Above: Photo (censored) taken during the filming of "Shame" in New York.
When it comes to sex and nudity in the movies, at some point the fiction gives way to a recording of the actors getting naked. Steven Soderbergh reportedly said on one of his commentary tracks that, especially when famous actors are involved, "the minute they take their clothes off, it becomes a documentary." I thought of this when I read Richard Brody's post at his New Yorker blog, The Front Row, about Michael Fassbender and co-stars' ballyhooed sex and nudity in Steve McQueen's "Shame." (Apparently nobody remembers that Fassbender was also naked in McQueen's "Hunger" -- although he was getting thrown around the prison at the time.)
In a piece called "Behind, Before, Above, Between, Below," Brody writes:
McQueen's film has lots of it--huffing and puffing, pumping backsides and writhing limbs and grimacing faces--and it's got bodies: Fassbender's, full frontal but fleetingly, in shadow, at a distance, or, most grotesquely, seen from behind and below, urinating; Carey Mulligan's, naked but in side view; and a few other women, in a variety of stages of undress. I have never had any particular interest in seeing any of these actors' genitals, but I find McQueen's coy respectfulness cinematically offensive. If he's going to show his performers undressed, the lighting should be the same as it is on their faces, and the angles in which he shows them should be as plain as those which he uses for their faces. Instead, he uses their bodies as a sort of chit of authenticity and frankness. Whether the story itself is authentic and frank, we can talk about when the movie is released, but there's an intrinsic oddity to the notion of actors showing it all.
I haven't seen "Shame" (which recently played the New York Film Festival), but that makes it sound like one crazy Busby Berkeley picture. ("By a Waterfall" indeed!) And while I'm all for more nudity and more sex -- and more naturalistic nudity and sex -- to return to the movies (the "Back to the Future" Reagan 1950s/1980s helped kill off the idea of an American cinema for adults), I believe I understand and somewhat sympathize with what he's saying.
Nudity, which some have argued became perhaps too commonplace and obligatory for a while in the 1970s (female nudity, anyway), has been stuffed back in the closet. In some ways we're back to where we were in the late 1960s, when the MPAA rating system was imposed. It was commonplace for TV talk show hosts (Johnny Carson, Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, etc.) to ask actresses if they would do "nude scenes" -- to which they would almost invariably reply, "Yes, if it was important to the story." And the development of the character. And not exploitative, but tasteful. (In 2011, 29-year-old Kirsten Dunst was asked to respond to these same kids of questions about her Cannes award-winning performance in Lars von Trier's "Melancholia.")
I am of two (or three) minds about this. Yes, nudity can distract you from the story when you start thinking about the performer more than the character. (On the other hand, when naked Viggo Mortensen was getting kicked and punched in that sauna in David Cronenberg's "Eastern Promises," my empathy for his character's vulnerability was only intensified.) I suppose Julianne Moore's bottomless argument with her husband Matthew Modine in Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" was somewhat distracting in some ways at first, but as the scene went on it seemed more and more natural -- much less absurdly artificial than, say, those damn bed scenes where the sheets are used as enormous pasties.
My feeling is, if you're a performer who makes a living with your body, and you like the way your body looks (and other people like it enough to pay you to show it off), then why wouldn't you? If, on the other hand, you're uncomfortable getting naked (whether you're insecure or ashamed about your body, or you just don't want your friends and family to see it on the screen and have explicit screen grabs posted all over the Internet), then I fully understand why you would not want to appear nude before the cameras. Some actors want to be forced or encouraged to confront their fears, to reach beyond their professional, physical, emotional comfort zones in their work. Others don't.
Richard Brody goes further:
Directors shouldn't ask them to do it. Such a level of revelation renders a performer so vulnerable as to risk making them close off and shut down their emotional sensitivity as they rely purely on technique to craft a performance in extremis -- or else, if they remain fully alive to the moment, they're likely to give more of themselves (of their inner selves) onscreen than anyone can or should ever be asked to give, and it's likely to take a toll on their careers and even their lives (see under: Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider).
I'm not sure precisely what he's referring to regarding Brando and Schneider, but directors have often been known to push (or gently guide) actors into dangerous and volatile emotional territory. I found this in a 2007 interview with Schneider, who died in February at age 58 -- and later I found that RB had linked to the same interview in a post shortly after her death:
"I was too young to know better. Marlon later said that he felt manipulated, and he was Marlon Brando, so you can imagine how I felt. People thought I was like the girl in the movie, but that wasn't me.
"I felt very sad because I was treated like a sex symbol -- I wanted to be recognized as an actress and the whole scandal and aftermath of the film turned me a little crazy and I had a breakdown." [...]
[Regarding the infamous "butter scene"] "That scene wasn't in the original script. The truth is it was Marlon who came up with the idea," she says.
"They only told me about it before we had to film the scene and I was so angry.
"I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can't force someone to do something that isn't in the script, but at the time, I didn't know that.
"Marlon said to me: 'Maria, don't worry, it's just a movie,' but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn't real, I was crying real tears.
"I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn't console me or apologise. Thankfully, there was just one take."
Schneider remained friendly with Brando, and furious with Bertolucci, to the end. Can we ever know what finally pushed her too far? Was it the nudity, the sex, the content of the film itself, the intensity of the acting, the atmosphere on the set, the overwhelming response to the film when it was released -- and how they all catalyzed with her own personal and professional demons and insecurities? Probably all of the above, but from what she says in that interview it sounds like the 19-year-old was unprepared (how could she have been?) for the fame and notoriety that engulfed her when "Last Tango" became an international sensation.
(I'm reminded of young James Fox, who had what we used to call a "nervous breakdown" after shooting Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammel's violent and psycho-sexually transgressive, X-rated 1970 "Performance" with Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg. Fox didn't fully return to acting until David Lean's "A Passage to India" in 1984. He has been quoted saying that "people think 'Performance' blew my mind... my mind was blown long before that" -- but he also said: "'Performance' gave me doubts about my way of life. Before that I had been completely involved in the more bawdy side of the film business. But after that everything changed.")
As for nudity itself, attitudes toward it vary widely by individual and by culture, of course. (Swedes, for example, don't think twice about being naked around the family or strangers in the proper settings.) Is nudity, in and of itself, or when presented in a sexual context, a moral or artistic issue -- or just a part of human experience that mainstream movies tend to gloss over? I'm more likely to see those ubiquitous, coy, low-light, close-up, soft-focus, blue-tinted sex montages as morally offensive (the filmmakers may as well simply insert a slide that says "Generic Sex Scene Here" -- that would be more honest) than something that treats sex as an intensely physical and/or emotional experience. (Unless, of course, the dramatic point is that it's just bad, awkward, unsatisfying sex, as in "Greenberg" or "Michael" Why do recent movies deal more powerfully and realistically with bad sex than good sex? Maybe it has to do with the difference between harmonic physicality and uncomfortable, self-conscious physicality?)
Richard Brody (who is an outspoken champion of Joe Swanberg's films (which prominently feature gratuitous/banal/matter-of-fact nudity and sex, depending on how you view it) concludes:
I've written here before about the artistic burdens of representing sex: it's a matter of such intimacy and such profundity as to make it a touchstone (no pun intended) of the director's art. Of course, one could say as much about, oh, love and death and other experiences of the greatest gravity, and the banalization of violence through endless and numbingly ordinary cinematic depictions is a more grievous and endemic societal ill. And as the essential lot of the species, sex seems like an odd thing to exclude from the screen. But the experience itself reaches deep into the inarticulate animal essence of life, and calls on a kind of philosophical or poetic extrapolation that is extraordinarily distant from the mere visuals of the activity. There's always more and less than meets the eye.
Of Swanberg's recent work, RB wrote:
Both of Swanberg's new films face the implacable connection of art and life, especially regarding sex on camera. In "Silver Bullets," Swanberg plays an independent-film director whose romantic and artistic life are jumbled when his girlfriend is cast in a higher-profile horror film and he himself casts her friend as his girlfriend in a quasi-autobiographical film he's making. "Art History" specifically concerns a pair of actors (Kent Osborne and Josephine Decker) whose intimate lives are overwhelmed by the explicit sex scenes they enact in a film made by a director (Swanberg) whose own private life also becomes implicated.
I haven't seen much of Swanberg's work -- though I got a voyeuristic kick out of some episodes of his IFC/nerve.com web soap/sitcom "Young American Bodies." I'd like to know more about Brody's view of sex and nudity in his work. (When I post this, I'm gonna send him a tweet and ask!)¹
How do you see sex and nudity in the cinema, if I may phrase the question that way? Is it too risky and intimate to be dealt with in a (non-pornographic) way on the screen? Is it still the last taboo in a mainstream cinema that has no qualms about depicting violent and grotesque violations of the human body -- torture, blood, gore, viscera, etc.?
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¹ Twitter reply from Richard Brody:
Good question; I was wondering whether someone would ask. 1. Nudity is never coy in his films, always direct and frank;...
2. the filming or staging of sex is itself the subject; 3. as is the unity of performance and life.
23 Comments
I loved McQueen's HUNGER and can't wait to see SHAME.
The naked knife fight scene in EASTERN PROMISES is a classic, one of the greatest fight scenes in the history of cinema, arguably, as you say, because of the nudity.
One of the other important fully nude films I've seen was John Cameron Mitchell's SHORTBUS, which, frankly, seemed to be proof of the opposite of its thesis about full nudity being roughly equivalent to full honesty. In conception and execution, the friendly inclusive sex positive vibe of SHORTBUS couldn't be further from a film like LAST TANGO IN PARIS. But knowing that the sex was real and seeing actual pornographic penetration shots didn't really deepen the experience for me or the truth of the relationships at the heart of the story. If it had been just as explicit idea-wise but shot in a soft-core mode or even fully staged/simulated, I would have felt the same way about the characters. It was the generous and loving attitude of the filmmaker toward his material that mattered most to my experience of the film, not the level of nudity.
Btw, Jim, you're really on a roll this year. I'd say you've done some of your best work yet on the blog so far in 2011 and the year's not even close to finished.
Gracias, w.o., and good point about "Shortbus." The sex and the abundant nudity may be shocking at first, but it's part of the movie's world -- just like those hand-crafted miniatures of New York are...
I haven't seen 'Shame' yet, but I was a production assistant on set (I was able to peep over Steve's shoulder to take a look at the monitor sometimes) and I've red the script,. The movie is about the incapability of a man to deal with his sexual obsessions, a man who is unable to connect emotionally with anybody that has sex with and the guilt -and of course shame- that comes with it.
So for me, what Mr. Brody is saying about nudity in this picture is a load of hooey. How in the world could Steve McQueen and DP Sean Bobbit photograph genitals in the same "natural" way as faces? It's not coy respectfulness what keeps explicit sex in the shade; it's, well, shame.
I was just thinking the other day about how limited we are because of people's modesty. I think on-screen graphic depictions of sex can be essential in representing a character's emotional narrative. Audiences are still too shy and become distracted it seems.
I can't sign on to Richard Brody's musings in any way. He begins by saying McQueen doesn't shoot bodies with sufficient truthfulness (look at your screen cap and ask yourself if you need to see the movie to realize that's a highly questionable assertion) and ends by suggesting that sex is a unique category of human activity in that it "calls on a kind of philosophical or poetic extrapolation." I didn't buy that last idea even when it was being peddled to me in my sex-ed textbook in the chapter called "Love Is Worth Waiting For." I also don't see a duty to showing sex that transcends the duty owed to showing anything else, from mother love to knocking back a beer. Brody's references to Brando and Schneider in Last Tango are an argument for hiring psychologically stable and common-sensical actors--not for some misty notion of sex as something we should keep off-camera, or show only if we've got a copy of Bazin for handy reference. Truly, where is Brody going with this? He's flirting with the idea that sex can't or shouldn't be filmed, but he won't go all the way (pun intended), because as you point out, that rather begs the question of why he's Swanberg's biggest fan. It seems to me that he just wants to tell McQueen, "You're doing it wrong." That can be said quite simply, without moralizing.
"(look at your screen cap and ask yourself if you need to see the movie to realize that's a highly questionable assertion)"
I had exactly the same reaction...but your comment also made me look back at the shot, and notice that it says "photo taken during the filming of...", presumably indicating this isn't from the film itself, and doesn't necessarily say anything about the look of that scene in the finished product.
Yes, it was taken by a photographer outside the building where the scene was being shot.
I didn't see that disclaimer; I thought it was one of those back-of-the-theater sneak-shots and that was why it was grainy. But I did see Shame, and that photo is not inconsistent with the film. There are actually two scenes like that, if I recall correctly. And in an early scene, in one full-frontal shot of Fassbender his equipment is swinging back and forth. Still, I'll restate: It wouldn't have occurred to me to complain that the nudity in this movie was coy.
I think it's safe to say, too, that these particular actors are not feeling coerced or traumatized by appearing naked before cameras in front of or behind them!
Jim: Like you, I have several opinions on the issue.
Indeed, sometimes nudity is simply a distraction -- no different than, say, many long uncut takes -- that take us out of the emotions of the scene and make us think more about how the scene was constructed. We could blame this on America's childish fascination with sex, nudity and celebrities, or just chalk it up to the fact that it's unusual and thus catches our attention. In any case, at a time in which video of nudity and sex are always available at our fingertips, nudity in the cinema has become no less notable, whether it's intended to titillate or inspire laughter, as in The Hangover, for instance.
But all of that leads me here:
Indeed, like you, I feel that if an actor is comfortable with showing his/her body, he/she should be free to do so. But I'm very uncomfortable with any suggestion that cinema owes us frank portrayals of sex and nudity, because by rule that means that actors owe us frank portrayals of sex and nudity, and if that's the case a willingness to shed one's clothes becomes a job requirement, much more so than it is already.
Back before Betamax and VHS, actors who got naked for movies could take comfort in the fact that their nudity would always be received in the context intended: on the big screen within the film itself. Obviously today, that isn't the case. Never mind the way we can scrutinize any given shot from the comfort of our own home, thanks to DVD/Blu-ray/streaming. Sex scenes from movies today get mashed up in videos that go around on the Web for easy consumption by folks who never watch the rest of the movie. Additionally, instances of movie nudity are now captured in frame grabs that eliminate any difference between extended scenes and blink-and-you'll-miss-it flashes. An actor who gets naked in a movie today isn't agreeing to be naked in a movie. They're agreeing to share their nudity in ways that have nothing whatsoever to do with art that don't earn them a dime of compensation. The scenario has changed.
I haven't seen Shame, but one of the things about Hunger that made me very uncomfortable was the McQueen created a scenario that required his actor (Fassbender) to lose an unhealthy amount of weight. ("It's work," McQueen said at the time. "He's a professional actor.") This was Fassbender's choice, of course, his right. But I felt that McQueen could have found ways to suggest the weight loss without demanding it of an actor, just like I presume that the extensive beatings in the movie were merely implied.
The beauty of acting is that actors can suggest emotional or physical experiences without actually going through them. No one would ever ask Meryl Streep to make a real "Sophie's choice" for the purposes of capturing those emotions for the film, and so Streep can play a character's emotions without having to reveal that part of herself. But when we ask an actor to get naked for a shot, and we don't offer them shadow, or carefully positioned sheets, we're asking them to give away a piece of themselves, and I don't think they owe us that.
I have no problem with nudity in movies. I have no problem with actors who are comfortable with it (and no doubt sometimes profit from it). But I'm very uncomfortable with a system that makes actors feel they must give away any part of themselves that they would prefer to keep private -- they should have that right. Perhaps even the right never to be asked.
Jim,
You ask, "Is it [meaning sex] too risky and intimate to be dealt with in a (non-pornographic) way on the screen?" I would instead phrase the question this way, "Is it too HOLY to be dealt with in a non-pornographic way on the screen?" and of course the answer to that question is yes, so I would censor all depictions of sex in the cinema, outlawing not only pornography but so-called serious films like "Shortbus".
Of course, I also agree that there is too much gratuitious violence in films and that violence would also feel my censorous wrath ;-)
This is a fantastic topic and post Jim! Thanks for it. I can't quite agree with you, however, about "Short Cuts". I found that scene with Julianne Moore to be awkward. It worked in some degree, because it is one of the standout parts of the Raymond Carver short story, "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" -- and really elucidates that strange sexual tension between Marian and Ralph that erupts more because of his disdain for the lame semantics that lured her into the sack ("Shall we have a go at it?") with another man, than the actual indiscretion. But at some point I thought, "Whoa. That's Julianne Moore naked." I think when the audience begins thinking that than something about the scene is amiss. Maybe it would have worked better with an unknown actress? As far as the "butter" in "Last Tango In Paris", I always felt bad that Maria Schneider felt a sense of shame about that scene. Yes, perhaps casual film watchers chuckle and remember the movie for that, but overall the film told a valuable story about isolation, grief, social constriction, etc. One of my favorite films about sexuality and nudity is "Eyes Wide Shut". You have that scene where Tom Cruise (Dr. William "Bill" Harford) examines the overdosed naked girl at the party, and you can't help but think of doctors and their 'apparent' divorcing of themselves from sexuality while on the job. Kubrick also shows how the madness of jealousy is often more about the constant turning-over and re-imaging of a perceived betrayal. It's self-imposed torture. And of course, there's his brilliant use of the early sequence of Nicole Kidman disrobing to a Shostakovich waltz. He makes us uneasy voyeurs whether we like it or not.
Thanks for those insights. When "Short Cuts" came out, Julianne Moore wasn't "Julianne Moore" yet, so if I recognized her at all it was from small-ish parts in "The Fugitive" or "Benny & Joon" or "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle." Later, of course, she not only became a star, but showed that she was very comfortable with nudity ("The Big Lebowski," "Boogie Nights," "The End of the Affair," etc.).
I had read Brody's commentary (after seeing Shame at the Toronto Film Festival) and never really understood his point. I found the level of sex/nudity in Shame to be quite appropriate to its subject matter.
I've thought of the film a lot since seeing it, and I wonder (possible SPOILER) if Brandon's *shame* wasn't so much the sex addiction, but his inability to relate emotionally to people. It's like, one can be lonely and live in New York and nobody would know. You're surrounded by people, you work in an office, but nobody knows that you go home to an empty apartment and have no friends. Brandon was like that. He could relate to people socially (at work, in a bar), and he could relate to them sexually, but he had no girlfriend and seemingly no friends. Allowing people (his sister, his boss, a woman at work whom he tries to date) to see into his life scares him because he's ashamed that he's not normal. An excellent use of nudity.
But back to the issue of nudity... I like to reference the play "Take Me Out." The play involves a pro baseball player who comes out as gay. His teammates are discomforted (for all the predictable reasons). But what got this message across to the audience is that there were (shower) scenes where the actors were naked. So, here you are all dressed up for a night at the *theatre* and there are nude men standing right in front of you. This makes the audience uncomfortable (it's not a strip club--is it appropriate to look?) and gives us the same feeling of the anti-gay players--we feel uncomfortable.
Similarly, in a film, the discomfort (or arousal) we feel when we watch a nude scene or a sex scene can be effective in putting us in the mind of the characters. In Shame, the sex and nudity is *not* of an erotic nature. And that's because it's not really that arousing to Brandon--it's an addiction. And just like an alcoholic doesn't slowly savor the taste of the wine, the sex addict is not savoring the erotic experience--he just has a driving need to get off. And we, the audience, get this because we're not aroused either.
You asked:
"How do you see sex and nudity in the cinema, if I may phrase the question that way?"
Great post and great question, Jim.
I wish there was more sex in the cinema frankly. The puritan approach to sex that Hollywood has taken for decades (with a few exceptions) seems utterly ridiculous and seriously damaging to cinema as well as society as a whole.
I don't want to see cinema sex with perfectly toned & siliconed Hollywood hard bodies either. I'd like to see 77-year-old Dame Judi Dench and 81-year-old Sir Sean Connery get it on (maybe with lots of toys and leather?) for example. We live in a world where the human body (aging, different weights, shapes, colors and kinks) has become a thing to fear and ridicule and that really disturbs me. But back to your question and Brody's complaint...
I just can't take his criticism of SHAME very seriously. I haven't seen the film myself so my perspective is limited (HUNGER is one of my favorite films of the last decade btw) but what kind of person complains about seeing a nude Michael Fassbender have sex on screen? He's one of the few genuinely beautiful males starring in movies at the moment and I applaud his ability to get naked. Actors like Fassbender & Viggo Mortensen should be appreciated for their acting abilities as well as their courage to bare all. I have to wonder if the same complaints would be made about a film that featured an actress (Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman?) in Fassbender's role. I suspect a lot of critics would talk about how "brave" these women were.
Brody complains that:
"If he's going to show his performers undressed, the lighting should be the same as it is on their faces, and the angles in which he shows them should be as plain as those which he uses for their faces."
Really? When was the last time most of us had sex with lights and a camera accentuating very angle, curve and crevice of the other body we were in contact with? Sure, a lot of us have experienced a little "afternoon delight" with a partner where natural lighting highlights every flaw of our bodies. And if you've been in a lengthy relationship with a partner for an extended period of time you get to know their bodies very well but that kind of intimacy can take a long time to develop between two people. Isn't SHAME about a sex addict who has random sexual encounters? Like I said, I haven't seen the film but what Brody wants and what the film is exploring seem to be in total conflict.
On a side note, I've sat through a couple of Swanberg's films and found the sex scenes in them to be incredibly dull, unimaginative, passionless and pointless. They seem as if they were written and shot by someone who hasn't ever had a really good orgasm. I realize that observation won't make me any friends but I had to say it because I think it illustrates how Brody & I see the world through very different eyes. I'm not claiming any superiority here. I wish I could see what Brody sees in Swanberg's films but they utterly bore me. I prefer my erotica dished out by directors like Jess Franco, Peter Greenaway & Bernardo Bertolucci (I think LAST TANGO IN PARIS is an incredibly sexy film btw). I could go one but I've probably said too much as it is.
An interesting use of nudity can be seen in Sarah Polley's forthcoming "Take This Waltz." Here is nudity without any sexual connotations. There's a scene where the protagonist (Michelle Williams), her sister-in-law (Sarah Silverman) and another friend are at an aquafit class. Afterwards, the women are chatting in the showers. Polley shoots this scene from head to toe, and the women are seen completely naked. Further, she cuts to some other, much older women from the aquafit class showering, lathering up their lady bits, and chatting, as well. It was surprising (and refreshing) in its matter-of-fact-ness. And in a film about a woman choosing between an exhilarating new man and her comfortable husband it does illustrate a point about the reality and comfort of old love--wrinkles and all.
The use of such frank and explicit depictions of nudity in Hollywood movies is a sickening example of the moral decay of western civilization. Why can't moviemakers stick to traditional values, and give us frank and explicit depictions of brutal violence, hatred, and cruelty, but not nudity? You know, good old family values!
But seriously, Hollywood tends to shy away from the banality of nudity. I suspect that every young man in our society was disturbed the first time he saw his nude girlfriend sitting on a toilet having a bowel movement. Why were we disturbed? Because Hollywood (and our puritanical society in general) had programmed us from childhood to believe that nudity is inherently erotic and forbidden. To see your girlfriend naked while doing something as mundane (and gross) as taking a poop is to shatter those associations. Or at least take the shine off them.
On this I can only recommend Andrew Haigh's excellent Weekend, which tries to situate sex in a way that's both good and satisfying from a narrative point of view. He's talked in interviews about how the film's sex scenes (the first not shown, the others at various stages of reveal) were designed to compliment the character development in the screenplay. All I can say is, that attention to purpose really shows, and the payoff is enormous.
This reminds of Orson Welles quote cited by Jonathan Rosenbaum in his review of a Robert Bresson book in Cinema Scope magazine:
"I do not like to show sex crudely on the screen. Not because of morality or puritanism; my objection is of a purely esthetic order. In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God. I never believe an actor or actress who pretends to be completely involved in the sexual act if it is too literal, just as I can never believe an actor who wants to make me believe he is praying."
I'm by no means a conservative fanatic, I have my share of favorite nude/ sex scenes too but I guess that's one of the reasons why I like Terrence Malick's movies so much.
His restraint in this department is an art in itself. Like that scene in Badlands when Holly mutters after making love off-screen with Kit, "Is that all there is to it?"
On the other hand, you can say that the whole film of The Tree of Life is some kind of a prayer, but I think it's not the kind of prayer Welles said above. Just read Roger Ebert's take on the film.
I love that people are still talking about LAST TANGO IN PARIS.
Brody's commentary is intrinsically misogynistic. I daresay only male nudity would be described as him as "grotesque" or "excessive".
Everyone has seen a penis or a vagina. Get over it.
Nudity is only back to pre-1970s levels if you're only looking at feature films. On TV, including but nowhere near limited to shows such as Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, True Blood, Californication, Hung, Spartacus, Homeland, Dexter, and Shameless (and, if you go back over the last decade or so, Rome, Deadwood, The Wire, Oz, The Tudors, Brotherhood, and Camelot), nudity couldn't be any more alive and well.
There are still some movies that I haven't seen that I'd like to see, Ai No Corrida aka "In the Realm of the Senses" and Walerian Borowcyck's "The Beast", which would probably be of the kind that are too interesting to be pornographic. Here's what Mike Figgis says about them in an interview (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2004/jan/30/1)
"But there is a short that comes with the British DVD release of The Beast that is genuinely erotic, because it allows you into this world that questions the object of eroticism. Nagisa Oshima's Ai No Corrida is the same: it has a weight of tragedy running through it. With both of those films you cannot separate the eroticism from the narrative and turn it into a commodity."
I guess the idea for me is that it would be about spontaneity,because art is the illusion of spontanety: and spontaneity wouldn't be spontaneity if it were happening all the time. It's a kind of mysterious thing:so it's kind of about the mystery of spontaneity. And what makes bad art is that it thinks spontaneity is something that happens all the time; like with porno, they don't even try to have a story.
About the nakedness, I think women (or people) look better with their clothes on, not to judge it just based on that, because as I said, it has to be about spontaneity too.
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