The third Fashion in Film Festival is sadly coming to an end this weekend, but, if you're in London, you still have tonight and tomorrow to get a glimpse of some amazingly extravagant costumes and sets.
There has actually been a bit of a hidden thread in this edition of the festival connected with Salomé.
At a costume party in Rapsodia Satanica, Lyda Borelli dressed up as a cruel and fatal Salome (check out the first image in this post), a reference to the fact that she had interpreted Oscar Wilde's Salome on stage in 1910 (the first picture in this post shows her as Salome in a sensual costume by Caramba - who will one day get his own post, promise!).
Loïe Fuller who has also been the inspiration for some of the screenings and for the Hemline installation interpreted in one of her performances the Biblical character, symbol of a sexually demonic woman (you can discover more about Fuller in the book Electric Salome: Loïe Fuller's Performance of Modernism by Rhonda K. Garelick).
Salomé will also be the protagonist of the eponymous 1923 film directed by Charles Bryant and featuring Alla Nazimova, a famous star of the silent era, scheduled for today at the BFI Southbank (6.30 p.m. with live piano accompaniment from Andrew Youdell).
Adapted from Oscar Wilde’s play (banned in England and later restaged in Paris by Sarah Bernhardt in 1894), the film features costumes and sets by Natacha Rambova, Rudolph Valentino’s second wife.
Nazimova was born in Yalta and had originally trained as a musician in Russia.
Once she moved to the States she became famous in various theatre performances, and later on started acting for the big screen.
Bryant's Salome was supposed to be an avant-garde and arty interpretation of the story with sets directly inspired by Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations (try to spot references in the clip embedded at the end of this post…).
Parallelisms can also be drawn between the exaggerated acting and the lavish sets and Wilde’s decadent text, though the film could also be interpreted as a commentary of Hollywood’s excesses in the 1920s.
According to Kenneth Anger, Nazimova only employed in the film homosexual actors, in homage to Wilde, making it a first in Hollywood.
Though not that successful, Bryant's Salome became a cult film and decades passed before new Salomé films directly inspired by Wilde’s text were released (in 1971 Werner Schroeter's and, in 1972, Carmelo Bene's). Enjoy the screening!
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