The 22 Best Nude Scenes in Film, from ‘Shortbus’ to ‘Blue Velvet’
“That’s not art.
A striptease isn’t art.
It’s too direct.
It’s more direct than art.”That line from Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” sums up a lot of feelings people seem to have about nudity in film.
The history of painting and sculpture is full of nude portraiture, which is regularly and comfortably classified as art.
But the nude scene in movies is rarely discussed alongside a Canova marble statue or Manet’s “Olympia.” Movies blur the boundaries between “real life” and artistic indirection so thoroughly that people discuss nude scenes in movies as practically everything but art.
It’s “content” that deserves an “advisory,” or something akin to “porn,” however the Supreme Court is classifying that these days.As many have noted, the very nature of the actor’s job demands the audience look at them.
So when nudity enters the (literal) picture, it complicates the relationship between viewer and viewed.
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