Umirayushchiy lebed

Yevgeni Bauer's "The Dying Swan" is a finely-crafted melodrama that involves all of your emotions, making the viewer not just a witness to, but a part of the psychological struggles of its characters. The story idea is an interesting one, and the script very nicely adapts the idea to the silent screen.

There are essentially only five characters in the story, yet they present a finely-tuned balance between the three ordinary, predictable characters and the two creative geniuses who live for their art. The ballerina Gizella and the artist Glinskiy are both very interesting, and with Bauer's expert guidance the actors (Vera Karalli, who contributes an enchanting ballet sequence, and Andrei Gromov) bring them to life effectively. The artist character is especially nicely drawn, highly eccentric and obsessive, yet with enough balance to make sure that he does not become a stereotype. The other three characters are used effectively as a balance, both in the story developments and in establishing the personalities of the two leads.

Bauer's technique, as always, shows a sure hand, using special techniques at the right places. The dream sequence is particularly affecting, with an atmosphere carefully established, the camera slowly drawing away from Gizella's bed, and then the dream itself using some creative visuals.

The story of love and obsession draws you in almost effortlessly, and it's not possible to pull back, even when the sense of foreboding becomes almost unbearable. As a whole, it's a tightly constructed movie that makes a memorable impression.

A mute ballet dancer is jilted in love and finds herself crossing paths with a deranged artistic noble and inevitable tragedy results. Good directing and good acting make this slow-going film worth the watch. The mousy and odd-looking but charming Vera Karalli acted well considering she started out as a ballerina. The film features a segment of her dancing and what an inspired moment in film and a marvel of fate it survived for posterity. If only the same can be said for Nijinsky. This melodramatic decadent curio from the dying age of the Tsars is a dated but charming remnant from the distant past.

The Dying Swan is surpassingly beautiful, the kind of movie you can sink into. Bauer seemed to be someone who loved the medium of film, there's beautiful framing and deep focus photography from the very first scene where a father and daughter go fishing whilst in the deep background we see a horse lolling at the waterside. It's a film filled with sunlight (seems strange that the black and white medium could be used so effectively to portray natural light). You get the idea that filmmakers used to be more subtle, Bauer crafts beauty from the shadow of a palm frond on a sunny porch, and uses moving camera shots sparingly and for maximum effect.

The film also has elements of humour, Bauer clearly enjoying making a mockery out of a fatalistic death-obsessed Count who sees his own amateurish daubs as masterpieces. Russia was supposedly in the grip of morbidity in this period.

The story is about a young woman (Gizelle) who is mute and lives with her father. She falls in love with a young man, stintingly, and is upset when she discovers a dalliance of his. The great passion of her life is dancing so she resolves to leave home and become a ballerina. She is sad and dances a solo ballet piece which is meant to imitate the death of a swan, and is in fact, very beautiful. The actress Vera Karalli was actually a great ballet dancer and danced with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Often the dancing in old films is a bit less than spectacular (I'm thinking of Les Vampires, and Der Heilige Berg), that is not the case here.

I've mentioned the painter Alma Tadema in reviews before, and I think Bauer does some shots which are similar to his type of preoccupations, shots of architecture, generally balconies with glimpses of landscape or seascape in the distance. Bauer is not quite as exaggerated, which is good seeing as the story is of folks more introverted that the Romans. I think early filmmakers particularly Griffiths were highly influenced by Victorian painters, unfortunately film's love affair with painting and image seems to have wained since then.

What I like about Mr Bauer as well are his dream sequences, which seem to resonnate at a primordial level (one might even call them Lynchian - especially as the one in this film is premonitive). There is a terrific one in Bauer's After Death (1915). The dead Zoya Kadmina (Vera Karalli again) appears to the student Bagrov in a dream, a wonderful rolling landscape of wheat-sheaves rolling away into the distance, her face incandescent. In Dying Swan Gizelle dreams that the Count who is painting her has already killed a predecessor of his obsession, she warns Gizelle that this is what is waiting for her and takes her down to a dungeon where hands close in on her, grasping.

Recommended to all.

Only ten months after the January 1917 release of the film, the whole Russian worldview was going to be torn asunder. The Soviet cinema that emerged post- 1922 was going to commit itself in the pursuit of the mechanisms that drive forward the eye, a collective eye that did not contemplate any more but would set in motion by seeing.

So, this is a really precious film to have, I think; a snapshot of the world about to be swept aside, and the transfiguration of the core of that world in terms of cinema.

So, whereas with Eisenstein or Pudovkin, the heroic focus shifts on the disenchanted individual - the faces tired but resolute, the living hard but rigorously driven - who is transformed, subsumed into a mass of collective struggle redolent with immediate purpose, Bauer's films shows a life distraught with aimlessness, women as fragile, ethereal beings - a far cry from Pudovkin's Mother - and the members of a decadent aristocracy, the ruling class not quite able to even rule their own lives, as entombed in morbid fixations with images of the past. Faces are nervous, agitated, sunken from inner weights.

In Daydreams it was the image of a dead wife; here it is the image of a ballerina, the swan with broken wings, as evoking the essence of death. The young painter will eventually have to stage the picture of death he wants to immortalize.

On the whole, this one more gloomy than Bauer's rest, it evokes an atmosphere of Poe; a tragic, romantic exaltation of woe. It's potent as Gothic romance but - like Poe - rather comfortably nudged in its archaism. It's not something I will keep with me, unlike Daydreams and its Vertigo-esque dizziness.

Early ballet films followed the pattern of the Romantic-era ballet craze of its popular staged librettos where the dancers, almost supernatural in their movements, would invariably die at the end of the show wrapped in tragedy. The earliest existing ballet movie inspired by this century-old tradition is Russia's 1917 "The Dying Swan."

The mute heroine, played by Vera Karalli, is spurned by an admirer and seriously takes up ballet. Performing the original 1905 Anna Pavlova-dance, "The Dying Swan," in public, Karalli is spotted by an artist who is fixated by the illusion of death. He's sees something in her face that speaks of despair and ending it all. He convinces her to model for him with that look of gloom. But the earlier admirer returns to the scene, sparking a newfound energy in Karalli's face. This is when the movie's macabreness takes a twisted turn.

"The Dying Swan" was directed by Yevgeni Bauer, who had been called "the first true artist in the history of cinema." (See 1913's "Twilight of a Woman's Soul." ) Producing over 80 movies, he broke his leg on the set while directing his next film, "On Happiness." The later movie suffers because of his injury, as well as his last movie, "The King of Paris," when he was forced to direct in a bathchair while soaking his leg. While he was overseeing "Paris," Bauer came down with pneumonia. He was rushed to a Yalta hospital and died there June, 1917 at 52 years old. An actress in the movie stepped in to finish directing. His departure occurred just before Russia's transformation to Marxism in October roiled its movie industry, turning its independent cinema into a propaganda outlet for the government.

As for Vera Karalli, she played in several Bauer films and cited "The Dying Swan" as one of her best performances. A mistress to the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia, first cousin to Tsar Nicholas II, she was at the palace of a co-conspirator with her lover the night the Tsarina Alexandra's confidant, Grigori Rasputin, was killed in December 1916. She fled Russia soon after the October Revolution and settled in Austria, living a long life teaching ballet.