‘[F]antasy, being imaginary and elusive, is the most difficult thing in the world to picture, for as soon as you build and photograph a thing you give it substance and reality’, commented a Hollywood producer about The Thief of Bagdad when it was released. The Thousand and One Nights is a composite collection of texts with a complex textual story. The earliest tales probably come from India and Persia, having been translated into Arabic during the eighth century. This small original core of stories had some Arab tales added to it in Iraq during the ninth or tenth century. Starting in the tenth century, independent story cycles were integrated into the collection, and from the thirteenth century onwards, further stories were added in Syria or Egypt. Still more tales were added to the compilation during the early modern period.

One of the first adaptations for the screen was The Thief of Bagdad. The Hollywood superstar actor Douglas Fairbanks (1883–1939) had been the major attraction in films such as The Mark of Zorro (1920), The Three Musketeers (1921) and Robin Hood (1922) when he turned his attention to The Thousand and One Nights. Under the pseudonym Elton Thomas, he wrote most of the scripts for his adventure films himself. For The Thief of Bagdad, he took in art director (and later film director) William Cameron Menzies (1896–1957), who impressed Fairbanks with the level of detail of his set drawings (and who later designed all the storyboards and colour sketches for Gone With the Wind [1939]). Menzies created an astonishing fairytale world combining ‘spare geometrical architectural forms’ and ‘lush Art Nouveau detail’ which can still impress the audience. Some special effects were so groundbreaking that they featured in scientific magazines of the time. Raoul Walsh (1887–1980), whose directorial career spanned sixty years and who had been a cowboy in Texas in the last days of the ‘frontier’, was the film director for a movie which the poet and occasional film critic Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931) superlatively described in an essay as ‘the greatest movie so far in movie history’.

Fairbanks’s movements in this film were influenced by the modernist dance techniques of the Ballets Russes – and he became, in the words of a critic, ‘a ballet dancer in the style of Nijinsky’. It has been mentioned that his characters often included transformations and contrasts (thief-prince; brave Zorro-foppish Don Diego; …). In this film, there is a second level of contrast: not only do we see many sweeping assumptions about the ‘exotic’ Baghdad and its inhabitants – there is another ‘Other’ in the film, embodied by the Mongols. The producer from which the first sentence in this commentary is quoted pointed out that there was a paradox in the fact that Fairbanks instructed the technicians to make the sets ‘magnificently impressive in size and character’ while ‘preserving the idea of unreality’. Almost one hundred years after this film was made, the audience can appreciate the fact that the ‘Bagdad’ of this film – like so many others later – is, on the contrary, more unreal the more ‘impressive’, and the less human, it is.

This screening is open to all and free to attend. No booking required.

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