Footage From Lost 1918 Film 'Salome' Starring Theda Bara Emerges Online

Approximately two minutes of footage from the long-lost 1918 film epic “Salome” starring Theda Bara has been made available for online viewing.

What Happened: Spain’s Filmoteca Española presented the footage, which consists of a series of fragmented moments from various sequences throughout the film. Film scholar Jack Theakson, a producer with the 3-D Film Archive LLC, theorized the footage might have been censor-mandated snips from the film, given the glimpses of bare Bara skin emerging from the star’s skimpy costumes.

Filmoteca Española did not state the source of the footage or how long it has been in its possession. The footage was included in a Vimeo video with excerpts from two other once-lost works, the 1932 Spanish animated short "El Rata primero" and the 1903 French short "L'Ours et la sentinelle."

Why It Matters: Bara was the film industry’s first femme fatale, specializing in roles where she played manipulative women who drove men to ruinous fates. She starred in 40 feature productions for the Fox Film Corporation between 1914 and 1919 and later appeared in an independently produced feature and short in 1925.

However, only five of Bara’s films have survived extant. The majority of her work was destroyed in a 1937 film vault fire, while a fire at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the 1940s obliterated the remaining Bara films held in that collection. Roughly 40 seconds from her 1918 “Cleopatra” has survived.

“Salome” was directed by J. Gordan Edwards and was popular with audiences, although some critics objected to the film’s deviation from the New Testament account of Salome’s role in John the Baptist’s execution and several state and city censorship boards within the U.S. demanded edits to several scenes that were deemed either too sexually suggestive or too violent.

An extant print of “Salome” was known to have survived in a private collection in the 1930s and it was offered for sale to pioneering French film archivist Henri Langlois, who turned down the offer but later rued his decision. Bara passed away in 1955 shortly before her 70th birthday.

Photo: Screen shot of Theda Bara in the surviving footage of "Salome."