Popular reviews

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★½ 2

  The most straightforward Bauer project visually, but the deepest one dramatically, The Dying Swan is a beauty-filled powerful tragedy of shocking proportions in which Bauer's take on the conscious and subconscious projections of the mind that constitute our reality and our present fantasies are shown in the finest and most cohesive form.

  Vera Karalli, who was a real-life Russian ballet dancer and choreographer, and officially Bauer's acting muse, returns from After Death (1915) as yet another stage performer that enchants the eyes of any man. The most direct comparison is precisely After Death not only because of having similar elements and the same female lead, but because the merging of themes such as life, death, reality and projections treated in…

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  Review by Ethan Lyon ★★★

  3rd Yevgeni Bauer (after After Death and Daydreams)

  With this third entry into Bauer's filmography, I'm increasingly of the opinion that he may well have been one of the two or three greatest filmmakers of the 1910s. Maybe not as complex in his use of form as Griffith, but there's a freshness to his filmmaking and the subtlety of expression he coaxes out of his actors that is second to none from the period. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say that his films feel almost ten years ahead of their time. The Dying Swan is a perfect example of this. Despite the incredibly melodramatic plot, the simplicity and subtlety of gestures from the actors make it feel so…

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  Review by V. Lepistö ★★★★★

  I spend my whole review on After Death to talk about Vera Karalli and I could here too... The whole film resonates with her - the inner world that travels through the waves to the calmness. Bauer seems to be obsessed with love and its drama, the memory and psychology, the obsession and fragility of life - yes, it seems that in every film of his he deals with death. After Death and The Dying Swan, both starring Karalli, both featuring the death already in their names. It feels as if Karalli reminds of him of something better. Perhaps he is the painter.

  Something to do with death:

  Bauer's men are obsessive, weak, hypocritical, fragile, stuck

  his women are alive…

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  Review by Sally Jane Black

  A beautiful movie based on a ballet based on a poem, this film is a simple love story with a deeper character than I expected. It seems like the film's main goal was to adapt the ballet in some fashion to a narrative, and the depth is, if not coincidental, certainly secondary to the poetry inherent in the story. Still, it speaks of obsession, art, and communication without dwelling too much on them.

  An artist obsessed with death seeks to capture the misery in Gizella's soul, caused by the fact that the man she loved left her abruptly. The foreshadowing is rather heavy handed (repeated statements and a dream sequence), but the dream sequence, at least, is hauntingly filmed (I…

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  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★½

  Perhaps the greatest feeling you can ever have film-watching is just viewing a random film with no expectations and being blown away by how good it is. I had that experience with 'The Dying Swan'.

  In my efforts to expand my old movie knowledge, I decided to watch 'The Dying Swan', a relatively obscure, Russian silent film from 1917. I expected it to be standard silent movie fare and just something to pass the time. Instead, I witnessed a superb piece of cinema.

  The key thing I loved was that it didn't fail where so many silent films do. It was entirely coherent, fast paced and never boring. There's also actual depth, some truly fucked up things, a beautiful dream…

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  Review by trolleyfreak ★★★½

  The worlds of art, poetry, music, ballet and film coalesce to produce a work as exquisitely doom-laden as you would expect from a Russian Silent film produced during the same year in which revolution would sweep Tsar Nicholas II from power and end over 300 years of Romanov rule!

  And it's simply divine..

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  Review by Arighna ★★★★½ 2

  A blatant simplicity covers the otherwise straightforward narrative of Evgeny Bauer's melodramatic melancholy. Alternative to the political motifs undertaken and revolutionized by Soviet auteurs like Sergei Eisenstein or Vsevolod Pudovkin, the pre Russian narrative of their quintessential tragedy concocts the elements of satire against bourgeoisie and romantic vibrancy of characters in their perfectly constructed dynamic relationships that produce off the factors of humanism which in turn Bauer's empathetic lens decides to project on the cultural bases of the country. A striking contrast between enchanting beauty and the rationale of death is brilliantly developed through philosophical symbolism and sequences of absolute surrealism. A narrative surrealism analogous to that of the Spanish maestro Luis Buñuel is very evident in the entirety of the cinematic projection of nightmarish proportions.

  92/100

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  Review by Lencho of the Apes ★★★

  The most dramatically complex of the Bauers I've seen, seems to turn on a recognition of Gizelle's status as a blank slate that men project their fantasies onto. There are a lot of inferences that can be drawn from that ; I won't list them, but the feminist concerns (female scenarist) are obvious.

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  Review by Ayla Van Damme ★★★★★ 4

  Uhm wow... I take back every prejudice I've ever had against silent films, they're not boring at all. This was so beautiful I was teary-eyed near the end.

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  Review by Avirup ★★★

  57/100
  
  Felt little undeveloped but still quite tragic and elevated by Vera Karalli's great performance. Compositions are once again superb and the dream sequence was terrific.

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  Review by supostatka ★★★★

  this movie is a hundred years old and honestly i am glad to see that Russia has always been manically depressed

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  Review by Cate ★★★½

  If you only knew how grateful I am to you. I have found what I have been searching for all my life. All my life I've been searching for death and I have found it in your dance.

  I love the morbid moodiness of the Yevgeni Bauer films I've seen. Here, the Swan Lake story is transmuted into a heartbroken ballerina; an artist who finds her mutism sublimely peaceful like death, who likes her sad and joyless, who wants to paint her dying over and over.

  I was fascinated also to learn about Vera Karalli's involvement in the murder of Rasputin, recontextuslising the eerie intensity of her performances.