In 1922, renowned Russian stage and screen actress Alla Nazimova committed the extraordinary sum of $350,000 to produce Salomé, a film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s popular play — directed by, written by (under a male pseudonym), and starring herself. Although a woman of forty-two, Nazimova convincingly plays the teenage Salomé, who performs the Dance of the Seven Veils in exchange for the head of Jokanaan. The film unfolds through a series of posed tableaux, deliberate movements, and highly stylized sets, resisting realism and traditional narrative action and embracing the fabulous. Photoplay cautioned that it was “a hothouse orchid of decadent passion… You have your warning: this is bizarre stuff”. Officially “directed” by her husband Charles Bryant, Salomé was largely shaped by Nazimova herself, with Bryant serving as both marital and professional beard. In his notorious Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger insinuated that Salomé was made with an all-queer cast and crew — an unverifiable claim that nevertheless summons the essence of the film’s decadent flamboyance. Salomé contains no explicitly queer characters, but its sensibility emerges from a network of artists whose identities and desires had to remain unspoken. Though the film was a financial and critical disaster and effectively ended Nazimova’s Hollywood career, it resurfaced as a cult object in the 1970s when it was double-billed with Broken Goddess, starring Holly Woodland. Seen a century on, Salomé offers a record of how queerness circulates through aesthetics, rumor, and history, inviting modern audiences to read between the frames. (TV)

Preceded by: “Overstimulated” (Jack Smith, 1959-63) – 5 min – 16mm from Canyon Cinema

35mm print courtesy of the George Eastman Museum 
Sponsored in part by Asian Improv aRts Midwest.