In this post, you will read a programme note for Evgenii Bauer’s film Sumerki zhenskoi dushi (Twilight of a Woman’s Soul, 1913). 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.
Sumerki zhenskoi dushi (Twilight of a Woman’s Soul, 1913)
Drama
49 minutes
Preserved without intertitles
Production Star Film Factory (A. Khanzhonkov & Pathé Frères)
Director, art director Evgeni Bauer
Scenarist V. Demert
Cameraman Nikolai Kozlovskii
Cast
Vera Dubrovskaia Nina Chernova
Prince Dol ski A. Ugriumov
Maksim Petrov V. Demert
Released on 26 November 1913, Twilight of a Woman’s Soul (1913) is Evgeni Bauer’s earliest extant film. It is also the only surviving Bauer film not shot by Boris Zavelev, the cameraman with whom Bauer collaborated from 1914 until the end of his career in 1917. Here Bauer’s cameraman is Nikolai Kozlovskii, who had worked alongside Aleksandr Drankov on the first all-Russian feature film, Sten ́ka Razin (1908). The consistency of the visual style in the films Bauer made with different cameramen suggests that Bauer himself devised and controlled this aesthetic aspect of his films.
Twilight of a Woman’s Soul addresses the theme of gender relations to which Bauer returned time and again throughout his career. It tells the story of one of Bauer’s strongest female protagonists, Vera Dubrovskaia, a beautiful, idealistic young woman who, disillusioned with the emptiness of her life and its tedious social distractions, enthusiastically accepts her mother’s suggestion that she accompany her on philanthropic visits to the poor. On one visit Vera encounters the workman Maksim. Struck by her beauty, Maksim tricks her into returning alone to his garret room, where he rapes her. Vera refuses to be a passive victim, however, and kills her rapist with one of his own tools. Months pass and Vera falls in love with Prince Dol´skii, who soon proposes. After their wedding Vera confesses her past, but her husband recoils from her in horror and Vera leaves him. Years later, during a visit to the opera, Dol´skii recognizes the operatic performer Ellen Kay as Vera. Overjoyed, he attempts reconciliation, but Vera rejects him, and the film closes with Dol´skii’s suicide.
Technically, Twilight of a Woman’s Soul is a highly accomplished début. If the opening ball scenes do not exhibit the depth and scale of similar scenes in later Bauer films, they nevertheless show Bauer striving to use space innovatively. In this respect the scenes shot in Vera’s bedroom are particularly successful, and they also demonstrate Bauer’s skilful use of lighting, props and costumes to create mood and highlight aspects of character and theme. A flimsy gauze curtain, drawn right across the screen, divides the set in two and creates depth. It also, however, serves to symbolize Vera’s detachment from the outside world, the sphere of public activity. The space in front of the curtain is in complete darkness; in contrast, the well-lit background where Vera sits appears even brighter, and Vera is bathed
in an unearthly light that lends her an aura of saintliness. Her ethereal nature is further suggested by the fragile curtain itself and by the diaphanous gown she is wearing. The whiteness of the curtain and of Vera’s dress also evokes associations of purity and innocence, as do the vases of flowers that decorate her bedroom.
The construction of the rape sequence, in which many elements of the mise-en-scène function to characterize Vera as the innocent victim of a dangerous male predator, is also extremely sophisticated for 1913. Consider Vera’s costume: with her simple dress, shawl-covered head and basket of provisions and medicine, Vera becomes an urban Little Red Riding Hood, while Maksim’s predatory nature is communicated through the various camera angles from which Bauer builds the sequence. The camera stalks Vera as she walks nervously along the deserted street towards Maksim’s garret; tension mounts when the camera cuts to Maksim’s leering face, as he leans out of the window to observe Vera’s approach; in the next shot, the camera adopts Maksim’s rapacious perspective, looking down on Vera and framing her as his helpless prey, heading unwittingly into his trap.
Although framed as a victim, Vera does not end the film in this way. In her refusal to accept Dol´skii’s declaration of love Vera shows that she has achieved not only financial independence and a successful career but also emotional independence. This makes Bauer’s first heroine unique among his female protagonists, for none of Vera’s successors acquires both forms of independence. In Bauer’s 1916 film Zhizn´ za zhizn´ (A Life for a Life) an intertitle informs us that: ‘Under the influence of love, a woman forgets everything’. Vera is the exception who proves this rule, being the only Bauer heroine who does not allow love to rule her life.