Yevgeni Bauer | Umirayushchii lebed (The Dying Swan) / 1916

drawing death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Zova Barantsevich (screenplay), Yevgeni Bauer (director) Umirayushchii lebed (The Dying Swan) / 1916

 

Like After Death, The Dying Swan is very much caught up in subject of death and dying and carries forward much of the Edgar Allan Poe tone of the earlier film. But here there are also links to Bauer’s Twilight of a Woman's Soul, particularly in the strengths of the female character Gizella, a mute dancer (again played by Vera Karalli).

     In this 1916 film, however, we enter a territory that goes far beyond the mere romantic notions of love and death as seen in Bauer’s earlier works. Here we enter a world were a young handsome misogynist, certainly a queer man if not a homosexual, is attracted to the ballerina for her abilities to portray death. When she discovers happiness, however, his sense of unhappiness demands that he destroy her, becoming one of the first of cinema’s tortured male outsiders who prey on women.

     The film begins rather audaciously with Victor Karosovky (Vitold Polonsky) encountering Gizella on a seaside path. His first statement is almost humorous and signifies his forcefulness: "Have you seen a big dog running past?" It is immediately clear that by 1916 Bauer had begun to understand the benefits of titles, and throughout, he and writer Zova Barantesevich use them effectively.

     Of course, as a mute, Gizella cannot answer, and the handsome intruder runs off, to her tearful regret. Her kindly father (Aleksandr Kheruvimov) comforts her, speaking in a manner that might remind one of Nora Desmond in Sunset Boulevard recalling silent films: "You have your face, which is more than words." The writer might almost be apologizing for the lack of spoken voice in his own silent work.

     Again, Gizella meets the rambunctious young man near the ocean, this time hurting her leg as he suddenly appears near her. But the meeting, now that he knows the cause of her silence, is felicitous this time around, and before long he is meeting with Gizella and her father daily. Again, the writer speaks for the art of silent-film acting, perhaps as a kind of testament for Karalli's memorable performance: "Your eyes are immeasurably greater...." than any voice might be. "Your soul is singing." Love, to apply the cliché, is clearly in "the air."

     But only a few days later, Victor bows out of one of his daily walks with Gizella, while she

surreptitiously observes him with another woman. The painful encounter is played out in visual terms through Victor and his new lover's affair in an open window, while below and to the right cowers the quiet and shy Gizella.

     Devastated by Victor's unfeeling actions, she writes to her father that he should take her away. Bauer lovingly puts this scene before a beautiful bush upon which he has tinted the flowers a lilac color. 

 

    Meanwhile, at the Count Glimskii estate the son, Valeriy—completely dedicated to depicting images of death—is attempting to capture his subject with drawings and paintings of skeletons without much success.

    This young man—with a long, pointed beard (long emblem of the aesthete) and a studio filled with flowers, either a large jug of wine or, more likely a vessel that is part of a hookah, a real skeleton and his depictions of it—all associate him the effete and decadent world of Huysman’s À rebours (1884). Count Valerian Sergeevich Glinskii is seeking “death, real death,” clearly as a creative solution to his own unhappiness, particularly given his rejection by his father.

 

    His anger over his failure is fueled by his father's dismissals: "I am sure it's all trivial." He and his father represent a kind of decadence that explains the later Bolshevik denouncement of Bauer's film.

     As in previous Bauer movies, a family member—this time Valeriy’s father—draws the reticent being into public life. At the ballet, where he is taken, Valeriy discovers, in Gizella's performance, the very vision of death he has been seeking. Visiting her backstage, he demands that she pose for him, and, soon after sends her one of the family crowns. The next day Gizella appears at his estate, he ludicrously strewing flowers before her as she makes her way into his studio. Glinskii is in a near delirious state: "I do not know whether I exist at all or whether I am in a delirium," he admits.

     Her father, however, does not like the Count, a feeling reiterated by an evening storm with lightening and Gizella's dream in which a montage of hands reaches out to grab her. When Valeriy proudly shows his father the results of Gizella's first sitting, the elder dismisses his art: "But it is untalented. It is terrible!"

     Gizella's tour comes to a spectacular end, her original boyfriend, Victor, reading of its success and pleading for an audience with her. Once again, upon the meeting, he momentarily frightens her, but this time he successfully pleads for her to forgive him, and they joyfully plan to marry.

     When Gizella appears at the Glinskii manor for her last sitting, the artist discovers that she has lost her deathly mien: "Where are those sad, exhausted, joyless eyes?"

     Again she poses in the position of the swan's final death, but Valeriy does not even recognize her: "Can this be the same Gizella?"

     He moves toward her, standing over the prostate figure, pausing only momentarily before putting his hands around her throat, strangling her to death. "Do not move. That is where beauty and peace lie."

   Already in this early film, the homosexual—this time features as the aesthete decadent—is a dangerously unhappy being seeking out not only his own death but those of all the female sex with whom he can enter into a fertile relationship.

 

Los Angeles, October 3, 2011

Essays reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2012).