‘Harmonies of Light’: Ciné-Dances and Women’s Silent Film

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Salome’s ‘dance of the seven veils’ in silent film. It shows how the modernist choreographic forms traced in previous chapters intersected with the development of filmic representation in both Hollywood and France, tracing the emergence of new grammars of movement through discourses surrounding performance, spectatorship, and the body in the 1920s. In the avant-garde silent film Salomé: An Historical Phantasy by Oscar Wilde (1922), the Russian actor and director Alla Nazimova paid queer homage to Wilde’s legacy by combining Beardsley’s Art Nouveau aesthetic with the modernist movement strategies of the Ballets Russes. Foregrounding the importance of this particular film, this chapter examines the reception of the various theatrical ‘vamps’ who played Salome, including Nazimova, Theda Bara and Mimi Aguglia, several of whom appeared in the interviews and neo-decadent short fiction of modernist author Djuna Barnes. Finally, it turns to the work of the French director Germaine Dulac, who was inspired by the performances of Loïe Fuller to develop a cinematographic practice devoted to the notion of the dancing line, embedding the kinaesthetics of modern dance in her experimental filmmaking.