In the world of cinema and entertainment, fame and influence have sometimes given cover to appalling conduct. It is to be hoped that the jailing of the film mogul Harvey Weinstein marks a decisive shift away from a culture that tolerated sexual assault as if it were a mere character idiosyncrasy.
New guidelines on sex scenes in the cinema are intended to help by ensuring that performers are comfortable in auditions and during the filming of intimate scenes. In particular, the new rules stipulate that directors should not use digital “body doubles” to make such scenes more explicit than the performer has agreed.
This is a welcome step that will enhance the experience of viewers as well as performers. For it is a timeless truth of cinema that, where sex and nudity are concerned, less is more. A hint of eroticism is a good deal more dramatically interesting and aesthetically alluring than a surfeit of it.
From the earliest days of moving pictures, sensuality has been at its most intense when restrained. Edwin Porter’s film The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903) famously depicts an assistant in a store who is attracted to a young woman shopping for shoes. As the customer lifts her skirt hem, she exposes (wait for it) her ankle.
The first explicit depiction of sex in the cinema is believed to be Ecstasy (1933) by the Czech director Gustav Machaty. It effectively shows the heroine, played by Hedy Lamarr, in the state implied by the title, but all we see is her face.
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In modern cinema too, passions of the human heart are most vividly conveyed by a glance rather than vigorous activity beneath the sheets. In Martin Scorsese’s dramatisation of Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence, the lovers, Newland Archer and the Countess Olenska, suppress their yearnings in favour of propriety. It leaves us, never mind them, wanting all the more.
