10 Days in a Nudist Camp (1952)
10 Days in a Nudist Camp (1952)
A fresh look at the vintage nudist documentaries recently resurrected on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber
The more early nudist documentaries I watch, the more familiar footage I see again and again. I’m a Godzilla fan, and the franchise in the late 1960s and early 1970s was rife with reused stock footage from previous movies, a common point of contention used by critics of the series. I’m used to it, but even those low-budget monster movies do not compare to the films found on Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray release of Nudist Life, 10 Days in a Nudist Camp, and Shangri-La.
The first two of these features, along with some of the included shorts, share a lot of common footage, and I’ve seen many of the same shots in other films, too. Watching everything on this disc back to back was a dizzying experience as so many things merged together in my brain.
However, out of these films, the one that took me most by surprise was 10 Days in a Nudist Camp. The film is stated by Kino to be a reworking and expansion of 1932’s This Naked Age, written by Jan Gay and based on her book On Going Naked. To my surprise, the footage from This Naked Age comprises less than half of the film, with the rest coming from, by my estimation, at least two or three other documentaries from the same period.
I recognized the opening shot itself as coming from 1925’s Ways to Strength and Beauty. While the opening credits inform us that the film’s narration is by Ed Gallner, he’s actually one of three narrators I counted in this Frankenstein’s monster of a film, with This Naked Age’s Leo Donnelly also present of course. It’s all haphazardly cut together, the footage varies in quality, and if you watch it shortly before or after This Naked Age like I did, the edits can be really strange and jarring.
I wonder what director Samuel Cummins and editor Ray Lewis were going for, or how experienced they were when they put this thing together. They still did a better job than the makers of Nudist Life, at least.
The new (to me) footage is what fascinated me the most, though: there are lots of shots of an American nudist camp early on…if you can call it that, because everyone is wearing bizarre-looking g-strings, and a lot of the women wear completely transparent bras, the purpose of which I’m unsure.
A lot of this footage is also found in Nudist Life, also awkwardly cut into that film, and I wonder where these scenes originated from, as I’ve never seen them before. Calisthenics and dance are emphasized, a strong reminder of how these exercises and modern dance as we know it were both developed alongside nudism in the early 20th century, all part of a reaction of industrialization and the desire to live a healthier, more natural lifestyle that would redefine modernity.
The themes of dance and bodily movement continue throughout the rest of the documentary, especially as we travel to France and Germany. There is beautiful footage of solo dancers, duets, and clothed and nude group numbers being performed all throughout, and as a dancer, it’s all mesmerizing to me. This is a focus other nudist films lack, although there are dance scenes in plenty of them.
I’ve written before about the connections between nudism and dance and how both can embody freedom, and 10 Days in a Nudist Camp captures that connection strongly in a way no other nudist film I’ve watched has.
My first instinct when I shed my clothes, especially outdoors, is to just take off running and frolicking and to see so much of that same feeling expressed here means so much to me. It’s a harnessing and release of energy that I find nowhere else.
It’s more than just about being fit and physically healthy, but despite being secular (as all of these nudist films tend to be, come to think of it—religion is always avoided!), there’s a feeling of spiritual health here as well. Multiple times, we see people dancing together amongst the trees or by large bodies of water in the sunlight, and these scenes strike me so deeply, hitting deeper than the rather dull narration would ever hope to suggest. They’re Magnus Weidemann paintings and photographs come to life.
Dance has become disconnected from fitness, and nudism has as well. This is good to an extent, as both need to be free of annoying, unrealistic body standards tied to fitness, but so much of how nudism is presented today feels like it’s lacking in spirit. I can’t help but feel like something is lost, some connection with our bodies and our souls that I personally feel most strongly when I dance with friends. We’re taught that the body and spirit are separate things: we treat our bodies like prisons when they are parts of a whole that make up who we are, connected in the way we’re connected with nature.
One of the last lines in this documentary is Gallner voicing concern over how the commercialization of nudism could spell its doom, and those words are downright haunting when I think about the expensive naked cruises and exclusive, high-end resorts that are advertised while more and more camps face trouble, not to mention the surface level platitudes I see posted over and over again by various nudist accounts. It all feels so shallow now.
As mentioned before, 10 Days in a Nudist Camp is found on Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray release of Nudist Life, alongside Shangri-La and various shorts. Of everything on the disc, this feels the least exploitative and is more expressive of the goals of nudism in its early days than the others as well. Part of that is the strong foundation that is Jan Gay’s work on This Naked Age, but it expands on that documentary in a way that, however haphazardly put together it is, really works for me.
And yet, many questions remain. I wonder where the other footage originates from, especially the French and German dance footage. Interestingly, Something Weird states that the movie is a French production, one which traveled the roadshow circuit for over thirty years under several different titles. They also list the year it was made as 1935, while other websites state 1952 and Kino dates it back to 1957. I do wish we had a better history of the making of these films! 🪐
Note: the above screenshots of 10 Days in a Nudist Camp were taken from a download of the film available on Something Weird. The Kino Blu-ray release is of much better, sharper quality, lacking the SWV logo completely
To me, one of the most fascinating parts of these films is what's going on in the background. While definitely stretching the definition of documentary, these movies were all made with such incredibly low budgets that there was no room for set decoration or even cleaning things up, and so the material culture of the time and place they were filmed is very much as it was then and there. The cars, the furniture, the roadside advertising, the ashtrays (so many ashtrays), all the objects surrounding the people give a fascinating picture of what material life looked like a century ago.
lovely