The first film to ever show a penis on screen
Nudity in film is now pretty much part and parcel of the industry, although we might hope that it has become less exploitative in the past ten or 15 years or so. A nude scene has often drawn the audience to the cinema, highlighting the true erotic voyeurism that the medium can offer.
The first films to contain nudity were admittedly silent erotic films made to stimulate the, erm, senses. Many cinematic historians consider 1987’s After The Ball to be the first in which a simulated nude scene was shown, in which director George Melies had his wife wear a body stocking in order to simulate nudity.
The world of erotic cinema took flight around the turn of the 20th Century. Two French filmmakers, Eugene Pirou and Albert Kirchner, had their 1899 short film Le Coucher de la Mariee featuring an actress named Louise Willy, in which she performed a striptease in the bathroom. The success of the film led many more filmmakers to acknowledge that there was money to be made from showing women taking their clothes off.
The first film to show a penis on screen was the 1911 Italian silent film L’Inferno, which had been loosely adapted from Inferno, the first book/canticle in The Divine Comedy by the 14th Century Italian poet and philosopher Dante Alighieri. The film took a remarkable three years to make and is widely considered to be the first full-length Italian feature movie.
The film was the first film to ever show nude males, including their penises, as they are led onto a boat from the River Styx. That’s probably the least shocking part of the film, though, as it also depicts some truly gruesome scenes, including the Devil eating humans alive whole and harpies eating the corpses of those who have committed suicide.
It was because the film was one of the first to depict human beings in hell that it was also the first to show full frontal male and female nudity. L’Inferno was remade several times, including a version in the United States entitled Dante’s Inferno, which sees many scenes of nudity and flagellation.
Many more explicit films showing nudity were, of course, to come, including I, Am Curious (Yellow), the 1967 Swedish erotic film written and directed by Vilgot Sjoman, who also performed in the movie. It saw several shots of Sjoman in the buff, including close-ups of his genitals. Evidently, things had changed drastically from the beginning of the 20th Century to its sixth decade.
