film on screen - 16 year-old blonde
starlet June Caprice (a Mary Pickford look-alike), in Fox's melodramatic Cinderella tale The Ragged Princess (1916), who
appeared in a prolonged, nude swimming sequence
director D. W. Griffith threatened virginal and innocent Lillian Gish's defilement in the controversial The Birth of a
Nation (1915), and his extravagant set of Babylon in Intolerance (1916) included half-naked, lightly-draped women in
love temples
in Jack Conway's The Penitentes (1916), fanatical Roman Catholics staged actual crucifixions on Good Friday, with one
crucifix holding a nude girl
Cecil B. DeMille's Male and Female (1919) included Gloria Swanson's notorious, half-clad disrobing scene in preparation
for a lavish bath in a sunken tub
Yvonne Gardelle appeared naked as temptress Lilith in a Garden of Eden prologue
sequence in The Tree of Knowledge (1920)
nude bathing/swimming scenes were evident in The Branding Iron (1920) and The
Isle of Love (1922)
Rudolph Valentino wowed audiences as a passionate Latin lover with his portrayal of a dashing Arabian sheik in romantic
fantasies including The Sheik (1921), Blood and Sand (1922), and Son of the Sheik (1926)
in Fred Niblo's Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), in two-color Technicolor, a remarkable segment showed rows of
bare-breasted flower girls dancing in a pageant/procession as they tossed flowers to the crowd lining the street
a decadent orgy scene and semi-nude musicians in Erich von Stroheim's silent operetta The Merry Widow (1925), and the
sexually-excessive depiction of a wickedly-decadent Queen Regina in von Stroheim's tawdry, grotesque and fragmentary
film Queen Kelly (1929)
screen lover John Barrymore starred in Don Juan (1926) with Mary Astor and Estelle Taylor, a film with a record number
of kisses (reportedly 127)
Lili Damita, Hope Hampton, and Sue Carol all appeared in the nude in Red Heels (1926), Lover's Island (1925), and In the
Line of Duty (1931) respectively
flapper icon Clara Bow, dubbed the "It" girl during the 20s and one of the earliest sex symbols, appeared nude as Hula
Calhoun in a bathing scene, and performed a sexy hula dance in the romantic comedy Hula (1927)
romantic lead John Gilbert (the sexy successor to Rudolph Valentino) played opposite exotic vamp Greta Garbo in her
star-making film Flesh and the Devil (1927)
American actress Louise Brooks was featured as an amoral and insatiable cabaret star/prostitute Lulu in G. W. Pabst's
classic German silent film Pandora's Box (1928) with blatant sexual themes, a memorable lesbian dance/tango scene during
Lulu's wedding party with Alice Roberts, and her murder by the infamous Jack the Ripper with a gleaming knifeblade stuck
into her stomach during an erotic embrace
actress Kay Johnson starred as a wicked woman in Cecil B. De Mille's bizarre Madam Satan (1930) - a film that challenged
the code with a racy party sequence aboard a zeppelin
German expressionistic director F. W. Murnau's last film (co-scripted with pioneering documentary film-maker Robert J.
Flaherty) presented a lush tale of ill-fated native South Seas love (with flower-garlanded, bare-breasted native
dancers) and the breaking of a sexual tabu (filmed entirely on location in Tahiti) - a very-late black/white silent film
Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931) - and an Oscar-winning effort for Floyd Crosby's cinematography
The 'Naughty' Pre-Code Days:
The Hays Office, with restrictions and guidelines on movie content to establish "correct standards of life," issued a
self-regulating list of "Don'ts' and 'Be Carefuls' for film-makers in 1927. Suggestive nudity or perversion, lustful
kissing, miscegenation, criminal murder, drugs, brutal violence, rape or attempted rape, cruelty to animals and
children, racial slurs or anti-government diatribes, a man and woman in bed together, deliberate seduction of girls,
profane swearing, and capital punishment (hangings or electrocutions) were specifically targeted - and to be avoided.
Many times, studios would circumvent problems with the new restrictions by wrapping up a film filled with sex and
sinning with a quick climactic scene of moral repentance. Other film-makers avoided censorship by changing the titles of
plays forbidden to be adapted into films. One of the major difficulties with the repressive code was that it was open to
varying interpretations.
Two Female Challengers to Film Morality:
Jean Harlow
One of the earliest sex stars of the silver screen was smart-mouthed, 18-year old platinum blonde Jean Harlow, who
shocked audiences as a sexy floozy with generous glimpses of flesh and her famous line of dialogue - "Would you be
shocked if I put on something more comfortable?" - in her first major role in Hell's Angels (1930). In Goldie (1931),
she was noted as the first woman specifically referred to as a "tramp" in a talking picture. She also appeared as an
adulteress in Red-Headed Woman (1932), and had a starring role as a stranded, wise-cracking floozy opposite Clark Gable
and a bourgeois, middle-class Mary Astor in a tropical, steamy setting in Red Dust (1932) - Harlow was best seen bathing
in a rain barrel. She has often been acknowledged as the first screen actress to place erotic emphasis upon her breasts
in a time when flat-chested women were the rage.
Marlene Dietrich
In a number of films made by obsessed, Svengali-styled mentor/director Josef von Sternberg, Marlene Dietrich played
seductive, cool females in sexually perverse melodramas. She was Lola Lola, a cheap, smoky-voiced, sensual cabaret
singer with stockinged-legs and top hat atop a beer barrel in the Blue Angel nightclub in her greatest film, The Blue
Angel (1930), Germany's first sound film. In the atmospheric, seedy film, she manipulatively lured a repressed and
obsessed Professor Emmanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) towards his doom by her teasing exoticism while singing Falling In Love
Again.
And she scandalously wore a men's tuxedo in Morocco (1930) and accepted both a rose and a mouth-to-mouth kiss from a
young lady in the cabaret audience - one of the earliest (if not the first) female-to-female kisses. In the
highly-stylized Blonde Venus (1932), she performed a cabaret striptease from her full-bodied gorilla suit and then
donned a bushy Afro blonde wig to sing "Hot Voodoo" in a throaty, hoarse voice to the beat of an African drum ("...That
African tempo has made me a slave, hot voodoo - dance of sin, hot voodoo, worse than gin, I'd follow a cave man right
into his cave"). Adultery and sadomachism were evident in the unusually frank and suggestive The Scarlet Empress (1934),
in which Dietrich played Catherine the Great.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Sondheim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.WVU.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, September 20, 2006 10:16 PM
Subject: Re: sexuality in performance and video
This all sounds pretty accurate. I was writing to someone who works on occasion with sexuality (more in writing, I
think, than anything else) - he wanted to discuss how it 'played out.' So I was thinking along prac- tical lines. In
the last 15 years or so just about everyone is dealing with 'body' - most without any awareness of the history. But
nudity in art well predates Duchamp - look at Courbet's Origin of the World (think that's the title) or Turner's
drawings. I don't think even in performance it has much to do with Duchamp; I think nudity was present in early film
as well as dance at the turn of the last century. - Alan
On Wed, 20 Sep 2006, Lucio Agra wrote:
After sending I'd also rememebered the concept of liminality proposed
by Victor Turner/Richard Scbhechner. Expose itself nude in western
societies tends to induce some states of perception analog to the
risks concerned to some rituals (like walking on fire, etc.)
Lucio
On 9/20/06, Lucio Agra <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
There's a link uniting performance art, risk, presence and, of course
nudity. Not considering the fact that nudity, in various cases, do not
attract the issue of sexuality in performance, it is, however, one of
the most frequent procedures for it is at the core of any conception
of artistic research taking body as a "primary medium" (Semitotics of
Culture).
I've been considering that one of the hypothesis for the insistence on
nutidty in performance is the overall influence of Marcel Duchamp. His
"Nude descending the staircases" imposed a certain new notion about
nudity in art, proposing it as a continuous movement. One cannot
despise de role of this image in post-modern/contemporary art's
sensibility...
greetings
Lucio BR
On 9/19/06, Alan Sondheim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Probably not the first book; there are a lot of books on Gk & Roman stuff
> and I have one on Egyptian sexuality revealed in graffiti etc. But maybe
> I'm wrong. - Alan
>
> blog at http://nikuko.blogspot.com - for URLs, DVDs, CDs, books/etc. see
> http://www.asondheim.org/advert.txt - contact [EMAIL PROTECTED], -
> general directory of work: http://www.asondheim.org
> Trace at: http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk - search "Alan Sondheim"
> http://clc.as.wvu.edu:8080/clc/Members/sondheim
>
blog at http://nikuko.blogspot.com - for URLs, DVDs, CDs, books/etc. see
http://www.asondheim.org/advert.txt - contact [EMAIL PROTECTED], -
general directory of work: http://www.asondheim.org
Trace at: http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk - search "Alan Sondheim"
http://clc.as.wvu.edu:8080/clc/Members/sondheim
