"They are like black lakes troubled by fantastic moons"

Cinephiles are sometimes Salomés. Wilde ones. The object of their fascination is first approached in darkness, if not the black hole of Herod's cistern (into which the princess first peers for a glimpse of Jokanaan). When the filmstrip is brought to light by the projector, many of Salomé's rhapsodic descriptions of the prophet's body serve splendidly as exultations for cinema: "an image of silver," "a moonbeam, like a shaft of silver," or (later in the play) "a column of ivory set upon feet of silver."¹ The possibility of consummation with such radiance also has its parallels. Salomé is only able to kiss Jokanaan, who has rejected her advances, after Herod grants her demand for the prophet's head on a silver charger. During her address to this decapitated part of her beloved, Salomé focuses on the pair of eyes that no longer see and the tongue that no longer speaks; had she lingered longer on the mouth, or at all on the nose (neither of which continue to draw breath), she might have uttered: "Never before has a face turned to mine in that way. Ever closer it presses against me, and I follow it face to face. It's not even true that there is air between us."² But these are not Salomé's words—instead they belong to a cinephile, one grappling with the force that a close-up can release from the silver screen.

To quote the critic and filmmaker Jean Epstein here is to recall the prominence that he and his writings on photogénie have been given in some accounts of the proto-history of cinephilia. Paul Willemen has pointed to Epstein's contribution as an important early attempt to think through "a relationship to the screen" that concerns itself with "revelation."³ Noel King has alluded to Epstein in his own identification of a through line for "cinephilic practice," namely "the fetishising of a particular moment, the isolating of a crystallisingly expressive detail."⁴ More recently, Christian Keathley has brought two points from King's trajectory together by discussing photogénie alongside a concept that arose out of the period generally recognized as the golden age of cinephilia (French film culture of the 1950s): the Cahiers du cinéma inflection of mise-en-scène.⁵ To have begun with Salomé acknowledges Willemen's coupling of cinephilia with necrophilia,⁶ but it also opens a door through which I can dramatize my burning connection to the topic of this dossier.

Figure 1.

Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, US, 1956).

For this, let us back up to the dance of the seven veils. Not the princess of Judæa's, but a possible filmic re-creation of it that has already been given other names—"the dance of death," the "dance of rebellion," the "'pink negligee' dance," the "'Temptation' dance sequence"—and has already been described energetically as both an "inflamed strip-mambo" and the dance of "some doomed goddess from a dionysian mystery."⁷ All of the above refer to a scene that I believe might be more properly summoned as a take on Salomé's shake: Marylee Hadley's (Dorothy Malone) bedroom dance in Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, US, 1956). Not only is the notion of decapitation suggested by both a decorative ceramic head and a photograph (almost a head shot) of Marylee's unrequited love Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), and not only are Marylee's costume changes (figures 1–3) in perfect keeping with the color progression that Wilde lays out in Salomé's shifts of attention (from Jokanaan's white body to his black hair to his red mouth), but Marylee's pink negligee also cites one of Salomé's specific invocations from the gamut of this last color category (in addition to comparisons that involve scarlet and vermilion, Salomé gushes, "Thy mouth is like a branch of coral that fishers have found in the twilight of the sea").⁸ The clincher? Once Marylee emerges from behind the curtain of...