In this post, you will read a programme note for Evgenii Bauer’s film Umiraiushchii lebed´ (The Dying Swan, 1917). The aim of this post is to provide viewers with little or know knowledge about the film with a critical introduction to it, to contextualise it briefly and to highlight significant features of the film’s themes and style. The word limit is 750-1000 words.
Umiraiushchii lebed´ (The Dying Swan, 1917)
49 minutes
Production A. Khanzhonkov & Co. Ltd
Director Evgeni Bauer
Script Zoia Barantsevich
Cameraman Boris Zavelev
Cast
Gizella, a mute dancer Vera Karalli
Viktor Krasovskii Vitol´d Polonskii
Count Valerii Glinskii, an artist Andrei Gromov
Gizella’s father Aleksandr Kheruvimov
Glinskii’s friend Ivan Peristiani
Released on 17 January 1917, this remarkable late Evgenii Bauer film borrows both its title and its starring actress from the world of ballet. Created for Anna Pavlova, the famous Russian prima ballerina, by the Ballets Russes choreographer, Mikhail Fokin, The Dying Swan (1907) was interpreted by many other ballerinas, including the star of Bauer’s film, Vera Karalli (1888/89?-1972). A dancer with the Russian Imperial Ballet, Karalli turned to cinema when her dancing career was interrupted by injury. Her first film role was in Petr Chardynin’s 1914 drama Chrysanthemums and in 1915 she made several films with Bauer, including After Death. Considered one of the most beautiful screen actresses of her generation – so beautiful that she was allegedly used in the plot to lure Rasputin to his death – Karalli was a big box office draw. When her interpretation of Fokin’s dance also proved successful, Bauer conceived the idea of creating a film scenario around it, and the enormous success this film enjoyed with contemporary viewers was probably due in no small part to Karalli’s performance of The Dying Swan, in her role as the mute ballerina Gizella. When Karalli briefly toured with the film, performing Fokin’s dance both before and after the showing, the reviews became even more enthusiastic.
Bauer’s film also features a decadent artist, Count Glinskii, who is obsessed with capturing the image of Death on canvas. The pursuit of this ideal drives Glinskii to the brink of despair, but, on watching the heart-broken Gizella perform The Dying Swan, he sees in her the ideal image he seeks; the artist falls in love with the ballerina and persuades her to pose for him. Ultimately, however, the young woman cannot live up to Glinskii’s ideal. Before the portrait is finished, Viktor – the faithless lover whose betrayal had broken her heart – re-enters Gizella’s life, offering love and marriage. Elated, Gizella runs to her last sitting with Glinskii, but her happiness threatens to ruin his masterpiece, for in her life-affirming joy she no longer embodies his ideal. The desperate artist is therefore impelled to kill her: he strangles Gizella, completes his portrait and gazes calmly and tenderly at her beautiful corpse. Unlike Nedelin, the male murderer in Bauer’s earlier film Daydreams (1915), Glinskii displays no awareness of the horror of his act. Here Bauer pushes the logic of his analysis of gender relations to its terrible extreme.
There is much in this film besides Karalli’s performance of The Dying Swan that is visually striking. The sequence in which Gizella discovers Viktor’s unfaithfulness features a shot of breathtaking depth and distance: as we look down on Gizella from Viktor’s terrace, our view extends past her, down the steps to where her fickle lover arrives with another woman in his carriage, and then beyond to distant buildings and trees. The beautiful outdoor shots in the first part of the film also illustrate Bauer’s skilful use of natural light and shade to create atmosphere and reveal character: the bright sunlight that bathes Gizella, who dresses in white gowns and flower-bedecked hats, conveys her innocence and naïveté; the false-hearted Viktor, however, appears more often in shade.
Bauer’s humor and irony are also in evidence, especially in his portrayal of Glinskii. In great comic tradition, Bauer discourages the viewer from taking him seriously by giving the artist a down-to-earth foil, in the character of his friend. He also undermines him by visual means, filling his studio with ugly – and absurd – anatomical paintings and a skeleton, which, grinning grotesquely, remains in his studio throughout the film. This note of parody does not lessen the impact of the film’s final tragic twist, however, which develops out of an extraordinary nightmare sequence. It begins, against the background of dramatic lighting effects, with an innovative dolly-out shot that drags the viewer into the space of Gizella’s nightmare, where a ghostly nun predicts her death and disembodied hands grasp at the cowering ballerina. At the moment of her death, this terrifying image flashes through Gizella’s consciousness and, of course, onto the screen. The film closes with a disturbingly eroticised image of the dead ballerina, in her pose of The Dying Swan.
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