Umirayushchiy lebed

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.

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.

I am afraid Vera Karalli. After watching the second film with her participation, I was convinced of this. I did not see so sad a face from anyone of actress. And it is exactly not plaintive, like "uncle, give me kopeck" (It is Russian idiom), namely sad, mystical sad. As for me it is a clear why she was taken to the role of Gizella and even, based on film plot, clear why she with her "The Dying Swan" was image of death. In combination with face of Karalli, appropriate music and Black and White and Blue colors the episode of the prophetic sleep of Gizella was shown to me more terrible than any there "Jawes" and "Pets cemeteries". By the way, they selected actor to the role of maniac- artist ideally. Perhaps, unique persons, who pleasant to me in this history, are, certainly, Vitold Polonsky, who as always is charming and lovely, Ivan Perestiani and Alexander Kheruvimov. And nevertheless I do not like films with the ending-death (I did not see anything pre-revolutionary film where in the end nobody would die). As for me the Soviet silent movies and early sound Soviet films are somehow closer. Let it is a socialist realism, let in the ending enamored heroes march on the Red Square and sing songs about Motherland, but all it looks though and is utopia, but whether more humanly that.

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.

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.