Flexible Venus 3: Olinka Hardiman

Amazingly, it's very nearly a year since we last posted one of our flexible Venuses.  Yesterday, S in Vancouver sent us a note suggesting this picture would make a suitable entry and we cannot disagree.  The legwarmers, tutu, ballet shoes and total absence of knickers make this a most appropriate picture for this slot!

This picture originates from the French Lui magazine from March 1979. The pictorial only contained one other ballet-themed picture which is this one.

After a bit of research we discovered that the lovely young lady is Olinka Hardiman, a model and actress active throughout the eighties.  Olinka's first role was as a murder victim in the US/German co-production of Sidney Sheldon's Bloodline, although her part was cut.

Strangely, given this inauspicious start, her next appearance, the following year, was in the starring role in Emmanuelle goes to Cannes (1980) a  film directed by Jean-Marie Pallardy.  This  had nothing to do with the original films but was one of numerous low budget rip-offs. Olinka plays Emmanuelle who is a stripper dreaming of an acting career. Produced in both hard-core and soft core versions, unlike many of the films of the time where different actors were used for the hard core material often inserted later on, Olinka did her own hard core scenes.  Olinka co-stars with French porn star and later director Gabrielle Pontello, who assumed the feminine alias of Gabriela Ponti for the films he shot for the German market. It was Pontello who got Olinka, then working as a model in Paris, into hard core films.

The girl on the cover isn't in the film!

Her next film, Six Swedes on Ibiza (1981) is, coincidentally, in Triple P's collection as it was sent him by his German friend B, who thought it would cheer us up during a period of horrible weather earlier in the year (which it did!).  Given that there are six Swedish girls (although none of the actresses are Swedish) Olinka's screen time is rather more limited.  

Olinka demonstrates how to ace a job interview in Six Swedes on Ibiza

She does do a brief striptease (which became quite a common performance in her subsequent films) before being taken doggy style during a job interview.  At least that's what we think it is: the dialogue is in German, which we don't speak, although lack of knowledge of the language is really no barrier to the appreciation of this particular film consisting, as it does, of a series of sex scenes with a bit of, nicely sunny, travelogue-type photography between these scenes.

What are we doing in this junk?

Her final scene is with the other five "Swedish" girls on, bizarrely, a Chinese Junk at sea where they all get involved in an orgy.  The film could obviously only afford one camera as it just pans from couple to couple at random.  Olinka is actually in a threesome with one of the other girls, who keeps her clothes on.

Many more hardcore films followed but then someone decided that she looked like Marilyn Monroe (which she didn't) and so she did a series of films with a Marilyn theme; much to her own annoyance as she wanted to be recognised for herself.  Still, it broke her into the US market

She also appeared in many European soft core magazines at the time.

Supersex magazine April 1986

She did many of the black and white Italian hardcore picture story magazines, such as Supersex, in the eighties too.  These were like comic strips but done with photos rather than artwork.

In both her film and magazine shoots her lovely smile was much in evidence, in contrast to today's dour porn stars.  The key to successful erotic film is to convey the sense that the participants are enjoying it, not just going through the motions for the pay cheque.  Olinka was certainly successful at this.

In many of her films she performs dance sequences (with or without striptease) and some of the athletic positions she attains make us wonder if she had any dance training.

Information on her is not that available although it seems she was born in 1960 which would have made her nineteen for her Lui appearance.  Most online sources say that she was born in the South of France although Olinka is a Czech name and one piece we read about her has her originating in Slovakia. 

Her last film was the US Postcards from Abroad (1991) alongside the likes of other European import Angela Baron and Hypatia Lee.  Later she lived in Amalfi in Italy and it has also been suggested that she ran a night club in Ostrava in the Czech Republic, which would give credence to the story that she was, in fact, Czechoslovakian.  French or Czech she was certainly flexible!

Venus with Champagne: Eva Herzigova

Whilst working on our second post on Herbert Draper we noticed that we have just passed 250,000 visits to Venus Observations since we started this blog in September 2008. The title was inspired by HMS, during one of my visits to Aquae Sulis, who was, in fact, thinking about vinous observations. Nevertheless, we liked the title and so, after a quarter of a million posts and 150 posts we feel that it is only approriate to celebrate with a young lady and some champagne: Venus and vinous together. Who better than our favourite "second wave" supermodel Eva Herzigova, here posing with some Dom Pérignon Rosé.

We have to confess, that whilst we have drunk a fair amount of Dom Pérignon in the past we have only had the rosé once, the 1996 which we drank in a round bath with S in, appropriately, Las Vegas. The problem with Dom Pérignon is that, thanks largely to James Bond, it is more than a little vulgar. Indeed, the rosé was first produced in 1958 because the Shah of Iran requested it at his wedding but Dom Pérignon didn't actually make a rosé at the time.

Only six weeks ago a Russian billionaire bought a methuselah of Dom Pérignon Rosé Gold in the bar of the Westbury Hotel in London for £35,000 (plus £10,625 tip and £4,375 service charge). They only make 35 bottles of this a year and each bottle is coated in gold. If that isn't the definition of vulgar we don't know what is!

Anyway, here is Eva, styled by Karl Lagerfield, presenting the 1998 vintage, in a series of pictures which are far more tasteful than the people who drink it.

Oh, and if you are looking for a reason to drink some Dom Pérignon Rosé why not bid on Herbert Draper's The Sea Maiden which is up for sale at Christies next week. Somewhere between £800,000 and £1.2 million should add it to your collection and give suitable cause for celebration.

Czech Venus: by Jan Saudek

Czech photographer Jan Saudek (born 1935) hand tints his originally black and white pictures for a very painterly effect.

He uses a Rolleiflex and a FLEXARET 6x6 cameras.

For much of his early life he was persecuted, by the Germans for being Jewish and then by the Communist Czech government from whom he had to hide his work because of its erotic nature and the use of political themes. Even in the nineties he found some of his work banned, but this time in the west, for some of its religious motifs.

Some of his work harks back to nineteenth century erotic photography which was carefully posed in the studio (outdoor shots were almost impossible at this time) with formal props such as pillars or flower arrangements in order to give the impression of a classical, painterly tradition and hopefull avoid the attention of the authorities!

Many of Saudek's pictures of women also evoke the aesthetic of the Dolní Věstonice Venus, we feel.

Czech Venus: Veronika Zemanová

30,000 years after the Venus of Dolní Věstonice the Czech Republic produced Veronika Zemanová who shows that the country can still produce Earth Mother sized breasts.

Veronika was born only 25 miles north of Dolní Věstonice so may well share some genetic material with those who carved the Venus.

Veronika delightfully demonstrates the effect of gravity on a natural bust

Veronika was originally a photographer until her equipment was stolen and she had to utilise her other equipment to pay her debts and so became a model.

Veronika gets all paleolithic by the sea

We would like to think that the paleolithic people of Dolní Věstonice would feel a strong affinity to her very ripe form. Although they would probably prefer her pregnant. Volunteers?

I'm an Earth Mother, me

Czech Venus: The Venus of Dolní Věstonice

Where to start but with this, the oldest known ceramic in the world; discovered on July 13th 1925 in the paleolithic settlement of Dolní Věstonice, Moravia in what is now the Czech Republic.

This figurine is 4 1/2 inches tall and about 1 3/4 inches wide and is made from fired clay. The original is now too fragile to be exhibited full time (she was in two halves when excavated) and was last on display in September 2007 as part of an exhibition entitled the Mammoth Hunters at the Prague National Museum.

Like many of these prehistoric Venus figures she is not designed to stand up so may have been designed to be held, perhaps as part of a ceremony. The truth is that we have no idea about her purpose, just that many other similar statues have been found across Europe from a similar period (although there is a strange lack of proven examples from the Iberian Peninsula).

These figures, as they are some of the earliest representations of the naked female form, have attracted a lot (some would say a disproportionate) amount of study. It is generally agreed that they are supposed to represent a pregnant figure and therfore may have something to do with fertility. It is also theorised that pre-Christianity the earliest religions were female-centric with the concept of the Earth Mother as supreme being and that these figures represent the Earth Mother herself. There is no evidence for this, however, but certain writers have been known to use this theory to decry the crushing of female power by the early Christian church.

The Laugerie-Basse figure

The use of the Roman name for Aphrodite, Venus, for these figures as a type was initiated by the Marquis de Vibraye, who discovered the first of these figures to be excavated at Laugerie-Basse in the Dordogne in 1864. He named his find Vénus impudique (immodest Venus), as an academic word play on the term Venus pudica (modest Venus) used to describe the particular coy pose seen in the Botticelli picture at the top right of this page. The French figure has a clear representation of the vulva, hence his name for her.

The use of the word Venus stuck and has since been used for all such figures, even if they have nothing to do with Venus or, indeed, any particular Goddess as far as is known.