This is a spinoff from the IBCC thread. Since a couple of folks asked about bedleh and its reputed origins through Hollywood, I thought I'd share what I learned in my research last year.
The "harem fantasy" costuming conceived by Europeans and Americans was kind of contemporaneous with the origins of the film industry.
Efforts to invent "moving pictures" were underway simulteneously in both France and the U.S. In France, it was the Lumiere brothers, and in the U.S. it was Thomas Edison. Both applied for patents in the mid 1890's, with the Lumiere brothers being about a year earlier than Edison.
At this time, European Orientalist fantasies were already in full swing. The colonial occupation of the British and French in North Africa had already been going on for a few decades. Orientalist painters such as Gerome and Ingres were selling their work about 10 or 20 years before the dawn of the film industry. Flaubert had been in Egypt around 1849 and written about his experiences, and other traveler's tales of the exotic East were being written about at the same time. So, by the dawn of the film industry, Western society was caught in the grip of Orientalist fantasy and fervor.
In the mid-1890's, around the same point in time as inventors were working on moving pictures, Oscar Wilde wrote Salome. It was first staged in France. I don't have my notes in front of me, but I'm thinking around 1897. Richard Strauss became interested in the play, and used Wilde's play as the basis for lyrics for his opera Salome, which was first performed somewhere around 1905-ish. (Again, writing from memory here, don't have my notes in front of me.)
Strauss's opera, even more than Wilde's play, touched off a Salome mania. Not only were opera houses staging the opera and theaters staging the play, but the fledgling modern dance movement picked up the theme and staged their own reinterpretations of the story. It was this Salome mania, in the 1905-1915 time frame, that really led to the fantasy costumes. I think the first silent "Salome" movie was released around 1908, the first Cleopatra around 1910. Theda Bara's famous depictions of these characters came later, 1918 and 1917, respectively.
Maud Allen was one of the early pioneers of the bedleh-style fantasy costume, staging her own interpretation of Wilde's Salome in Austria in 1906. It wasn't either Wilde's play or Strauss's opera, it was a modern dance program loosely based on the story as told by Wilde but portrayed through dance rather than through words. Her career was primarily in Europe, not the U.S., and so far as I know she appeared in only one movie, released in 1915, "The Rug Maker's Daughter", and I've never been able to find evidence of filming of her doing her Salome dance. Lots of still photos, yes, but not moving pictures of her.
Anyway, from the above I have concluded that it wasn't exactly Hollywood that brought the notion of bedleh to Egypt, but rather the European music hall dancers who would have been performing imitations of Maud Allen and her ilk in the early nightclubs of Cairo. Hollywood certainly became inspired by all the operatic and modern dance interpretations of Salome, and incorporated those into its own portrayals, but the imagery was already part of the European and American collective fantasy before Hollywood picked up on it. And since the origin of nightclubs in Egypt was to present European-style music hall entertainment for expatriate businessmen and government bureaucrats, well, the bedleh would probably have been seen on stage through their portrayals even before the movies crossed the ocean from America.
Sadly, most of the early silent movie footage has been lost forever. This is partly because early photographic technology was difficult to preserve (ie, the chemicals that formed the image disintegrated if not properly cared for), partly because some early movies were intentionally destroyed so that the precious silver utilized in creating the photographic image could be harvested and reused to create new movies, and partly because the only known prints of some early movies (including Theda Bara's Salome and Cleopatra movies) were destroyed through catastrophes such as the fire at Fox Studios vault in 1937. (Early movies were made using nitrate, which was very combustible.) Tragic.
Anyway, since a number of folks expressed interest in seeing how early movies may have depicted the precursors to bedleh, I thought you might enjoy knowing that I've actually been researching the topic but have been thwarted in finding moving pictures! But I've accumulated some really great still images!
The "harem fantasy" costuming conceived by Europeans and Americans was kind of contemporaneous with the origins of the film industry.
Efforts to invent "moving pictures" were underway simulteneously in both France and the U.S. In France, it was the Lumiere brothers, and in the U.S. it was Thomas Edison. Both applied for patents in the mid 1890's, with the Lumiere brothers being about a year earlier than Edison.
At this time, European Orientalist fantasies were already in full swing. The colonial occupation of the British and French in North Africa had already been going on for a few decades. Orientalist painters such as Gerome and Ingres were selling their work about 10 or 20 years before the dawn of the film industry. Flaubert had been in Egypt around 1849 and written about his experiences, and other traveler's tales of the exotic East were being written about at the same time. So, by the dawn of the film industry, Western society was caught in the grip of Orientalist fantasy and fervor.
In the mid-1890's, around the same point in time as inventors were working on moving pictures, Oscar Wilde wrote Salome. It was first staged in France. I don't have my notes in front of me, but I'm thinking around 1897. Richard Strauss became interested in the play, and used Wilde's play as the basis for lyrics for his opera Salome, which was first performed somewhere around 1905-ish. (Again, writing from memory here, don't have my notes in front of me.)
Strauss's opera, even more than Wilde's play, touched off a Salome mania. Not only were opera houses staging the opera and theaters staging the play, but the fledgling modern dance movement picked up the theme and staged their own reinterpretations of the story. It was this Salome mania, in the 1905-1915 time frame, that really led to the fantasy costumes. I think the first silent "Salome" movie was released around 1908, the first Cleopatra around 1910. Theda Bara's famous depictions of these characters came later, 1918 and 1917, respectively.
Maud Allen was one of the early pioneers of the bedleh-style fantasy costume, staging her own interpretation of Wilde's Salome in Austria in 1906. It wasn't either Wilde's play or Strauss's opera, it was a modern dance program loosely based on the story as told by Wilde but portrayed through dance rather than through words. Her career was primarily in Europe, not the U.S., and so far as I know she appeared in only one movie, released in 1915, "The Rug Maker's Daughter", and I've never been able to find evidence of filming of her doing her Salome dance. Lots of still photos, yes, but not moving pictures of her.
Anyway, from the above I have concluded that it wasn't exactly Hollywood that brought the notion of bedleh to Egypt, but rather the European music hall dancers who would have been performing imitations of Maud Allen and her ilk in the early nightclubs of Cairo. Hollywood certainly became inspired by all the operatic and modern dance interpretations of Salome, and incorporated those into its own portrayals, but the imagery was already part of the European and American collective fantasy before Hollywood picked up on it. And since the origin of nightclubs in Egypt was to present European-style music hall entertainment for expatriate businessmen and government bureaucrats, well, the bedleh would probably have been seen on stage through their portrayals even before the movies crossed the ocean from America.
Sadly, most of the early silent movie footage has been lost forever. This is partly because early photographic technology was difficult to preserve (ie, the chemicals that formed the image disintegrated if not properly cared for), partly because some early movies were intentionally destroyed so that the precious silver utilized in creating the photographic image could be harvested and reused to create new movies, and partly because the only known prints of some early movies (including Theda Bara's Salome and Cleopatra movies) were destroyed through catastrophes such as the fire at Fox Studios vault in 1937. (Early movies were made using nitrate, which was very combustible.) Tragic.
Anyway, since a number of folks expressed interest in seeing how early movies may have depicted the precursors to bedleh, I thought you might enjoy knowing that I've actually been researching the topic but have been thwarted in finding moving pictures! But I've accumulated some really great still images!
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Iowa
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