ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the era of silent film and its impact in the early stages of mass culture and filmic representations. It considers the groundbreaking work of women in silent cinema and the pleasurable ways of looking they introduced by interconnecting highbrow and popular culture. Natacha Rambova, writer and designer, and Alla Nazimova, actress and producer are discussed as fruitful collaborators in producing Salomé, a film based on Oscar Wilde's play. Rambova, a famous and provocative costume designer, devises for the film colorful ornamentations inspired in Aubrey Beardsley's Art Deco. Nazimova synthesizes the influence of classical theater on the popular forms adopted in the Hollywood industry. Salomé presents feminine desire as an alternative to patriarchal ways of looking rooted in the biblical story. Feminist theory and Mulvey's theory of the gaze and its revisionists are applied here to examine spectatorship and women's subversion of patriarchal societal norms within Hollywood's star system.
