"Men dream of women." "Women dream of themselves being dreamt of." "Men look at women." "Women watch themselves being looked at." "Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors reminding them how they look or how they should look." "Behind every glance, is a judgement." "Sometimes the glance they meet, is their own, reflected back from a mirror." "A woman is always accompanied, except when quite alone" "And perhaps even then, by her own image of herself." "When she is walking, across a room, or weeping at the death of her father, she cannot avoid envisioning herself, walking or weeping from earliest childhood, she is taught and persuaded to survey herself continually" "she has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others and particularly how she appears to men" "is of crucial importance, for it is normally thought of as the success of her life A woman in the culture of privileged Europeans, is first and foremost a sight to be looked at." "What kind of sight is revealed in the average European oil painting" "There were portraits of women as there were portraits of men." "but in one category of painting, women were the principle ever occuring subject, that category was the nude." "In the nudes of European painting, we can discover some of the criteria and conventions by which women were judged." "We can see how women were seen." "What then is a nude?" "In his book on the nude, Kenneth Clark says that being naked is simply being without clothes" "the nude, according to him, is a form of art" "I would put it differently." "To be naked is to be oneself." "To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized as oneself." "A nude has to be seen as an object in order to be a nude." "In the European oil painting, nakedness is not taken for granted as in archaic art." "Nakedness is a sight for those who are dressed." "That is why Manners's painting which really marks the end of a period I am considering is so profound a comment on all the works that preceded it." "the story begins with the story of Adam and Eve as told in Genesis." "And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desired to make one wise she took of the fruit thereof and did eat" "and she gave also to her husband with her, and he did eat." "and the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked and the Lord God called out to the man and said" "Where art thou?" "and he said" "I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself unto the woman God said," ""I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception." "In sorrow, thou shall bring forth children, and they desire will be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."" "Two things are striking about this story." "They become aware of being naked because, as a result of eating the apple, each sees the other differently nakedness is created in the mind of the beholder." "The second striking fact is that the woman is blamed and is punished by being made subservient to the man" "In relationship to the woman, the man becomes the agent of God." "In medieval art, the story is often illustrated scene following scene as in a strip cartoon." "During the Renaissance, the narrative sequence disappears, and the single moment which is nearly always depicted, is the moment of shame." "The couple wear fig leaves or make a modest gesture with their hands" "But now, their shame is not so much in relationship to one another as is to the spectator." "It is the spectator looking which shames them." "Later, as painting became more secular, many other subjects offer the opportunity for painting nudes." "But always in the European tradition, the nude implies an awareness of being seen by the spectator." "They are not naked as they are, they are naked as you see them." "Often, as with the favorite subject of Suzanna and the elders, this is the actual theme of the picture." "We join the elders to spy on her." "She looks back at us looking at her." "Sometimes the woman, Suzanna, looks at herself in a mirror, picturing herself how men see her." "She sees herself first and foremost as a sight which means as a sight for men." "Thus the mirror is a symbol of the vanity of women yet the male hypocrisy in this is blatant." "You paint a naked women because you enjoy looking at her you put a mirror in her hand, and you call the painting vanity thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you have depictured for your own pleasure" "And thus, incidentally, repeating the biblical example by blaming the woman." "The Judgement of Paris is another favourite mythological subject with the same in written idea of men looking at naked women and judging them." "Paris awards the apple to the woman he finds most beautiful." "Beauty in this context is bound to become competitive." "The judgement of Paris is transformed into a beauty contest." "Aesthetics when applied to women are not as disinterested as the word beauty might suggest." "I don't want to deny the crucial part that seeing plays in sexuality, but there's a great difference in being seen as oneself naked or seeing another in that way and a body being put on display." "To be naked, is to be without disguise." "To be on display, is to have the surface of one's own skin, the hairs of one's own body turned into a disguise." "A disguise which cannot be discarded." "Amongst the tens of thousands of European oil paintings of nudes, there are perhaps 20 or 30 exceptions, paintings in which the artist has seen the woman revealed as herself." "this Rubens this Rembrant" "this George De La Tour" "These paintings are as personal as love poems and their character is quite distinctive" "Most nudes oil paintings have been lined up by their painters for the pleasure of the male spectator owner, who will assess and judge them as sights." "Their nudity is another form of dress" "They are condemned to never being naked with their clothes off, they are as formal as with their clothes on" "Those who are not judged beautiful, are not beautiful." "Those who are, are given the prize." "The prize is to be owned." "That is to say, to be available." "Charles II commissioned this secret painting from Lale." "It's like hundreds of others, it might be Venus and Cupid, but in fact, it was a portrait of one of his mistresses, Nell Gwen." "He chose her passively looking at the spectator staring at her naked." "Her nakedness is not an expression of her own feelings, it is only a sign of her submission to his demand" "The painting, when he shows it to others, demonstrates this submission." "His guests envy him." "By contrast, in another tradition, nakedness is a celebration of active sexual love as between two people, the woman as active as the man the actions of each absorb the other." "In oil painting, the second person or the second person who matters it the person looking at the picture." "Compare the expression of these two women." "One the model for what is considered a masterpiece by Ingres and the other an ill paid model for a photograph in a girly magazine" "Or these two." "Just the expression, the look, what do you see?" "It seems to me that in each pair, the expression is remarkably similar, and it is an expression of responding with calculated charm to the man who she knows is looking at her although she doesn't know him." "It is true that sometimes a painting includes a male lover, but the woman's attention is very rarely directed towards him." "She looks away from him or she looks out of the picture towards he who considers himself her true lover, the spectator-owner." "This painting was sent as a present from the Grand Duke of Florence to the King of France" "The boy kneeling on the cushion and kissing is Cupid." "She is Venus." "But the way her body is arranged has nothing to do with that kissing." "Her body is arranged the way it is to display it to the man looking at the picture." "The picture is made to appeal to his sexuality, it has nothing to do with her sexuality" "The convention of not painting the hair on a woman's body helps towards the same end." "Hair is associated with sexual power, with passion." "The woman's sexual passion, needs to beminimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly of such passion." "There were paintings which depicted male lovers." "These did exist." "But they were mostly private, semi-pornographic pictures." "In most paintings, which were painted to be seen rather than hidden, the only rival to the male spectator is a cupid." "Now, how extraordinary it is that the pictorial symbol of passion was a small boy." "For a similar reason, women in the European art of the oil painting are seldom shown dancing." "They have to be shown languid, exhibiting a minimum of energy." "They are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own." "The appetite was theoretically...gargantuan." "The absurdity of this male flattery, although it was not seen as absurd then reached its peak in the public academic art of the 19th century prime ministers discussed under paintings like this when one of them felt he had been outwitted, he looked up for consolation Ôhe nude in European oil painting is usually presented as an ideal subject" "it is said to be an expression of the European humanist spirit" "I don't want to reject entirely the truth of this, but I have tried to add to it starting off from a different viewpoint." "Duer who believed in the ideal nude thought that this ideal could be constructed by taking the shoulders of one body, the hands of another, the breasts of another,and so on..." "Was this humanist idealism?" "Or was it the result of the indifference to who any one person really was?" "Do these paintings celebrate as we're normally taught the women within them?" "or the male voyeur?" "Is there sexuality within the frame?" "or in front of it?" "I showed the program, as you have seen it, up to now, to five women." "It began to seem absurd that the only images that you are seeing are of women silent, mute" "So, I showed it to them and asked them to comment." "To comment not so much on the program but rather on the questions raised by it" "Above all, on the question of how men see women or how they have seen them in the past." "And how this influences the way women see themselves today." "We have an image, of course, we all have an image of ourselves and it is a visual image, but I wonder how much this sort of classical European painting has shaped that image." "In my own case, I find it quite impossible when I look at the paintings you show, in your film," "I can't take them seriously, I cannot identify with them because they are so immensely exaggerated." "Always, you know, they fasten onto some secondary sexual characteristic, these enormous breasts,these beasting bottoms, those huge things like that and they just aren't real." "Whereas with photographs, you can feel that is potentially, possibly although it probably isn't." "But these, these" "Nearly all of the paintings you have shown are, what is called, idealized." "And therefore, they are to me very unreal in connection with any deep down image that I might have of myself or in connection with any deep down pleasure that I might have when looking at another female body" "They don't give me that pleasure at all" "I can admire them as paintings but they don't mean human beings to me." "The image that I compare myself with is the photograph because it is with photographs that I have been encouraged to think of myself in this way, it is essentially advertising for me that has contributed to this." "And consequently, I find it extremely interesting to go back and think of nudes in this way because" "I have never done so, but having seen the film" "I have no doubt that the same thing applies." "And do you find the nudes in painting unreal in the same way?" "Ões." "Well, you can't get any information from it,can you ?" "there's no guide to how you might-- what information is lacking?" "well, activity." "Dynamism, anything." "It is how someone sees you and that's all, it is something laid upon you." "I'm glad you showed the men in picture because I always find this extremely shocking because the men are dressed and the women are naked and this seems to sum up the whole situation." "It is a humilating position and these women are as well being humiliated and I think this is part of the whole scheme of things as most people have had, at some station in life, nightmares about running through the streets with nothing on" "while everyone else is dressed." "And this seems to me to be one element in the picture." "One very interesting thing you said in the film was about how nudity was really a kind of disguise, it wasn't the real person themselves free." "But it was just another garment they were wearing and worse than a garment, in a sense, because it was something that you can't take off." "This comes, I think, with nudity being combined with a pose." "And that's inevitable if you're going to have a painting of a model." "Um, in a way, I think that we're always dressing." "We're always dressing up for a part." "Always putting on a uniform of one kind of another and I think women do this more than men." "Men have only been doing it fairly recently." "Women are always dressing to show the kind of character that they want to present:" "the mother, the working woman, the pretty young chick." "And nudity is a uniform, in a way, for I'm ready now for sexual pleasure." "So, it doesn't." "You can't identify being nude with being free." "Only just recently I read that book "Story of O" (by Anne Desclos, 1954) which describes a way in which a woman is reduced for the sexual pleasure of the man she's in love with, to a complete object." "And what struck me in all that book as the most impressive image is the fact that she was told that she was never to touch her own breasts, to entirely close her own mouth or to put her legs together." "So, the whole point about her stance all the time is that she was available and this sense of being available, of waiting for other people is the very antithesis of action." "And you know, just like the Brook Street Bureau advertisement," ""Tony hasn't rung." "He's three minutes late in ringing." You feel this whole situation, the number of women who talked to say" ""I stay in so many nights a week, waiting for someone to ring"" "the concept of availability implies passivity because if you're simply waiting for someone else to act then you can't act yourself." "Yes, it's like you will awake when a man touches you when a man kisses you." "Whether its an excuse, to get yourself going" "I think women are shy they are waiting too long." "yes, yes." "Could I say something now about narcissism?" "I think that both men and women are narcissistic but in different senses, and I think that one in sometimes I have the impression that men and women are tremendously narcissistic and are cut off from each other from their images of themselves." "But whereas a woman's image of herself is derived directly from other people, the mirror you're talking about a man's image of himself is derived from the world, that is, it's the world that gives him back his image because he acts in it." "And the women are drawn to him as a source, as central activity and as a source of worth since he is in the world, the fact that he values her is important and so because their centers of narcissism are different," "and the woman's is essentially only related to the other person she is in a much more passive position than he is in relation to it." "Yes." "Do you see narcissism as essentially a negative or positive phenomenon?" "Well, i think that is very difficult to answer but in the sense that it is related to an identity, um, it is a positive phenomenon and it seems to me that what women envy in men, is that they have a sense of their own identity" "that there is something in them which is important to them, other than simply what other people think of them and I think that thingnis product of their interaction with the world" "It' s almost as if through this interaction they build up a store of worth of their sense of themselves which is a constant, it cannot be lost and because a woman doesn't go out and do that, she doesn't create a store" "she waits for the present interaction with a man that can go, that can end at any moment." "There is something here that really I would like to push around a little bit because narcissism is a very short pronounced way of stating a relationship with the world whether it is a man or a woman but this other question which is contained within it, but doesn't go as far as it as an idea" "is this sort of self delight of a person whether it is a man or a woman in life, in what they're doing in their relationships with a man or woman" "and it is a thing that matters tremendously and it's not only a kind of inner thing by which you live but it is a very outer thing by which you gain relationships with your own context in the world" "that you can't gain any other way that it's when you've somehow been made so unconscious of yourself that you easily, naturally, sort of compulsively go out to whatever is going on around you." "Now, when you're a child that tends more than with people to be other things, doesn't it?" "mountains, streams, whereever you go and then only gradually as you go on, you make this kind of absolutely necessary contact with people but I do think that the sort of essense of self delight as a kind of possible thing in the modern world and something" "that fewer women have than men, and want and must have is the power, the compulsion, not the power the compulsion to make contact with the world as you are living in it and when I'm saying that I don't simply mean the people next door or your friends" "I simply mean what is going on" "Yes." "I am not so sure about the delight" "I think it is a very double edged thing" "I know as I suppose I've always known, but I've became aware of it in this film." "I've never consciously looked at myself in the mirror and seen myself as I am" "I always see the image that I want" "I know and my children notice it that if I make up my face I put on a certain expression if I, from adolescence on, if I have seen myself naked in the mirror," "I have not thought of myself naked, I have thought of myself as a nude and I think this comes from having been trolled around all the major art galleries all that lessons, this is culture, this is beauty with a capital B" "and, of course, up to a point from advertising too, but much more from the painting thing um, that you think the female body is beautiful" "I am a beautiful object, if not, I have to do something about it and therefore, the painful part of a narcissistic society is the feeling of inadequacy" "this business of always posing in a mirror" "I think one does absolutely automatically and if you actually catch yourself in a mirror by chance that is not deliberately because you're getting dressed or having a bath but because there's one in the street, or you catch yourself in a shop window," "it's a tremendous shock because you suddenly see yourself as you are which is windblown, untidy, badly dressed, tired, and so on." "We don't see this person at all, and I think this is what happens to women they are always trying to measure up to this erotic image that is projected." "There are some paintings and I'm thinking at this moment of one painting where there is a woman who is wearing a garment she is not nude but it is a garment so loose, so comfortable so easy," "and its my idea, very much of what a picture of a woman might be like" "I think it's from a period before yours, it's so long ago, it's by Lorenzetti(1290-1348) it's from the "Good and bad government"" "it's a fresco, very very old and it is a picture of a woman who is suppossed to represent peace it's quite extraordinary she could be one of the liberated or trying to be liberated young women of today." "she is at ease, she is relaxed she is not playing any part at all she is able to combine pleasure with thought and with dreaming and she is, she might spring into action at any moment and for me she has much, much more to do with nakedness, with oneself," "with the truth of oneself than any number of nudes I have seen." "Subtitles by áñìüäéá ïìÜäá ôïõ 5ïõ öåóôéâÜë êéíçìáôïãñáöéêþí ïìÜäùí ÁÐÈ  ÐÁÌÁÊ"