The Earliest Films

Shortly after the Lumieres conducted the first public screening of a film (in December 1895), pioneering French film-maker Georges Melies directed the very short B/W 'adult' film Après Le Bal (1897, Fr.) (After the Ball, Bath) with one of the earliest nude scenes in film history. Reportedly around the same time, "blue movie" pornographer Eugene Pirou pioneered the risque film (called "smoking concert" or stag party films) when he produced the slightly erotic Le Coucher de la Marie (1896, Fr.) (aka Bedtime for the Bride) in which Louise Willy performed the first strip tease onscreen during a bathing scene -- the short pornographic film (of which only a few minutes exist) was directed by Léar (real name Albert Kirchner).
Another similar film was Fatima’s Coochie-Coochie Dance (1896) a short nickelodeon kinetoscope/film of a gyrating belly dancer named Fatima (well-known for her dancing shows at the Columbia World's Exhibition in 1893). It became the first film in which a scene was censored - for her gyrating and moving pelvis - it was covered up by what appeared to be a white picket fence (a grid-like pattern of white lines).
The very first kiss on film was between a Victorian couple seen in the Edison kinetoscope The May Irwin Kiss (1896) (aka The Kiss, or The Irwin-Rice Kiss in a filmed scene from the stage play The Widow Jones). This titillating short 20-second film, with a close-up of a kiss, was denounced as shocking and pornographic to early moviegoers and caused the Roman Catholic Church to call for censorship.
And Eadweard Muybridge's primitive motion studies (from 1884-1887) included test footage with cinematic glimpses of naked men and women. Lois Weber's and Paramount's 4-reel silent film Hypocrites (1914) featured full female nudity in the guise of an unclad lady (Margaret Edwards) - 'the Naked Truth' - who occasionally appeared as a transitional plot element between scenes.


Audrey Munson (a real-life model) first appeared artistically nude in George Foster Platt's controversial Inspiration (1915) from the Mutual Film Corporation, as a sculptor's model. It was the first known film in which a leading actress stripped down to be naked, making her the first nude film star. Munson also appeared nude in another silent film, Rea Burger's 7-reel Purity (1916), in a dual role as a spirit figure and as an artist's nude model named Purity/Virtue.