Letter to the Editors: Salomé Doesn’t Dance

Abstract

In my essay on Alla Nazimova’s Salomé published in Volupté 2.2 (Winter 2019), I comment on the lack of camera movement in the film and make this observation: ‘Salomé was shot in January and February 1922, and it would not be until 1924 that Hollywood directors, most likely after coming under the influence of F. W. Murnau and other German directors, began to experiment with camera movement’. The source for the information about Murnau’s influence is Patrick Keating, The Dynamic Frame: Camera Movement in Classical Hollywood (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), pp. 6, 292 n.3. The claim that Hollywood directors did not employ the moving camera or, more precisely, the mobile frame until 1924 is accurate as far as it goes but additional context is required. Recently, I finally made it all the way through D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) – not an easy film to watch – and saw that Griffith had his cinematographer mount a camera on some kind of motorized vehicle, probably the back of a truck, to film the ‘heroic’ members of the Ku Klux Klan riding at full gallop to rescue the fainting damsel Elsie Stoneman (Lilian Gish) from the clutches of the villainous mulatto Silas Lynch (George Siegmann), then saving a group of white southerners trapped in a cabin being attacked by a ruthless band of black soldiers. The camera is driven ahead of the charging Klansmen who are kept in frame because the speed of the vehicle matches the speed of the horses. This example could be multiplied many times to show that, indeed, filmmakers employed the mobile frame well before 1924.