A few caps and a couple of video clips of
Belinda Bauer from movie Winter Kills.
Winter Kills is a conspiracy movie in which Jeff Bridges stars in the role of Nick Keagan, the half-brother of an assassinated former president, who hears a deathbed confession from a guy claiming that he was the second shooter in the assassination of the president. Jeff character then stumbles upon a conspiracy plot involving more murder and silencing and twist ending.
Belinda Bauer portrays Nick’s girlfriend in the movie. During the audio commentary, William Richert, the director of the movie, mentions that Belinda was his at the time of filming of the movie and adds a few more interesting stories related to the film.
Belinda had another nude scene in the movie. You can check that one out at
Mr. Skin.
Belinda Bauer nude from Winter Kills [
mir.cr]
Belinda Bauer nude from Winter Kills with William Richert's audio commentary [
mir.cr]
As if I don’t have enough work with keeping
up with the contemporary celebrity nudity in films, magazines, social media…, I
got this brilliant idea to start collecting sources of nudity from the past.
Paintings, sculptures, engravings, frescoes,
mosaics, prehistoric Venus figurines, illuminated manuscripts, coins, carvings,
ancient cave art, painted earthenware, jewelry, woodcuts… in short, anything
that was used to depict nude female form.
Today’s topic are prehistoric Venus
figurines, small statuettes from prehistoric times portraying women, that archeologist
excavated at various archeological sites all around the world, but my main
focus will be the ones discovered in the region of Eurasia.
Let me start up my time travel device.
First stop, -187 years ago, no internet, no electric motor yet for another few
years, but according to google, the birth year of the world’s oldest living person. It
happens, when everything is run by computers and there’s no one left to monitor
them. Come to think it, this site might suffer the same fate when I stop
updating it.
If I set my time dial to -2000. No Allah
yet, Jesus just finished high school, deciding which places to visit during his
ten year rumspringa. Maybe head south to see the pyramids, perhaps north to
visit the Athenian Acropolis, or go east, to visit the lands of the wise Buddha.
Next stop some -4000 BCE, and the pyramids
are gone. While some people were occupied with inventing the wheel, others
tried to figure out how to write down how they did it.
Go back another two millenniums and, hooray, we just invented beer. No, glass bottles or metal cans to store it
though, so perhaps a ceramic amphora will do.
Not much human records left, so I’ll just
jump to 35,000 BCE, the approximate date when the oldest of these Venus figurines,
Venus of Hohle Fels, was made.
Oh, look at that, the woolly mammoth made a
comeback, so did the woolly rhinoceros, and there’s a cave bear and watch out for
those cave hyenas scavenging its kills. Luckily, we are still in Eurasia and
not Americas, or we’d have to deal with saber-toothed tiger as well.
But the years of all these creatures are
numbered. Because the person who made the Hohle Fels Venus figured the mammoth’s
tusks are just the right material for his work of art, much more durable than
wood and easier to sculpt than rock. A person from another tribe was occupied with inventing flutes,
the wooden ones produced nice pitch, but a neanderthal choir using flutes made out femurs of a cave
bears, angelic. And how about that poor guy, hunting down hyenas because his
woman needs a new carpet every full moon. And let's not forget the guy whose performance
in bed was questioned, so a quick visit to a shaman for advice, and the fate of woolly
rhino was sealed.
Since there are no written records,
archeologist can only speculate why were this figurines made and what purpose
they served. Some say it was depiction of mother goddess (a personification of
nature, motherhood, fertility, creation, destruction…), they could be fertility
objects, some of the figurines look like dildos, so they could be used as sex
aids, or in some kind of rituals I don’t even want to think about, one theory suggests
that the Venus figurines could be self portraits of women without access to mirrors, and so on
and on.
I’d probably go with the first one, a
personification of nature. Mountains, rivers, winds, zodiac signs, sun travel, rain,
snow, thunder, volcanic eruptions, comets, shooting stars, birth, death,
singing, stars, planets, Earth, Sun, Moon, floods, disasters, rainbows, sun
dogs, virtues, vices, traits… everything was deified or tried to be represented
in ways understandable to humans.
To my untrained eye and limited knowledge,
some of these figurines look like depictions of abundance (Venus of
Willendorf), Venus of Savignano reminds me of Matterhorn mountain and it was located there about, and some
younger ones, like the Venus of Falkenstein, Strelice, Idol from Ig, actually
do look like depiction of Venus planet itself, but in those times the planet was
probably considered a star, hence the spread of arms. The Willendorf Venus was
also one of the reason for my recent trip to Ethiopia. Saw this photo, and I wanted
to see where it all started. Then I saw this girl there, and the Venus of
Brassempouy shaped a different image in my head.The carvings on the Venus of Hohle Fels also came to life when witnessing a local ritual in a remote village, 1, 2, 3
I created a google map with 35 of these
Venus figurines. You can check where they were found, with some basic info, for
more, you’ll have to do your own research. I am not sure how long the google map will work though; Google climes I have 25,000 free requests a month for the map, but I have a feeling it won't be enough.
You can also check out other portions of
the above site if you’re interested in depiction of female form in art. The database might have some errors in it, since it’s a hobby not a job.