O tempora! O mores! Cultural modernisation and nudity depiction in European cinema

Film production is not an isolated process. Filmmaking is highly embedded in authors’ cultural backgrounds and social and cultural contexts. Cultural industries are thought to be affected by the cultural environment: values and attitudes shape patterns of production and the types of products (Hesmondhalgh, 2018). That being said, culture is known as probably the most polysemantic concept in modern humanities and social sciences which poses a problem to the definition of cultural context. Generally, sociologists view culture as a set of beliefs, values, and attitudes incorporated in social institutions, meanwhile, scholars in culture studies tend to see culture as a set of symbols embodied in various types of texts. In the current study, we combine these two approaches to see how different types of cultures are related to each other by juxtaposing the social attitudes of the population and European film production.

Particularly, this work focuses on the relationship between cultural modernisation measured by the prevalence of choice values (Welzel, 2013), and nudity depiction in films. Choice values are a subcategory of the emancipative values index proposed by Welzel (2013) who argues that economic development and increase in existential security leads to the shift in value orientations amongst the population. This revised modernisation theory (Inglehart, 1997) suggests that people start preferring personal freedoms over conservative views. This manifests through higher acceptance of minorities, tolerance toward sexual freedom and, generally, more egalitarian views. In this case, choice values cover the aspects related to sexual freedoms. Consequently, we may expect that the spread of choice values is reflected in the cinema.

The depiction of nudity in films is itself an ongoing discussion in many areas of studies. The employment and perception of nude bodies has been under the scrutiny of film studies for decades. This issue relates to numerous aspects of art history, ethics, and aesthetics, as well as gender studies and the sociology of the body. Established gender orders are a particularly prominent aspect in the discussion of nudity depiction in films. This discussion focuses on the differences in the presentation of female and male characters including body images (Mulvey, 1975; Peberdy, 2011; Tasker, 1993a). Another branch of studies covers the representation of sexual orientations, and the acceptable ways of showing certain types of relationships (Bordo, 1999). In the current study we aim to look at how cultural context shapes the depiction of men and women onscreen.

This study relies on several sources of information. The primary one is the Internet movie database (IMDb) which is a collaborative dataset of films and television programs containing information about technical characteristics, content, and crew. Data on value orientations is obtained and calculated using European Value Study (EVS, Gedeshi et al., 2021). We also use V-dem data (Coppedge et al., 2020) on government media censorship, and Maddison Project Database (Inklaar et al., 2018) on GDP per capita to account for external factors that may affect the content of films.