Salomé

USA, 1923. Director Charles Bryant. 74min.

The cult status that Salomé enjoys today owes much to the outlandish, highly stylised sets and costumes à la Aubrey Beardsley. The designer Natacha Rambova was a protégé of the lead actress and producer Nazimova who reportedly sank much of her own money in the film. Despite being a box office failure the film remains a landmark in the history of cinema, bridging the mainstream and the avant-garde. Its radical modernist aesthetic, camp stylisations and deliberately exaggerated acting is a departure from the turn-of-the-century portrayals of Salomé as an overtly eroticized seductress. Nazimova’s film is arguably less exhibitionist than it is a comment on exhibitionism (one reviewer even complained it had little worthy of censorship) as it thematises looking, voyeurism and transgressive sexual desire – an apt homage to Oscar Wilde indeed.

With Alla Nazimova and Mitchell Lewis.
Costumes and sets by Natacha Rambova.

Past screenings

Birds of Paradise – London
Saturday 4 December 2010, 20:30 | BFI Southbank, NFT2
Saturday 11 December 2010, 18:30 | BFI Southbank, NFT2
With live piano accompaniment from Costas Fotopoulos on Saturday 4 and Andrew Youdell on Saturday 11.

Birds of Paradise – New York
Sunday 24 April 2011, 16:30 | Museum of the Moving Image