[QUOTE=pizzabrat]
You most certainly mean on television, and even then that’s only notable because it was the first and last show where a couple shared a bed on TV for a long time, since TV programming isn’t much older than 1947. But if you think that’s the first time a couple was shown sharing a bed ever in the mainstream media, you sound stooooooopiiiiiiid!
[/QUOTE]
I should have noted that I was indeed referring to television. Thank you for pointing that out.
[QUOTE=jovan]
Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles (1989) had puppet sex (and much more) way before Team America. As a matter of fact I think it was the first time a walrus and a kitten were shown having sex in a mainstream movie.
[/QUOTE]
OK, but Team America is the first movie where puppets piss and shit on each other during sex. Hell it may be the only mainstream movie where anyone pisses and shits as a sex act.
[QUOTE=Larry Borgia]
OK, but Team America is the first movie where puppets piss and shit on each other during sex. Hell it may be the only mainstream movie where anyone pisses and shits as a sex act.
[/QUOTE]
That scene really took me buy surpirse. There I was happily watching what I though was a nostalgic remake of a children’s TV series, when, well, ummm . . . YIKES!
[QUOTE=Wee Bairn]
Not sexual, but genital- Ebert IIRC once wrote that Point Break (the good one) (1967) was the first film to show a guy getting punched in the crotch- and probably the only film that showed a punch (as opposed to kick).
[/QUOTE]
You’re thinking of Point Blank (d. John Boorman, with Lee Marvin & Angie Dickinson).
[QUOTE=Larry Borgia]
Hell it may be the only mainstream movie where anyone pisses and shits as a sex act.
[/QUOTE]
There’s urine involved in one of the scenes in The Realm of the Senses I mentioned above. However, it’s one of the few things they don’t show in graphic detail.
Last Tango in Paris must be the first cinematic use of butter as a lubricant.
First French kiss in a US movie is reputedly Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood in “Splendor in the Grass”.
[QUOTE=jovan]
There’s urine involved in one of the scenes in The Realm of the Senses I mentioned above. However, it’s one of the few things they don’t show in graphic detail.
[/QUOTE]
Not shown at all (thank goodness), but in Crimes and Misdemeanors Woody Allen’s character’s sister tells him how a date tied her up and “went to the bathroom” on her.
That’s not from Ben Hur, that’s from a photo series taken in the '30s. Novarro is never nude in Ben Hur–skimpily and suggestively dressed, yes, but not nude. There is a naked man in the film, though, playing a galley slave chained to a wall.
A pair of breasts hell, it’s a whole parade of them, and in Technicolor, no less.
Movies about these topics were tremendously popular in the late teens in Europe, especially Germany during the brief window during and after WWI when there was no film censorship. They generally went under the title “Enlightenment Film”, and some may genuinely have been, but mostly they were just exploitation. Still, they played in mainstream cinemas and drew enormous audiences.
Richard Oswald’s 1917 film Let There Be Light! really kicked-off the genre. It turned into a film franchise with plots revolving around venereal diseases, mostly syphilis. Then there was Diary of a Lost Girl in 1918, which starts off with a rape resulting in pregnancy and leads to a life of prostitution. Speaking of prostitution, there’s Prostitution in 1919. Not terribly sexy, but Different From the Others, also from 1919, does revolve around two gay men and features scenes of a gay bar. It’s also the first film to actually use the word “homosexual”. And that’s just Oswald, lots of other directors were in on the act, too.
Very few Enlightenment Films survive. Of those I’ve mentioned, beyond newspaper reviews and personal letters, we’ve got around 20 minutes from Different From the Others, a few scattered stills, and that’s it. Diary of a Lost Girl was remade in 1929 with Louise Brooks, and it survives. It’s depictions of prostitution are explicit and it also adds a bunch of lesbianism to the story for good measure (there’re also gay and lesbian subplots in Brooks’s other European silent, Pandora’s Box, as well mistresses and threats of being sold into Egyptian sex-slavery).
As for abortion, I’m sure there’s a better example, but it’s suggested in A Woman of Affairs (1928). It’s not explicit, like it is in the book the film is based on, but it’s hinted at enough.
For gay sex (and not just gay characters), the earliest I know of is Sex in Chains (1928), although you could make an unconvincing argument for Courtship of the Sun and Moon (1907). Sex in Chains is about two men finding each other in prison.
As for Gone With the Wind-style basking, the list is endless. For a start, watch any Garbo/Gilbert silent, or really, any pre-Code romance.
Charlie Bubbles (1967), starring Albert Finney, was the first mainstream movie to portray a woman going down on a man (although the camera stays on Finney’s face).
Two early sex scenes in mainstream movies to involve nudity are Hiroshima, Mon Amour (France-Japan, 1959) and Woman in the Dunes (Japan, 1964). Both, very erotic.
And switching to television, I’ve mentioned this before, but Lucy and Ricky initially shared the same bed on I Love Lucy — on the first episode of the series, in 1951.
American silent features dealing with abortion include: The Miracle of Life (1915), Faith (1916), The Question (1916), The Valley of Decision (1916), Where Are My Children? (1916), Corruption (1917), The Curse of Eve (1917), Enlighten Thy Daughter (1917), Master of His Home (1917), The Natural Law (1917), The House Without Children (1919), The Scoffer (1920).
[QUOTE=Dusty]
Movies about these topics were tremendously popular in the late teens in Europe, especially Germany during the brief window during and after WWI when there was no film censorship. They generally went under the title “Enlightenment Film”, and some may genuinely have been, but mostly they were just exploitation. Still, they played in mainstream cinemas and drew enormous audiences.
Richard Oswald’s 1917 film Let There Be Light! really kicked-off the genre. It turned into a film franchise with plots revolving around venereal diseases, mostly syphilis. Then there was Diary of a Lost Girl in 1918, which starts off with a rape resulting in pregnancy and leads to a life of prostitution. Speaking of prostitution, there’s Prostitution in 1919. Not terribly sexy, but Different From the Others, also from 1919, does revolve around two gay men and features scenes of a gay bar. It’s also the first film to actually use the word “homosexual”. And that’s just Oswald, lots of other directors were in on the act, too.
Very few Enlightenment Films survive. Of those I’ve mentioned, beyond newspaper reviews and personal letters, we’ve got around 20 minutes from Different From the Others, a few scattered stills, and that’s it.
[/QUOTE]
Were any of these films/directors associated with the Dada movement?
None that I’m aware of, but maybe some were. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never read anything suggesting a link between Enlightenment Films and the Dada movement.
In some biography of Gloria Swanson I read it discussed Erich von Stroheim’s background and how he drove Billy Wilder and other members of the cast and crew bonkers on the set of Sunset Blvd with his constant suggestions and sharing of his (decades out of date) expertise on filmmaking. He was accounted a genius when he was a silent film director/producer but a genius whose films were never on schedule or within budget and usually lost money, thus he earned his living playing Nazis and evil scientists for most of his career.
The relevance to this thread is that he wanted to majorly beef up the script to incorporate revelations and subtleties about Max and Norma’s sexual history. He developed a backstory about Max’s sado-masochistic obsession with Norma before, during, and after their marriage, how he had beaten her constantly when they were together (which explained why he became her remorseful slave) and his impotence when they were together, etc., and when told that there was simply no time to go into this and it would get them in trouble with censors he suggested just dropping hints: Max looking at Norma and holding a champagne bottle downward to symbolize a limp penis, Max gathering Norma’s underclothes from her bedroom for the laundry and sniffing them as he went downstairs, Max standing behind Norma and drawing back his hand as if to strike her when she’s not looking, but then being gentle when actually approaching her, etc… The producers and directors all continued with a “thanks but no thanks- please read your lines as written and don’t even think of ad-libbing unless you clear it with us in advance, about which- don’t” attitude. (They were already irritated by the fact he didn’t volunteer the information he couldn’t drive, hence in the scenes where he’s chauffeuring Norma you’ll notice he’s moving the wheel constantly on a straight road [someone who’s never held a steering wheel before] and in the scene where they drive into Paramount you can see the cable that attaches the Isotta Fraschini to the truck that’s actually towing it.)
I’ve never seen any of von Stroheim’s movies (i.e. the ones he directed), but I wonder if he tried the S&M and perversion hints (subtle or otherwise) in them. And if he didn’t, were there any silent directors who did?
I recommend Von Stroheim’s GREED (1924) and THE WEDDING MARCH (1928), his two best pictures. Unfortunately, neither is in print on Region 1 DVD, but TCM shows them occasionally, including a four-hour restoration of GREED.
Cruelty and fetishism are running themes in Von Stroheim’s silents.
[QUOTE=Sampiro]
I’ve never seen any of von Stroheim’s movies (i.e. the ones he directed), but I wonder if he tried the S&M and perversion hints (subtle or otherwise) in them. And if he didn’t, were there any silent directors who did?
[/QUOTE]
FTR, Von Stroheim was approximate 187.5 times the director that Billy Wilder was, so as good a film as *HB * is, it might have been great.
Sampiro, I think you might like Foolish Wives. Not as ponderous Greed. It’s also got a bit of proto-pomo fun in it.
Last summer’s Short Bus was the first mainstream (NC-17 - but not porn) film that had a lot of firsts:
Don’t blame me, you asked.
[QUOTE=JohnBckWLD]
Last summer’s Short Bus was the first mainstream (NC-17 - but not porn) film that had a lot of firsts:
Don’t blame me, you asked.
[/QUOTE]
Please at least tell me that it isn’t Ed Koch’s rectum. Even if it’s a lie, please tell me that.
Wait a minute, into or towards?