Thursday, April 28, 2011

Sex in Cinema

Nudity in film is any presentation in motion pictures of people without clothing, whether as full nudity — a view of someone's entire nude body — or more modest versions of nudity.

Nudity in film should be distinguished from sex in film. Nudity of a sexual nature is common in pornographic films. In softcore films there are limitations, such as avoiding the appearance of a penis, although it may be depicted. Erotic films are suggestive of sexuality, but need not contain nudity. A film on naturism or about people where nudity is common may contain non-sexual nudity, and some other non-pornographic films show some seconds or fractions of seconds of nude scenes, but the vast majority of nudity in film is in pornographic films.

Nude scenes can be controversial because they may challenge some people's standards of modesty. These standards vary by culture, and depend on who is exposed, which parts of the body are exposed, the duration of the exposure, the pose, the context, and other variables. Regardless, many cultures use censorship or a rating system to manage content of films, with the intention of limiting content that is deemed by the government and/or the movie industry to be harmful or undesirable, morally or otherwise. Nudity is usually one of the aspects of a film subject to censorship or rating.

For this reason, it has been said that many directors and producers apply self censorship, limiting nudity (and other content) in their films, to avoid external censorship or a strict rating, in countries that have a rating system.^[1] Thus adults are denied images just because these images are not considered suitable for teenagers. This applies even for scenes explicitly about a character showing or seeing nudity. Directors and producers may choose to limit nudity because of objections from actors involved, or for a wide variety of other personal, artistic, genre-bound or narrative-oriented reasons.

The first entertainer to pose nude for photographs was undoubtedly the stage actress Adah Isaacs Menken (1835–1868). A series of Menken photos survive in near pristine clarity.