The main subject of this book is not "eroticism in cinema" but the naked body, as recorded by the film camera to appear on the cinema screen, viewed by an audience seeking these images for the pleasure of sight and imaginative erotic provocation.
On the global stage, nudity follows the dictates of fashion and the moral rules of each era, and any deviation is punished or ghettoized. Once, a woman's calf was considered an affront to public decency, at a time when the millions of corpses lying in the battlefields of World War I did not constitute a similar affront.
Slowly and painfully, skirts rose, necklines fell, the scissors of censorship and "public decency" appeared and disappeared, and at the same time, thousands of naked Jewish bodies entered the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Mauthausen, and the human body, just like the sexual act, became enslaved to a destructive Christian morality, which was later used, through censorship, as the best advertiser for similar films.
Since the 1960s, Europe progressively removed veils from human bodies, reaching the 1970s, which became "Sodom and Gomorrah," with Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) by Pasolini and The Empire of the Senses (1976) by Oshima. The struggle was not with the ghosts of censorship and bourgeois-Christian morality. The struggle was and continues to be for the saturation of the "insatiable" thirst of the human eye for the naked body.
What a more beautiful image of a naked female breast or a male organ in erection or flaccidity, even today, even after many decades. Some angle of capture, some lighting, some functionality within the frame still escapes us. And some renowned and esteemed actor will remain to be exposed and glorified.
11 photographs, the greatest ersatz of the 20th century, kept the bodies young-old, alive-dead, naked and beautiful, while they do not exist. The deception is present before the anxiety of the Western man for the decay and impending loss of the perishable body, in the preservation of the Hollywood stars, women with perfect faces, platinum hair, and the body they hinted at offering us, a body we would all wish to remain unspoiled.
We attempted, through the constructs of the mind, to immobilize the body and, by replacing time with space, to evade death; this is photography, this is cinema; and here are the results: the body has departed, and its trace remains on the screen.
