Alla Nazimova’s Salomé: Shot-by-Shot

Abstract

Alla Nazimova’s Salomé was a strange film for its time and remains so today because it is so hard to categorize. What kind of film is it? The opening title card describes it as ‘An Historical Phantasy by Oscar Wilde’, even though Wilde called his play ‘A Tragedy in One Act’. Possibly, the Latinate spelling of ‘Phantasy’, from phantasia, is meant to preserve a sense of the original Greek meaning on which the Latin word is based, namely ϕαντασία, ‘a making visible’ (OED). If so, Salomé becomes comprehensible as a type of cinema that proliferated in the silent era (and continues to this day), one that sought to make events from some remote historical period visible to modern audiences. Understood thus, Salomé seems like a kind of matchbox biblical epic, a scaled-down version of the massively produced sword-and-sandals extravaganza, such as The Ten Commandments (1923) or King of Kings (1927), made famous by Cecil B. DeMille. Indeed, the lost Theda Bara Salomé (1919), called ‘an ambitious and elaborate spectacle’ in contemporary accounts, seems to have been just such a film. At the same time, Nazimova’s smaller-scale ‘phantasy’ is more than simply a historical visualization because the film includes some genuinely fantastic elements, such as the spectral salver floating before Salome as she holds aloft the scimitar she has taken from Herod’s bodyguard [fig. 1; see Appendix I, shot-list: shot 502]. Such effects, as well as the wildly ahistorical mise en scène (more evocative of the fin de siècle than of first century Judea) obviously work against the idea of the film as a mini-epic set in biblical times.