THE PRESENCE of sexuality in films or motion pictures has not been as prevalent or detailed as it has been in creative literature and painting. Both painting and literature have been vehicles for sexuality centuries before the 20th Century invention of motion pictures. These two prior art-forms certainly had a major influence on filmmaking, whether steeped in sexuality or not. But try to think of many mainstream films, outside of today’s hardcore pornographic ones, which have memorable scenes of sexuality. Our memory, at least of those who have been film fans for four or five decades, may recall that in the 1960s, there were constant cries in the media that nudity and sex were becoming a new trend in mainstream films.
This was true, not so much in American or Hollywood films, however, as in European films. We will return to the reason for this shortly. The reason for this outcry about the new explicitness of certain Hollywood films was because in the prior decades before the 60s, the famous Production Code for Hollywood films permitted no outright nudity. The contrast with the restrictions on sexual content in 40s and 50s Hollywood films is what made the  appearance of nudity and prolonged sexual activity in new Hollywood films of the 60s, and after, seem so exciting and unusual.
Sensational media commentaries and the free speech of laymen and women may try to convince us that the appearance of nudity and sexuality in mainstream movies since the 1960s has to do with modern decadence, permissiveness and promiscuity. This viewpoint is typical of those not involved in the creation of the different arts, and who never consider the reasons behind the progressive techniques of artists, or the function this might play in giving a more believable credence to creative literature or films, and the attention of their audiences.
A photographic image is stagnant, immobile, but a movie is not. The photographic image is therefore less convincing than captured active human behaviour in motion pictures, because it does not show the whole active contextual truth. For over a century, the stagnant photographic image nevertheless offered far more time for contemplation of sexuality and arousal than the fleeting images of nudity and sexuality in movies, except, of course, for today’s pornographic films whose entire novelty is based on sustaining sexual acts in detail.
Mainstream films, on the other hand, for decades had to present an artificial face to the world by denying the reality of continuity in human behaviour when it came to showing people as they really were in uninhibited moments, or in acts of intimacy. Everyone knows those famous cutaway moments of the movie camera in countless films. What this restriction did, by its artificiality, was to block an enormous amount of  value attached to scenes where only the artistic presentation of nudity or sexuality is important, giving pleasure on the surface of the screen, and not encouraging a judgmental opinion based on artificial extended definitions of morality, pornography, sin, etc, which are cerebral projections from viewers, but not inherent within the mere presentation of affectionate fleeting creative images of sensuality or sexuality.
Also, the presentation of sexuality as a cinematic image detached from any excessive involvement with crime, violence, or abuse (which too many Hollywood or American films often add on to stories showing nudity, as though including such aberrations makes movies more ‘true’ ) gave more credence to the everyday lives of humans, stretching far back into human history.
For example, in ancient Egypt, a hot tropical land, were Egyptian women always swaddled in clothing while indoors? Did Cleopatra ever lie in the nude while attended by her servants? In Joseph Mankiewicz’s brilliant 1963 film, ‘CLEOPATRA’, Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra lying in the nude created quite a stir, simply because such an everyday historical truth had always been denied in prior Hollywood films.
In ‘THE CARPETBAGGERS’  of the 1960s, when Carol Baker is shown in a brief scene sitting on her vanity stool nude (a highly sexual scene because of the generosity of the composition and Baker’s hips inflated by her posture), is such a scene uncommon among countless women past and present at toilette?
Similarly, in other films of the 60s, like ‘THE LONG SHIPS’ with Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier: Is the scene of white blonde Iberian and Scandinavian women being sold stark naked at an 8th Century North African Moorish auction historical fiction?  Or Dionne Warwick in her film debut as a slave woman in ‘THE SLAVES’ of 1969, a rarely seen today but unique and worthwhile film, when she gives a fully nude rear view of her gorgeous black Aphrodite dimensions, is that purely an untrue Hollywood depiction of  reality during the centuries of African bondage in the Americas?
Such honest scenes of everyday life, past or present, stimulate further consideration of attitudes and social values when we focus on the peculiar physical qualities of individual actors/actresses, and no doubt there are women who regret the double-standard of films not offering enough heterosexual male nudity.
A pronounced visual and sexually-charged suggestiveness is offered when women with voluptuous bodies but faces contrary to a fine-featured classic definition of beauty, display this dichotomy. This is a value which singer Warwick’s nude scene in ‘THE SLAVES’ delivers, and later in 1975, the wonderful spunky English actress, Glenda Jackson offers us in ‘THE ROMANTIC ENGLISHWOMAN’, a totally interesting and enjoyable film, when, as the neglected wife of novelist, Michael Caine, and the assertive mistress of the suave sophisticated gigolo played by Helmut Berger, she shows us all her luscious assets with the camera rolling on her back from head to heels.
Obviously, the cinematic medium grasped the opportunity for attracting audiences by choosing specific actresses and actors for their peculiar physical and mental attributes. The famous faces, bosoms, legs, hips etc, of actresses like Jean Harlow, Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe, Anita Eckberg, Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida etc, come to mind. But conveying a deeper more extended human value to sexuality on screen concerns those film directors and actors who surprise us with their fresh examples of the sexual image. Deborah Kerr for example, a cherished English actress who left Britain for Hollywood during World War II, came to be known for her quiet, modest, tender, caring roles as a wartime widow, wife, lover, dedicated daughter, Nun, etc, all unforgettably rendered with her erudite British accent, yet near her retirement from acting, as a mature experienced actress under Elia Kazan’s direction, she shocked us by taking off everything in ‘THE ARRANGEMENT’ of 1969, revealing her voluptuous body in a few nude scenes, that were worth the wait.
Kerr’s nude scenes were valuable beyond mere cinematic eroticism, because they asserted the preserved beauty of a middle-aged woman’s body in an artistic profession which continually overstresses the commerciality of recent or youthful material.
Often the over emphasis or over attention to the apparent beauty of a contemporary actress can blind or distract us from the creative use of sexuality in her films. Michele Pfeiffer, for example, has been constantly noted for her imaginative and emotional grip on our attention via her apparent facial beauty, her expressions or gestures, but her more serious creative use of screen time, under good direction, to highlight artistic significance often goes by under the noses of well-intentioned admirers.
In ‘INTO THE NIGHT’ of 1985, for instance, Pfeiffer’s stylistic design of future roles, when the camera reveals her for a few seconds in the nude through the narrow space of an open door, walking within a bedroom, the scene has little sexual power, but far more creative meaning
as a perfect example of the double-edged fleeting motion-picture image; it nails the technical aspect of film’s fleeting imagery simultaneously with the fleeting voyeuristic pleasure of unfinished sexuality suggested by the potential in her visualized nudity. A number of years later the same sort of suggestive sexual potential in the fleeting cinematic image would be shown more sensationally in ‘BASIC INSTINCT’ when Sharon Stone, also under good direction, uncrosses her legs minus underwear, and when she undresses with her bedroom door open knowing detective Mike Douglas is outside looking in.  Stone’s scene however is quite second fiddle to Pfeiffer’s neatly echoing one made a good decade earlier. The tying together of two distant moments of imagistic sexuality in film history also occurs in Pfeiffer’s ‘ONE FINE DAY’ of this decade, when in the final scenes she invites George Clooney to her apartment and prepares to sleep with him, placing her leg high on a bathroom sink and shaving it (meanwhile he has already fallen asleep). This is an original influenced version of Sophia Loren’s incredibly sexy striptease in preparation for sex with Marcello Mastroianni, who has already fallen asleep, in the final scenes of Vittorio De Sica’s ‘YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW’ of the late 60s, a good thirty years before ‘ONE FINE DAY’. These are the sort of creative supplements to Pfeiffer’s sexuality in some of her best roles which elevates them beyond mere audience manipulation via displays of her physical beauty.
This brings us to the indispensable creative role sexuality has played in perhaps the most balanced films of the world, made by continental European cinema. The key to this vibrant and ever-fresh distinction left in  a  sumptuous quantity of European films from the 1940s to the present, is the pronounced heightening of cinematic sexuality by the feminine use of clothes. This begins in Italy of 1948, with De Santis’s indelible cinematic masterpiece of local female labor in Italy’s rice fields, ‘BITTER RICE’, starring Silvana Mangano, one of the most beautiful, sensual and intelligent Italian actresses, born of an English mother and Italian father, to ever light up the screen. Mangano’s wardrobe of tight shorts and shirts, sometimes wet, hwer marvelous dancing to American Swing Jazz, etc, under de Santis’s  exaggerated left-wing direction, escalated a love for cinema world-wide. Mangano added ‘MAMBO’ of 1954 to her superb early highly sensual and vivacious film roles, before moving on to a brilliant list of diverse intelligent and sensitive roles. Yet the European cinema’s exciting skill in the use of clothes to explore sexuality had been preceded by the delightful 1930s films of legendary Hollywood actresses like Jean Harlow, Ginger Rogers, Myna Loy and others, but typically, Hollywood’s creative freedom would be cramped by all sorts of non-artistic pressures. Particularly since the 1960s European actresses like Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Claudia Cardinale, Monica Vitti, Laura Antonelli, Romy Schneider, Elke Sommer, Julie Christie, Charlotte Rampling, Isabelle Huppert, Daniel Silvera (Venezuelan), Sonia Braga (Brazilian) Maruska Detmers,  Ornella Muti, and others, explored numerous qualities of sexuality via semi-nude images. Scenes like Claudia Cardinale’s sun-tanned curves glistening beneath sheer transparent fabric as she paces a corridor in Visconti’s masterpiece ‘SANDRA’ of 1965, or Monica Vitti sitting on a sunny window-sill revealing the splendor of all her bare legs and thighs after love-making in Antonioni’s profound classic ‘L’AVENTURA’ of 1960, or the young aspiring models being playfully undressed by the serious bohemian photographer in Antonioni’s greatest artistic film, ‘BLOW UP’ of 1966, or Gina Lollobrigida’s and Romy Schneider’s seductive scenes in ‘BAMBOLE’ of 1965,  and ‘BOCASSIO 70’ of 1962, etc. Not to have seen, or have the opportunity to see this exciting and educational quantity of European films is to miss the chance to share the everyday pleasures such films deliver, and also to remain inexperienced in the artistic possibilities of sexuality’s role in high-quality film-making.
The necessity of sexuality as a lasting value in the arts, and therefore in upholding the optimism and pleasure of everyday life, has been extended to some of the best music videos of today. This is the format in which one possibility of a  new exciting cinematic form, also influenced by the vivacious style of 1930’s Hollywood, and 50s and 60s European cinema, can take shape. The rapid images and jump-cuts, already influenced by Jean- Luc Godard’s films perhaps, hold potential because of  their short story qualities, and not as recordings of a band’s performance. First brought to outstanding visual beauty and emotional sensitivity by the greatest of all video musicians DURAN DURAN, then added to by Michael Jackson’s two masterpiece videos, ’THRILLER’ and ‘BILLY JEAN’, both admitting to a cinematic historyof Sci-fi horror and Film Noir, some music videos have brought cinematic narrative style to a new unrealized threshold. It does not get any more perfect in all artistic aspects than ‘WAITING FOR TONIGHT’ by Jennifer Lopez, who can walk away from her career on the basis of that faultless audio-video work of art and remain honored. The signs of a new exciting cinematic style related to the early sexuality of vivacious 30s Hollywood, and 50s and 60s European cinema are in other videos like, the also perfect, ‘CRAZY ABOUT YOU’ by Kelly Rowland and Nelly,  and Laura Branigan’s ‘SELF CONTROL’. How can one extend such style coherently to over an hour’s length? This challenge can be an artist’s and public’s discovery. One the other hand, the sign of immaturity in artists appear when they seem unaware of the achievement or advancement they have made in a specific work, or works of art, so that they are unable to arrive again at the same quality or standard, and their opportunity to become the true artist they may is lost in the category of past flukes.