Director: Charles Bryant

Script: Natacha Rambova

Music: Marc-Olivier Dupin

Cast: Alla Nazimova, Mitchell Lewis, Nigel De Brulier, Rose Dione

Film was screened in Riga, in the New hall of Latvian National Opera, September 12 at 19:19 and September 13 at 19:00.

USA, 1923, 74 min, F

Alla Nazimova’s Salome

In 1923 (1922, according to a range of sources), the already busily producing film factory of Hollywood saw rise to the screen a film arte-fact, which neither gathered too considerable a public, nor could boast of much of a box-office or would trace a new vista in the opening landscape of American film art. It was Salome, admitted by critics to posses aesthetic values, but also, and not entirely groundlessly, treated as an extravagance, a soon to be forgotten artistic fad of its star, producer and inspirer Alla Nazimova.

The biblical plot about Galilean princess Salome’s infatuation with John the Baptist with its tragic finale had already been mined by early American cinema more than once, although neither these films nor their casts have earned the attention of history. Salome of 1922, meanwhile, was to become a corpus within film history and be referenced often. The play about this film by then-condemned and forbidden Oscar Wilde emphatically realizes a highly stylized plastic of performance and physical expression in an aesthetisized setting which evokes the richness of imagery of the famous series of drawings by Aubrey Beardsley.

Then, who was she – this Nazimova, one of the stars of early Hollywood, this female mystery and embodiment of fatality, remoteness and magnetism? Born in 1879 in Yalta, she excelled as a child in music, was taught to play violin, an acclaimed concert interpreter of music. And then a sudden turn of mind to theatre, theatre, and nothing but theatre! And Nazimova threw herself into training at a performing arts studio in Moscow, with Stanislavsky, which led her way to cross paths, formatively, with the talented actor, director and entrepreneur Pavel Orlenev and tour the most important cultural centers of Russia with his modern repertory private drama group, before casting sights to touring United States, with Nazimova, the primadonna and the spouse of director, the focus of the events.

1905 is the year Nazimova emigrated to the USA where her interest in drama was further nurtured. Her performing success in The Doll House turned out to be ‘translatable’ into American English, and other prominent parts follow. In 1916, the couple Alla Nazimova and director Charles Bryant moved to Hollywood. Nazimova’s rise to actual stardom happens in the after-war period – determined by dramatic roles she chose herself, partaking in production, script-writing and even in composition of inter-titles. Although featuring as director of her films, Bryant, according to their contemporaries, in this distribution of production components, accepted the rather subordinate role of organizer.

Nazimova’s phenomenon was in her ability to retain physical youthfulness and beauty. The quite scantily clad body of the Jewish princess was boyishly slender and supple, not for a single moment would the delicate features of face let one remember that this embodiment of eroticism of Biblical myth is played by a 43 year old woman with a tumultuous past. The first part of the 20th century was the most luscious as well as the most unruly of Hollywood’s epochs. The bold and the beautiful of the film world competed in demonstration of wealth and licentiousness in a true disregard of culture of the new rich. An organic and prominent, even dominating, part of this scene was Nazimova’s lavish villa and her social milieu. She shared the house not only with Bryant but with her official lover, a talented costume set designer, and script-writer Natasha Rambova who contributed also to Salome’s artistic plenitude. However, Nazimova departed from American Hollywood with her aura of cultural elite and interests of a truly talented and reflexive artist. She often expressed desire for the more modest, less frivolous life of a theatre actress away from the card-board decorativeness of tinsel-town on the West coast.

Nazimova did leave Hollywood for theatre in the wake of her major achievements on screen. She died in 1945 and seems to have been forgotten for a time, but events like the birth of the Paris Cinemateque along with renewed interest in the beginnings of cinema have brought on a veritable Nazimova renaissance. Salome which for a half a century existed only in brief notes of film history rose from the ashes in its communion with a live film audience.

Dr. Valentīna Freimane