Mad Love: The Films of Evgeni Bauer

Director: Evgeni Bauer
Russia. 1913-1916.
145. B&W/Tinted.

Cast: Vera Karall, Vitold Polonskii, Vera Dubovskaia.

Russian film poet Evgeni Bauer combined the technical virtuosity of D.W. Griffith with the haunting terror of Edgar Allan Poe and the artist’s eye of Johannes Vermeer. He is — perhaps — the greatest film director you have never heard of. During his brief four-year career, Evgeni Bauer created macabre masterpieces. They are dramas darkly obsessed with doomed love and death, astonishing for their graceful camera movements, risqué themes, opulent sets and chiaroscuro lighting. Tragically, Bauer died in 1917, succumbing to pneumonia after breaking his leg.

For many decades, Bauer’s films were buried in the Soviet archives — declared too "cosmopolitan" and bizarre for the puritanical Soviet regime. But with the fall of the Iron Curtain, Bauer’s work has risen like a glorious phoenix out of the ashes of time.

Twilight of a Woman's Soul (1913), Bauer's first surviving film, tells the story of a society woman who kills her rapist and — in its aftermath — must make a new life for herself when her husband leaves her. After Death (1915), adapted from a story by Ivan Turgenev, explores one of Bauer's favorite themes: the psychological hold of the dead over the living. In The Dying Swan (1916), an artist obsessed with the idea of capturing death on canvas becomes fixated on a mute ballerina.

After Death and The Dying Swan star Vera Karalli, the legendary ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet and Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo. Karalli’s colleague, the great Alexander Gorsky, choreographed the dances in many of Bauer’s movies including these two films. Restored by the Russian state archive Gosfilmofond and featuring brilliant new scores commissioned by the British Film Institute, Mad Love is a must-have collection for all lovers of film. Watching these extraordinary films is the cinematic equivalent of peering into the Tsar’s magnificent Fabergé Eggs.

Bonus Features

A 37-minute documentary film essay on Evgeni Bauer by Russian film scholar Yuri Tsivian and a stills gallery

Reviews

Last year, Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov made film history by staging Russian Ark, an odyssey through three centuries of czarist rule, as a single 96-minute traveling shot through the Hermitage art museum. While such a technical feat could arguably be achieved only in the digital age (Sokurov used a Sony HD camera), its aesthetic precedent was set 90 years earlier by Sokurovs countryman Evgeni Bauer. A forgotten filmmaker of the pre-Soviet era, Bauer was a master of screen space on par with G.W. Pabst or Cecil B. De Mille. This despite a four-year career cut short by his death in 1917. In some 80 films, Bauer mobilized high-contrast lighting and expressive camera movement to penetrate the stultifying decorum of the Russian aristocracy. Beneath the thick ornamentation of czarist ballrooms and boudoirs, Bauers fascinated but critical gaze exposed a world of morbid obsessions and withered wills. In Twilight of a Womans Soul (1913), a depressed socialite is plunged into tragedy when an act of philanthropy leads to rape and murder. Early on, Bauer binds us powerfully to the womans loneliness with a brief, subtle tracking shot that follows her from the edge of a swirling party to ironic isolation against an extravagant floral display. In After Dark (1915), a melancholy young man meets a similar destiny when the love of an enigmatic actress drives him to madness. Bauer sets up their initial encounter, again at a party, with a stunning three-minute tracking shot. The shots startling sense of claustrophobia prefigures not only the ineluctable fate that awaits the characters but also the bravura wedding of technique and emotion that put Sokurov in the history books. Twilight, After Dark and The Dying Swan (1916) are available on the Milestone collection Mad Love: The Films of Evgeni Bauer (VHS-DVD). – Paul Malcolm, LA Weekly