The Dying Swan

Yevgeni Bauer's 1917 Russian film is among the strangest works of Russian cinema immediately before the revolution. Betrayed by her lover, the mute young woman Gizella joins a ballet company; a painter watching her in a performance of The Dying Swan, obsessed with depicting death truthfully, fixes on her. Bauer was the most original visual stylist of Russian silent film; his use of deep space, gauze curtains and lighting still impresses. The film's subject is what art does to its object: the painter sees the woman not as a person but as the solution to his search, and the outcome is the logical consequence of that gaze. Vera Karalli was a real ballet dancer. Bauer died the same year. Who it's for: viewers interested in pre-revolutionary Russian cinema and visual experiment in the silent era. Who it's not for: anyone wanting fast narrative, or troubled by a woman character constructed as passive.