Only thanks to her impeccable reputation and the high standing this most eminent author of early film history enjoyed, did Lois Weber’s ‘Hypocrites’ manage to escape censorship in 1915. No one else would have got away with showing a film about a medieval ascetic whose quest for spiritual truths culminates with a naked woman carved in stone. Nevertheless, the scandal was considerable: not everyone can handle the naked truth.

The assessment of this first surrealist oeuvre in film history by the British censorship authorities at the time says it all:  a film that is ‘devoid of any meaning, and if one can be found it is without a doubt offensive.’  While the statement may not fully do justice to the film, it does contain a central moment.  The erotic hallucinations of a clergyman and the shifting play of treacherous surfaces are always aimed at something underneath or behind: the unconscious.

Much like the prima donnas of opera and dance, Alla Nazimova omitted her first name already during her lifetime,  appearing as Nazimova tout court in the adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s theatre piece ‘Salomé’. She came up with the idea for the film, which she herself also produced and in part financed, as pressure on the production companies began to increase. Moralisers saw it as a decadent and dangerous oeuvre from which the general public needed to be shielded at all cost. The film only premiered several years after its completion. It found little recognition and remained the last production of this exotic Russian libertine.