Bird's Eye View

Broken Hearts on Theda Bara and interview with Bishi

The Broken Hearts - “A Hollywood musical on hallucinogenics” (The Independent) - will be offering live musical accompaniment and a healthy dose of performance for the Vamp film A Fool There Was next Monday 9th Mar 6pm at the BFI Southbank. They also host a radio show on Q Radio every Sunday evening amongst other things (which include launching a fashion collection with Beyond The Valley, making songs, music videos for those songs, plus films about the circus…).

This week the theme on the show was “Silent Movies” and their special guest was none other than Bishi, the award-winning singer, multi-instrumentalist and DJ, who is also providing live music for one of the Vamp films in the festival - Salome. Adding to this, every week on The Broken Hearts radio show they have a section called Sartorial Memorial - the Fabulous Fashions of the Dearly Departed and this week they chose Theda Bara, star of A Fool There Was. Here is an extract:

“Now it’s time for our Sartorial Memorial - The Fabulous Fashions of the Dearly Departed - where we talk about a dead person who left a legacy of fabulous style!

This week, who could be a more perfect memorial than an actress who was only ever in silent films - she never made a talkie at all. She’s someone we’ve already mentioned quite a lot as she stars in the film we’re creating a soundtrack for, it’s the exotic and glamorous Theda Bara.

One of cinema’s earliest sex symbols - A Fool There Was is possibly the first film in which a vamp character appears, and her femme fatale roles also earned her the nickname “The Vamp” (short for vampire).

The exotic and mysterious "Vamp", Theda Bara

Theda Bara was really interesting, as she was one of the first stars to really receive a strong publicity campaign from film studios. She was photographed in several publicity shots in skimpy Oriental-themed costumes. It was popular to promote an actress as mysterious and elusive, with an exotic background at the time.

The studios promoted Bara with a massive publicity campaign, billing her as the Egyptian-born daughter of a French actress and an Italian sculptor. They claimed she had spent her early years in the Sahara Desert under the shadow of the Sphinx, then moved to France to become a stage actress. They called her the “Serpent of the Nile” and encouraged Bara to discuss mysticism and the occult in interviews. Theda Bara’s name was an anagram of ‘Arab Death’ and publicity department even said that she shared an astrological sign with Cleopatra.

But in truth she was a Jewish girl from Ohio! And she had never even been to Egypt or France.

But it clearly worked, as at the height of her fame, Bara was making $4,000 per week and was one of the most famous movie stars, only Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford were more popular.

The sad thing is that even though Theda Bara made more than 40 feature films between 1914 and 1926, complete prints of only six of these films still exist. So although there are loads of amazing press shots of her as Cleopatra in the 1917 film, there isn’t actually a print of it anywhere. We’d love to see it, it looks amazing!

A lot of designers for this summer are actually referencing that sort of exotic Egyptian look - harem pants and gold - she’s clearly a sartorial memorial for more than just us!

And in A Fool There Was she has this amazing vertically striped black and white dress - it’s very Beetlejuice, and just the sort of thing we would wear!

Track intro: In memory of the exotic Theda Bara, here’s a song that was written at the height of her notorious fame, when all things exotic and vampish were in vogue.  Listen out for the lines “She’s as bold as Theda Bara/Theda’s bare but Becky’s bare-er”

Track 11: Rebecca Came Back from Mecca - Janet Klein & Her Parlor Boys”

To listen to the song,  and hear the rest of the The Broken Hearts radio show, which includes an interview with Bishi and a playful Silent Movie themed tracklist, click here,

www.myspace.com/2brokenhearts