Nudist film  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Revision as of 18:01, 12 February 2009; view current revision
←Older revision | Newer revision→
Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Nudity in film

Exploitation and nudist films

Another notable exception to emerge in the 1930s were the low-budget, sensationalized exploitation films that travelled across the country in "roadshow" fashion and played in independent theaters. The exploiters found they could skirt the production code and make lurid exposes on taboo subjects (drug parties, prostitution, venereal disease, etc.) that sometimes included nudity if they were presented as moralizing educational films that delivered a cautionary message. Using this framework as a pretense, brief nude scenes of women appeared in Maniac (1933), Sex Madness (1937), and skinny-dipping sequences in Marihuana (1936) and Child Bride (1938).

Nudist films are a genre of films associated with the 1950s and 1960s, although the genre has roots dating back to the 1930s with such titles as The Nude World (1933). Nudist films claim to depict the lifestyles of members of the nudism or naturist movement, but were largely a vehicle for the exhibition and commercial exploitation of female nudity within the context of public theatrical screenings.

Famous examples of nudist films are Garden of Eden (1954) directed by Max Nosseck. Other producers and directors active in the genre included David F. Friedman, Herschell Gordon Lewis, and Barry Mahon. Filmmaker Doris Wishman was probably the most active producer/director in the genre, with seven nudist films to her credit between 1960 and 1964. (Blaze Starr Goes Nudist (1962), Hideout in the Sun (1960), Diary of a Nudist (1961), Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls (1962), Playgirls International (1963), Behind the Nudist Curtain (1963), and The Prince and the Nature Girl (1964).) Exploitation producer George Weiss released films such as Nudist Life (1961), by editing together vintage nudist camp footage. That same year in England, Harrison Marks released Naked as Nature Intended starring Pamela Green to box office success. (Marks soon went to make softcore pornographic and caning/spanking fetish films.)



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Nudist film" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools