Wilde, Beardsley and Beyond. Salomé in the Cinema: from Charles Bryant to Al Pacino

This article investigates how cinematic versions of Wilde’s works and life span the entirety of cinema history from the silent era to the present age. Salomé is undoubtedly the most decadent of Wilde’s plays, one in which the author’s debt to the Symbolist poets clearly emerges through the disturbing music which characteriseshis ‘literary score’. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the play had an enormous influence on cinema and popular music. In the 1923 silent version directed by Charles Bryant, the highly stylised costumes, exaggerated acting and minimal sets created a screen image that was much more focused on atmosphere and on conveying a sense of the characters’ heightened desires than on conventional plot development. The film was shot completely in black and white, matching the illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley in the printed edition of Wilde’s play. On the other hand, the most recent filmic version of Salomé – the 2011 celebrated docufilm Wilde Salomé by iconic director and actor Al Pacino – documents a period in which Pacino performed in a production of Salomé, directed by actress and theatre director Estelle Parson at Los Angeles’ Wadsworth Theatre while he was also making a movie relating to the mounting of the show and shooting a narrative film version of the play. This article shows how the film is for Al Pacino, and of course for the audience, a journey, and, most importantly, a process in which Pacino re-writes not only the play, but Wilde himself. Indeed, Wilde Salomé stages his ‘love affair with Oscar Wilde’ and his desire to explore the latter’s legacy in contemporary culture.