MOBIA Brings Sexy Back with Salomé
Thursday night’s screening of the 1923 art house film Salomé at MOBIA brought sexy back with the silent film based on Oscar Wilde’s infamous play. The screening was preceded by a lecture by author and film critic Geoffrey O’Brien, who took the audience through Salomé’s 2,000 years as mystery and muse for the arts.
The Film
Alla Nazimova was 42 when she played the role of the adolescent daughter of King Herod, but from the defiant chin and lustful eyes the silent film siren sports in her performance (not to mention her lithe figure as she dances in an itty-bitty mini skirt, short even by modern standards), one can believe she is a sulking teenager burned by love and thirsting for revenge.
O’Brien emphasized that Nazimova’s power as an actress is well documented: her performance in Ibsen’s 1936 production of Ghosts inspired Tennessee Williams to become a playwright.
Not only did Nazimova inspire men to write: she took on the role of producer and screenwriter for Salomé, and her vision of Wilde’s play is both faithful to the original and a fanciful showcase for her over-the-top, riveting performance.
Charles Bryant, the purported director of the film and Nazimova’s husband, was director (and husband) “in name only,” O’Brien claims —it was Nazimova who was calling the shots, both on and off-screen.
Natacha Rambova’s dreamlike costume creations, based on Aubrey Beardsley’s iconic black and white illustrations for the 1894 edition of Wilde’s play, positively dazzle. The profusion of leggings, nipple tassels, and oversized cod pieces are perhaps fodder for the longstanding rumor that it was the only film with “an all-gay cast and crew,” a hiring practice per the order of the bisexual Nazimova, who dressed up many of her actors in drag for their performance.
Pretty boys with cotton-ball-topped heads, mermaid-like helmets, and bare chests are a feast for the eyes and compete for attention with Salomé’s simple tunic, though her hair– which appears like a dreaded fro topped with some precursor to fiber-optic Christmas lights–makes her hard to ignore.
Salomé throws a tantrum as she taunts an emaciated Jokanaan the Prophet (a.k.a. John the Baptist), portrayed by Nigel de Brulier, who, with the exception of wooly loincloth, looks every bit like a mod Brit from the 60s with a name like Nigel.
“I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan,” Salome insists, getting up on tiptoe and sticking her lips out to smooch the man of God that her father keeps in a gilded birdcage.
Nazimova is adept at using body language to portray a young woman used to getting her way at the expense of men: she steps on the heads of servants in loin cloths as they prostrate themselves before her, and causes two men to commit suicide before she agrees to dance for her sauced stepfather, King Herod (played with great humor by Mitchell Lewis.) Lewis clearly relishes his role as debauched patriarch, and plays up his own pouting and panting to the fullest: like father, like stepdaughter.
Yet all eyes are on Nazimova as men in black card-like, caped costumes swirl around her like black butterflies, then spin out to reveal Salomé transformed by a blonde bobbed wig and white mini. The rest is cinematic history: we see the hungry eyes of the entire court, but particularly her father, gaze upon the gyrating girl as she dances to the music of a midget band sporting reindeer racks on their heads. The members of the King’s Court whisper to one another conspiratorially, and sideways glances and bitten lower lips convey the hunger of the men before her. We cannot hear what they are saying, but their eyes say it all.
Salomé /Nazimova begins to spin and spin like a drunk, a girl possessed, winding a white sheet about herself. Yet she dons pants before she demands the head of Jokanaan, the man that resisted her virginal charm. Perhaps issuing death orders in a mini was too much even for Nazimova: she had to don a vestige of masculinity for such a moment of biblical import.
The final scene showing Salomé pierced by the spears of multiple men encircling her needs no explication: the spears accomplish physically what the piercing eyes could not.
Salomé: Her First 2,000 Years
Critics of Wilde’s original play, upon which the film is faithfully based, called it “bizarre,” “repulsive,” and involving “situations the reverse of sacred.” In his introduction to the film,Geoffrey O’Brien asked the question on the minds of many: why is a film once dubbed a “hothouse orchid of decadent passion,” by Photoplay Magazine in 1923 playing in The Museum of Biblical Art in 2009?
The history of Salomé is full of scandal: Sarah Bernhardt was set to star in the original play, but the role was taken away when the Lord Chamberlain officially banned the play in England on the grounds of an obscure law barring the acting out of scenes from the bible on stage.
By the 1950s, a thirteen-year-old O’Brien could find and become enchanted by Wilde’s play, now packaged as a “modern classic” alongside Little Women and Robinson Crusoe (though he and his friends couldn’t help but notice the sexier parts.)
The bible’s account of Salomé, O’Brien points out, is a stark, minimalist narrative. Salomé is never even named in the Good Book: the only reason her name survives is thanks to the first century historian Josephus and his Jewish Antiquities.
Yet it’s exactly the absence of emotional description and of character development that has inspired centuries of artists to flesh out the story of Salomé.
According to O’Brien, Salomé was the “pre-eminent icon of 19th century Europe.” The historically obscure character became muse to countless paintings, theatre, music, poetry and dance of the period.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, a host of artists depicted Salomé in paint: Giovanni de Palo, Lucas Cranach, Bernardo Luini, Titian and Caravaggio, among others.
Yet Salomé, O’Brien claims, was not truly reborn until she fired up the French imagination. Her rebirth is largely thanks to the symbolist poem by Stéphane Mallarmé that carries her namesake. This, in turn, inspired the painting of the bewitching beauty by Gustave Moreau, exhibited at the 1876 Paris Salon and written up in Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans’s Against the Grain.
To Wilde, Salomé was “the cardinal flower of the perverse garden,” and the only depiction of this cardinal flower that satisfied him was the vision of otherworldly splendor in Moreau’s painting.
Yet Wilde was attune to depictions of Salomé by another great Frenchman: he was a guest at Mallarmé’s salon, and later, when Wilde wrote Salomé in Paris in French, Mallarmé was a great admirer of his play.
Today, O’Brien argues, it is Wilde’s version of the story of Salomé that persists above all others. It was Wilde, O’Brien points out, that invented the enduring love of Salomé for John the Baptist, and Wilde that created the violent ending where Herod orders his stepdaughter executed.
O’Brien claims the play is not great or even good, but it has become a part of modern culture: “he made Salomé a byword for decadence in modernity—or perhaps decadence as modernity,” he said wryly.
From the written word and the tableau to the big screen: O’Brien traced the history of Salomé’s infamous dance in film. It was at the 1893 World’s Fair that the “hoochie coochie” dance, and thus the genre of burlesque dancing, was created, paving the way for future adaptations of Salomé’s sensual performance.
O’Brien showed clips of an ethereal Annabelle Whitford dancing for the Edison Kinetograph in 1897 and told stories of Mata Hari dancing as Salomé at a private villa in 1912. He recounted how the American performer Maud Allen made a career of dancing as Herod’s daughter, though she was more famous for the libel lawsuit she brought against a newspaper publisher for alleging that she was a lesbian, a trial that later put both dancer and Wilde’s play on trial.
The 1953 film version of Salomé starred Rita Hayworth and Charles Laughton in the roles of stepdaughter and King, respectively, and O’Brien also indulged the audience in a brief screening of the incredibly campy 1961 dance sequence from King of Kings.
Yet it is Nazimova, spinning and spinning in her little white skirt and channeling the extravagance of Oscar Wilde that remains in the public imagination, filling in the biblical blanks.
Geoffrey O’Brien is a widely published author, cultural historian and film critic. A frequent contributor to Film Comment, The New York Review of Books and The New York Times, O’Brien is the author of such books as The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the Twentieth Century.
The original poster for Salomé is one of the highlights of REEL RELIGION: A CENTURY OF THE BIBLE AND FILM, the current exhibition of 80 rare vintage film posters and original Hollywood costumes on display at MOBIA.
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