First nudes in film history — El Sartorio (Porno, 1907), Forbidden Daughters (1927), Hypocrites (1915), Dr Mabuse (1922), Ecstasy (1933), Intolerance (1916), L’inferno (1911), Wings (1927)

Forbidden Daughters (1927), Hypocrites (1915), Dr Mabuse (1922), Ecstasy (1933), Intolerance (1916), L’inferno (1911), Wings (1927) are some of the most famous examples of early nudes in the cinema (special mention to Forbidden Daughters (1927) as the most daring and erotic of all). But what was the first nude in the cinema? Well, as is “normal”, the first nudes were feminine although it is true that we have seen some masculine as in The Big Road (1934). But ultimately, the woman’s body has always been used, in art, as a symbol of beauty; as an object of eroticism; as a symbol of temptation and devilish attraction.

Cinematography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge took photo shoots with nude models (including poets Walt Whitman and George Bernard Shaw). It was the first time that naked bodies had been seen moving.

Fatima’s Coochie-Coochie Dance, was the first film censored by the “suggestive movements” of the dancer.

The Kiss is perhaps one of the most important silent productions of all time. This half-minute production (titled The May Irwin Kiss) first showed a kiss in the cinema. At the time he was condemned as immoral and a precursor to ethics movements in the nascent film industry. Thirty years would pass before the first “French kiss” –with his mouth open- was filmed on the tape Flesh & Devil, with Greta Garbo and John Gilbert – Kiss (Flesh and the Devil, 1926)

The short film Le Coucher de la Mariée featured the first time a woman undressed in front of the camera.

The film L’inferno (1911) showed the first nude, at least not known, in a film production. ! This Italian production, directed by Giuseppe De Liguoro, Adolfo Padovan, Francesco Bertolini and shot in Naples, lasted 11 hours and 11 minutes. A group of naked men and women launch a boat while they are observed by the protagonists of the film.

The Italian filmmaker Francesco Bertolini, makes an adaptation of The Divine Comedy, where he portrayed the first male frontal nudes.

D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance is one of the great films in the history of cinema, a pioneer in the language of cinema and also as we see in the nude, at least in North America, sensual nudes appearing behind light fabrics.

And we go to Forbidden Daughters (1927), a 16-minute short film directed by Albert Arthur Allen in which we see full-length female nudes as the total protagonists of the scene.

Will Hays, the director of the Association of Producers (now the MPAA), implements the Motion Picture Production Code – better known as the Hays Code -, a regulation whose purpose was to eliminate “the depravity of cinema”, for which the love scenes, lewd images and anything that was considered indecent.

Producers and studios were required to send their films to Hays’ office, who issued them a Seal of Approval for national screening. Those works that contained erotic elements were exhorted to be edited, replaced or eliminated in order to reach the billboard.

This censorship limited creative freedom in Hollywood for than thirty years.

The first and most outrageous full-length female nude in film history was starring the Viennese actress Hedy Lamarr in Ecstasy. Directed by Gustav Machaty in 1933, the film chronicles the extramarital affair of a beautiful young woman married to a helpless old man. Lamarr appears in puribus swimming in a pool for 10 minutes and almost the same footage running as he came into the world through a forest. Also for the first time on the screen a woman was pretending to have an orgasm. Despite negative criticism and outrage from the most Puritans, the film was a commercial success in countries where it was not censored and served, along with the sequel, for Lamarr to be claimed in Hollywood.