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Dangerous beauty: representation and reception of women in the films of Evgenii Bauer, 1913-1917

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Dangerous beauty: representation and reception of women in the films of Evgenii Bauer, 1913-1917

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Content DANGEROUS BEAUTY: REPRESENTATION AND RECEPTION OF WOMEN IN THE FILMS OF EVGENII BAUER, 1913-1917 by Michele Leigh Torre A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (CRITICAL STUDIES) May 2008 Copyright 2008 Michele Leigh Torre ii Dedication I would like to dedicate this work to my daughter Sadie, who was both a distraction from and my inspiration for finishing. I hope that I will be an inspiration for her in her life. I want her to know that the world is full of possibilities; she only has to choose which path she will take. I would also like to dedicate this work to my mother Linda. There is no way that I can thank you enough for letting me become the person I am and never insisting that I follow some preconceived notion of who or what you thought I should be. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my family, especially my husband Paul, who allowed me the space to get crazy with this dissertation. Paul never let me forget that this little thing called my dissertation was something I could and would finish. I would especially like to thank Dr. Lora Mjolsness, for her friendship and all the support she has provided throughout this process. She listened with patient understanding when I needed to talk out my thoughts; she read and reread everything without complaining (at least to me). I would also like to thank other friends who have helped me through the process of writing my dissertation: Dr. Heidi Rae Cooley, whose thoughtful insights were invaluable and Kristen Wagner (soon to be Ph.D), who made going through graduate school a pleasure and the dissertation writing process a little bit funnier. iv Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgments iii List of Figures vi Abstract xi Chapter One: Introduction 1 Chapter Two: Reading Cinema and Consuming Women 13 The “Woman’s Director” 19 Films about Women 21 Films for Women 22 Consuming Women 23 Pegasus 28 Overall Structure of the Journal 32 Connection to Women Consumers 34 Reinforcing Evolution of the Star System 36 Conclusion 40 Chapter Three: Women on the Loose 43 Modern Russian City 46 Moscow 54 Women in the City 58 Urban Space and Bauer 63 Twilight of A Woman’s Soul 64 Child of the Big City 75 One Thousand and Second Ruse 86 Conclusion 94 Chapter Four: Filtering Culture: Modernity and Gender Construction 98 The Cultural and Historical Landscape of Russian Modernity 101 The Intersections of Modernity, Symbolism and Melodramatic Cinema 112 Symbolist Themes and Bauer’s films 118 Bauer’s Films 122 Silent Witnesses 123 Conclusion 136 v Chapter Five: Death Becomes Her 139 Death in Russian Culture 141 Death and the Cinema 145 Bauer’s Dead Women 146 Yuri Nagornyi 147 After Death 153 Day Dreams 161 The Dying Swan 173 Conclusion 186 Chapter Six: Afterthoughts 190 Bibliography 195 Appendices Appendix A: Filmography 204 Appendix B: Sample Pegasus Table of Contents 212 Appendix C: Sample Pegasus Table of Contents 214 vi List of Figures Figure 1.1 Cinematographic Herald, Evgenii Bauer 27 Figure 1.2 Pegasus Logo 30 Figure 1.3 A. Khanzhonkov & Co. Logo 30 Figure 1.4 Pegasus, Lev Tolstoy, Nov. 1915 33 Figure 1.5 Pegasus, Vera Kholodnaya, May 1916 33 Figure 1.6 Pegasus, excerpt from Irina Kirsanova. 35 Figure 1.7 Pegasus, still from Burning Wings. 37 Figure 1.8 Pegasus, still from Happiness of Eternal Night. 38 Figure 1.9 Pegasus, still from Retribution. 38 Figure 1.10 Pegasus, still from Bloodless Duel. 39 Figure 1.11 Pegasus, still N. N. Nel’skaia and O.N. Frelikh 39 Figure 2.1 Map of Moscow 1893. 56 Figure 2.2 Twilight of a Woman’s Soul, Vera in her bedroom. 68 Figure 2.3 Twilight of a Woman’s Soul, Vera avoiding the party. 70 Figure 2.4 Twilight of a Woman’s Soul, the basement. 71 Figure 2.5 Twilight of a Woman’s Soul, the basement. 71 Figure 2.6 Twilight of a Woman’s Soul, slums. 74 Figure 2.7 Child of the Big City, Mary’s mother dies. 77 Figure 2.8 Child of the Big City, Mary daydreaming. 80 Figure 2.9 Child of the Big City, window shopping. 81 Figure 2.10 Child of the Big City, window shopping. 81 vii Figure 2.11 Child of the Big City, the big kiss. 82 Figure 2.12 Child of the Big City, tango scene. 84 Figure 2.13 Child of the Big City, tango scene. 84 Figure 2.14 Child of the Big City, Mary’s apartment. 85 Figure 2.15 Child of the Big City, Viktor’s hovel. 85 Figure 2.16 One Thousand and Second Ruse, the old husband. 88 Figure 2.17 One Thousand and Second Ruse, the young wife. 89 Figure 2.18 One Thousand and Second Ruse, the wife takes a stroll. 91 Figure 2.19 One Thousand and Second Ruse, the wife takes a stroll. 91 Figure 2.20 One Thousand and Second Ruse, window shopping. 91 Figure 3.1 Advertisement for a lecture on "Criminals and Hooligans.” 105 Figure 3.2 Advertisement for a patent medicine, Purgen. 108 Figure 3.3 Advertisement for a patent medicine, Arovin. 109 Figure 3.4 Silent Witnesses Nastia. 127 Figure 3.5 Silent Witnesses, Elena. 127 Figure 3.6 Silent Witnesses Baron von Rehren. 129 Figure 3.7 Silent Witnesses, Pavel Kostritsyn. 129 Figure 3.8 Silent Witnesses, the kitchen. 130 Figure 3.9 Silent Witnesses, Pavel and women. 130 Figure 3.10 Silent Witnesses, the Baron arrives. 131 viii Figure 3.11 Silent Witnesses, Nastia observes. 131 Figure 3.12 Silent Witnesses, Tango kiss. 132 Figure 3.13 Silent Witnesses, deception. 135 Figure 4.1 Yuri Nagornyi, seduction. 149 Figure 4.2 Yuri Nagornyi, Yuri’s apartment. 149 Figure 4.3 Yuri Nagornyi, the dancer. 151 Figure 4.4 Yuri Nagornyi, the sister. 151 Figure 4.5 Yuri Nagornyi, retribution. 152 Figure 4.6 Yuri Nagornyi, before the suicide. 152 Figure 4.7 After Death, Andrei’s mother. 154 Figure 4.8 After Death, Zoia gazes. 155 Figure 4.9 After Death, Andrei gazes back. 155 Figure 4.10 After Death, Zoia’s intense gaze. 156 Figure 4.11 After Death, remembering. 157 Figure 4.12 After Death, Cleopatra. 158 Figure 4.13 After Death, deathbed scene. 158 Figure 4.14 After Death, dream sequence. 159 Figure 4.15 After Death, dream sequence. 159 ix Figure 4.16 Daydreams, cutting the hair. 164 Figure 4.17 Daydreams, deathbed. 165 Figure 4.18 Daydreams, garden. 165 Figure 4.19 Daydreams, portrait of the wife. 167 Figure 4.20 Daydreams, portraits of Sergei’s wife Elena. 167 Figure 4.21 Daydreams, dead nuns. 170 Figure 4.22 Daydreams, misrecognition. 170 Figure 4.23 Daydreams, the apparition. 171 Figure 4.24 Daydreams, The End of Tina. 172 Figure 4.25 The Dying Swan, Gizella. 176 Figure 4.26 The Dying Swan, the swan dies. 179 Figure 4.27 The Dying Swan, misrecognition. 179 Figure 4.28 The Dying Swan, Glinksii and the crown. 180 Figure 4.29 The Dying Swan, flowers. 181 Figure 4.30 The Dying Swan, death triangle. 181 Figure 4.31 The Dying Swan, the dead nun. 183 Figure 4.32 The Dying Swan, Gizella and the hands. 184 Figure 4.33 The Dying Swan, posing Gizella. 185 x Figure 4.34 The Dying Swan, handiwork. 185 Figure 4.35 The Dying Swan, the dead swan. 186 xi Abstract My work on Russian Silent film offers an in-depth exploration of a Pre- Revolutionary filmmaker frequently referred to as “The Woman’s Director,” Evgenii Bauer. In my dissertation, I analyze Bauer’s particular status as a “Woman’s Director” and provide a historical analysis of female representation in Russian silent film. Alongside this, I explore the implications these representations held for women of the time, expanding our current understanding of how women envisioned themselves during this tumultuous period. My dissertation adds to a growing body of scholarship on women at the turn of the last century. This work unpacks how contemporary journals positioned Evgenii Bauer’s films in contemporary culture, and how Russian spectators, especially women, were invited and encouraged to understand Bauer’s films. In particular, I analyze the significance of the Khanzhankov Studios’ journal Pegasus, a fan magazine published during the height of Bauer’s career. This analysis of the journal and Bauer’s films examines depictions of women in urban, metropolitan environments, as these places were Meccas for female migration, employment, earning, culture and change. The dangers, allures and opportunities of the modern city had to be navigated and negotiated by a new kind of woman, one who broke the molds of tradition, who was resourceful, and who wanted more from life than the daily struggle for basic needs. In my analysis of the films of Evgenii Bauer, I demonstrate that the various aspects of Bauer’s films and his career, including his use of melodrama, combined specifically with visual elements that replicate aspects of modernity and create a sense of ambiguity about changing gender roles. Bauer’s use of modern urban spaces illustrates the possibilities and potential power of women in Russia. My dissertation illustrates that the ambiguity that Bauer created in his films regarding gender issues allowed for multiple readings from his viewers. My work changes our current understanding of how women were represented and how women envisioned themselves during years preceding the Revolution. 1 Chapter One Introduction ‘Women’s cinema’ is a complex critical, theoretical and institutional construction, brought into existence by audiences, film-makers, journalists, curators, and academics and maintained only by their continuing interest: a hybrid concept, arising from a number of overlapping practices and discourses… Alison Butler 1 Cinematic images of women have been so consistently oppressive and repressive that the very idea of a feminist filmmaking practice seems an impossibility. The simple gesture of directing a camera toward a woman has become equivalent to a terrorist act. Mary Ann Doane 2 Pre-Revolutionary Russian cinema was considered for a long time to be a primitive predecessor to Soviet filmmaking, and therefore as something that could be disregarded and dismissed. Many contemporary critics believed that cinema in general, and pre-Revolutionary Russian cinema in particular, was an imitative and inferior art form. They reinforced this attitude by situating cinema in a precarious position between popular entertainment and legitimate art. In Russia this assumption that cinema was inferior was underscored by the relatively late arrival of Russia onto the film market, as Russian film production did not begin until 1908. Despite this late start, however, the Russian film industry, and Russian filmmaking, quickly gelled and developed a style all its own and established itself as an art form in its 1 Alison Butler, Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen (New York: Wallflower Press, 2002) 2. 2 Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991) 165. 2 own right, especially during the First World War, when Russia closed its doors to most imports. Another reason for the dearth of serious scholarship during this period and until recently was the utter disregard for pre-Revolutionary cinema by the later Soviet filmmakers, politicians and film historians. Early Soviet filmmakers, like Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, as well as Bolshevik politicians wanted a complete break from the past and, therefore, dismissed out of hand anything connected to the Bourgeois culture of the Tsarist regime. The Revolution of 1917 served as an arbitrary, albeit, historic fissure in the continuum of Russian filmmaking, one utilized by both western and Russian scholars. This rather arbitrary rupture between filmmaking prior to 1917 and Soviet filmmaking was further exacerbated by an apparent lack of material, namely the films, from before the revolution. 3 The study of the Russian film industry drastically changed in 1989, when thanks to the diligence of film scholar Yuri Tsivian, some 200 films dating from 1908 to 1917 were found in the Gosfilmofond and then shown at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy. 4 The lack of pre-Revolutionary material made scholarship of this period in Russian film history difficult; without seeing the films scholars were only able to talk about the films in general terms. While there have 3 In addition to the many films lost due to the ravages of time, revolution and civil war, there is also a rumor that many films were lost due to shortages of film stock. Supposedly existing films were stripped of their chemicals, recoated and used again for filming. See Denise J. Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era 1918-1935 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991) 1-2. 4 This is a week long festival showcasing great and forgotten works of the silent era. 3 been several articles published on the topic to date, only two other book-length studies have attempted to recoup or reconstruct this period in Russian film history. The first is Yuri Tsivian’s Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception, which establishes a model for reception studies in Russia by addressing how various spaces, machines, and techniques influenced and created a semiotics of film viewing in Russia. The second study is by historian Denise Youngblood’s The Magic Mirror, which takes a social-historical approach to looking at the film industry in Russia before the Revolution in 1917. When Evgenii Bauer’s films were rediscovered and shown at the eighth annual Pordenone silent film festival in 1989, they registered strongly with many leading scholars. In this preliminary viewing of Russian pre-revolutionary cinema, several feminist scholars considered Bauer’s films in particular, with their modern urban women, to be typical of misogynist discourse when read through the filters of standard western conceptions of melodrama and gender. 5 The quote by Mary Ann Doane that I began this introduction with reinforces such a negative assessment of Bauer’s pre-revolutionary cinema. 6 Yet, when one examines these films within the context of Russian culture at the turn of the century and considers the ways in which spectators were invited to read the films, they actually defy Doane’s evaluation of the nature of feminist cinema, and Bauer’s films are potentially revolutionary in their representation of women. 5 For example, Miriam Hansen in her essay “Deadly Scenarios: Narrative Perspective and Sexual Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Film,” Cinefocus 12.2 (1992): 10-19. 6 While Doane’s comment does not refer specifically to the films I will discuss, it is comments like this that inform contemporary understanding of historic films. 4 Building on the two studies by Tsivian and Youngblood, my own work explores the oeuvre of Evgenii Bauer, who had a brief but productive career in the years preceding the Revolution. While Bauer’s entire film career lasted only four short years, from 1912 to 1917, he was extremely prolific during that time, directing eighty-two films. 7 Before signing on as a director for A. Khanzhankov & Co., Bauer worked briefly as set designer and director for other film companies like Pathé Frères, Drankov and Taldykin. It was at the Khanzhankov studio, however, that Bauer really made a name for himself. He quickly became one of Khanzhankov’s most popular directors, eventually earning an unheard of salary of 40,000 rubles a year and becoming a shareholder in the film company. 8 This dissertation offers an in-depth exploration of Bauer’s key films 9 , with detailed discussions of his use of mise-en-scene, narrative structure, lighting, and blocking to understand the types of female representations he created in his films and the implications they had for female audiences. I discuss cultural influences on Bauer’s films and filmmaking techniques, as they add extra-textual meaning to our 7 Bauer’s career ended abruptly in June of 1917, when he contracted pneumonia after suffering a fall and breaking a leg while on location shooting a film in Riga. 8 See Yuri Tsivian, “Bauer, Evgenii,” Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel (New York: Routledge, 2005) 60-61; Denise J. Youngblood, The Magic Mirror: Moviemaking in Russia, 1908-1918 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999) 53-54 and 80-86; and Silent Witnesses: Russian Films 1908-1919, eds. Paolo Cherchi Usai, Lorenzo Codelli, Carlo Montanaro, and David Robinson, Research by Yuri Tsivian (London: British Film Institute, 1989) 546-550. 9 Of the 82 films that Bauer directed during his career, only 26 are known to be in existence. There is some discrepancy over the actual number of films that Bauer directed some sources list 82 while others list 86. It is difficult to know the actual number because so many of the films have been lost and because even Alexander Khanzhonkov himself does not properly credit Bauer for some of the films we know he directed. See The First Years of Russian Cinematography: a Memoir [Pervye gody Russkoi kinematografii, vospominaniia], (Moskva [Moscow]: Iskusstvo, 1937). My dissertation offers a detailed analysis of 8 of these films, which based on accounts of his other films; offer a fair sampling of his work as a filmmaker. 5 understanding of the development of his female characters and the viewers who watched them. I situate Bauer’s films historically, in order to create a fuller picture of the issues surrounding female spectatorship at the turn of the century in Russia. Filmmaking in Russia from 1912-1917 was primarily a male-dominated industry, and so when I began my work I was quite intrigued by the fact that Evgenii Bauer was frequently referred to as the “Woman’s Director.” This curious nomenclature became the starting point for my dissertation. While Bauer chose to make women the central subject of his films, when female-centered melodramas were still a rarity in most countries, 10 this could not have been the only reason for the designation of “Woman’s Director.” As film scholar Alison Butler points out in the opening quotation, defining women’s cinema is a difficult and complicated task, so too is defining the significance of being a “Woman’s Director” in Russia at the turn of the century. In this dissertation I unpack the significance of Bauer’s title as a “Woman’s Director” by exploring cultural conditions and sources contemporary with the filmmaker. The first chapter creates a model for a possible female spectator by exploring Bauer’s position as “Woman’s Director.” I explore the significance of the designation “Woman’s Director” within the silent film era and the connection with other filmmakers so labeled. I examine the assumptions associated with the title, which range from simply making films about women, to making films for female 10 With the exception of Germany and Denmark, who had a rich tradition of female-centered melodrama during the early period. The issue is especially important in Russia which had a deeply ingrained patriarchal culture, where women were considered non-entities and the Tsar was the quintessential head of the family. 6 audiences; from encouraging spectators to identify with female characters to setting up women as symbols of the nation. Viewing Bauer’s films through the lens of current feminist film scholarship, I analyze how Bauer’s status as the “Woman’s Director” challenges our preconceived notions of early Russian Cinema. In this chapter I address questions such as: What were the implications for a male director at the turn of the century in Russia to be labeled a “Woman’s Director”? What do these conceptions imply about Bauer’s films? What does this nomenclature and Bauer’s work tell us about the status of women in Russia during this period? What can be inferred about the audience reception/perception (by both men and women) of Bauer’s films? And finally, what does the title “Woman’s Director” say about Russian women both as a commodity and as consumers of culture? In answering these questions we will be able to better understand the historical context of what the concept of woman symbolized in the urban space of modernist Russia and how real women struggled to break free of this confining symbolism. This first chapter also looks closely at how Bauer’s films were positioned within Russian culture and everyday life. 11 According to Miriam Hansen, “the emergence of cinema spectatorship is profoundly intertwined with the transformation of the public sphere, in particular the gendered itineraries of everyday life and 11 This time period in Russian cinema pre-dates any type of audience study and the likelihood of finding living subjects to study is virtually impossible, thus we must turn to other sources such as films reviews in popular magazines, journals and newspapers. 7 leisure.” 12 In other words, cinema is indebted to industrialization in many ways; most importantly because of the way it structured daily life, allowing for the invention of leisure, which in turn opened a world of possibilities for both men and women. Hansen approaches spectatorship from the “perspective of the public sphere, as a critical concept that is itself a category of historical transformation.” 13 With this in mind, I examine the contemporary film journals in order to explore how Russian spectators were invited/encouraged to understand Bauer’s films. In particular, I analyze the Khanzhankov studio press, Pegasus: A Journal of Art (Pegas’ zhurnal isskustvo), published during the height of Bauer’s career. An analysis of this publication will offer insights into how the Khanzhankov studio positioned and marketed Bauer’s films to Russian filmgoers. I argue that Pegasus was intended for a female audience as a way of selling film to women and establishes a picture of the type of viewer the studio envisioned for the films of Evgenii Bauer. In this chapter I suggest a model for reception by looking at how Bauer’s films were received in popular presses. I examine several of these publications to provide an analysis for how Bauer’s films were understood in relation to contemporary Russian cinema and Bauer’s position as the “Woman’s Director.” This chapter looks at the position of real women in Russia at the turn of the century and examines how Bauer utilized these dynamic figures in his films. 12 Miriam Hansen, Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) 2. 13 Hansen, Babel & Babylon 2. 8 My second chapter establishes a picture of the Russian city at the turn of the century. This chapter deals with important historical and cultural factors which influenced the rapid growth of Russia’s two major cities, St. Petersburg and Moscow. I pay particular attention to Moscow for several reasons, including the fact that while St. Petersburg was the political capital of the Empire, Moscow was the film capital. Moscow housed the majority of the production studios, thus most of the filming took place in and around the Moscow environs. The city of Moscow, as well as a more generic, urban space played an important role in the films of Evgenii Bauer; it influenced not only the type of films he made but also the types of female characters he used in his films. This chapter maps the use of urban space as it relates to the construction of his characters and viewers in three films by Evgenii Bauer, Twilight of a Woman’s Soul, One Thousand and Second Ruse, and Child of the Big City. I examine issues of public versus private space in addition to urban versus rural culture as they relate to Bauer’s films. In each instance I explore the various roles Bauer established for women. The visibility of women and their ability to maneuver this new urban terrain will be important in a discussion of the role entertainment played in urban spaces. The third chapter builds on the connection between urban space and theories of modernity. In this chapter I explore the relationship between modernity, melodrama, and gender construction as it relates to Russia in general and Bauer’s film Silent Witnesses. Through a detailed analysis of the film, I examine the connection between strong urban women in Bauer’s films and the emasculation of 9 the bourgeois male. The artistic lineage of Bauer’s urban female characters can be traced through Symbolism, ‘Boulevard’ penny press literature, theatrical melodrama, painting, and advertising. To help us understand the cultural significance of Bauer’s female representations I explore major literary and artistic movements as they relate to women in urban space and modernity. I analyze how Bauer established guidelines though his use of modernity, Symbolism and melodrama, for how gender was to be performed, and how that performance created a sense of ambiguity, which then allowed the possibility for multiple readings of Bauer’s films. In the fourth and final chapter, I look at the significance of the ‘Russian ending,’ and the conclusions of several of Bauer’s films. Many of Bauer’s films end with the death, figuratively and literally, of one or more of his central characters. In particular, I discuss the ways in which Evgenii Bauer uses the death of a female character, or rather the feminine corpse in three of his films: Yuri Nagornyi, Daydreams, After Death and The Dying Swan. 14 I examine how Bauer utilized and transformed tropes of death and the female body in the cinema as a cultural construction that belied some of the confusion about gender identity in Russia following the turn of the century. Literary scholar Elisabeth Bronfen proposes that narrative and visual representations of death can be read as symptoms of a culture, that the female body is ‘culturally constructed’ as a site of ‘otherness’ and thus she becomes the perfect 14 The distinction between a dead woman and a female corpse will become clear later in the chapter. 10 tool for the reenactment of death. 15 This presupposition poses an interesting starting point when considering Bauer’s use of death in conjunction with his use of striking narrative and visual imagery in these films. Building on this presupposition, I address several questions in this last chapter. First, how does the death of the female protagonist or the feminine corpse affect our reading of the themes dealt with in earlier chapters, i.e. urban space, modernity, melodrama, and female spectatorship in the public sphere? Also, how does the interplay among these four thematics help to define Bauer’s identification as a “Woman’s Director”? And finally, does Bauer insist that the women are punished or killed for their violations or are they justified in their breaches of the patriarchal order? Historically in patriarchal Russia women had such limited power and even less agency. There was an old joke that circulated in the Eighteenth century where one man recounts to another about the people he saw during his journey. 16 The first man tells his companion that he “saw two people walking along the road today – a priest, a farmer and the farmer’s wife” The significance of this joke is that the woman is not counted as a person, she is insignificant, yet she still listed amongst the tally of daily encounters. Throughout early Russian history, “woman,” as a category, seems to function as something less than a whole, as a lack (a cultural literalization of Freud’s psychoanalytic lack). Even as this category “woman” represents a void, it is also simultaneously the site of proliferating, almost frenzied, representations of 15 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992) xi. 16 What follows, was recounted to me in one of my Russian courses. 11 and, perhaps, expectations for women at the turn of the century. 17 Thus an over- abundance of representations supplant and subvert the culturally constructed lack created by Russia’s patriarchal order. Nowhere is that over-abundance, this hysteria of female representation more visible than in Bauer’s films. His position as the “Woman’s Director” in Russia at the turn of the century is clouded with ambiguity, at once both derogatory and laudatory, and referring simultaneously to his audience and his preoccupation with memorable female characters. This ambiguity carried over into the ways in which Bauer utilized cultural influences to problematized gender construction in his film. Bauer’s ambiguous position in the film industry, and the films he chose to direct worked together to create a liminal space where traditional understanding of the types of roles and representations available to women were changing, allowing for new perspectives. My dissertation demonstrates that the types of characters in Bauer’s films provided women with hope that things could change, or illustrated how they were changing. My conclusion illustrates how, rather than simply reinforcing the status quo, Bauer’s films provided female viewers with agency, allowing for multiple interpretations. The various aspects of Bauer’s films and his career, including his use of melodrama, combined specifically with visual elements that replicate aspects of modernity. Bauer’s use of modern urban spaces illustrates the possibilities and potential power of women in Russia. Bauer’s studio published journals that used his 17 Thanks to Dr. Heidi Rae Cooley for helping me put this thought into words. 12 films to cultivate a growing female audience. And, finally, Bauer constructed his films, using death itself as an anti-ending. All of these elements work together to create the possibility of alternative interpretations of his films, and unique positions for women, both on the screen and in the audience. 13 Chapter Two Reading Cinema and Consuming Women Before discussing the textual and cultural analysis of Bauer’s films it will be helpful to spend some time discussing how Bauer and his films were positioned within the Russian media, and what that might have meant in terms of cinema spectatorship. By understanding how his films were promoted by the Khanzhonkov studio, we can get a glimpse not only of who these films were marketed to, but also how the studio intended the films to be read. In order to do this, we must unpack the significance of Bauer’s status as the ‘Woman’s Director’ within contemporary culture in the years prior to the Revolution. Through a discussion of Bauer’s position as a ‘Woman’s Director’ and an exploration of how the Khanzhonkov studio capitalized on Bauer’s status with the publication of their monthly film journal Pegasus (Pegas’), we can trace Khanzhonkov’s attempts to attract a growing consumer base of women. This in turn will provide us with some insight into the construction of the female spectatorial position in Russia, which we can then use to further understanding of Bauer’s films themselves, as well as their audience. It is difficult to talk specifically about female audiences in early Russian cinema. There were no empirical audience studies done during this time to determine factors like gender, age, and class among film viewers. Box office numbers are unreliable as there was great fluctuation in the price of admission among theaters, along with a tendency within the industry to inflate numbers. Despite their unreliability, box office receipts do provide us with a rough idea of the 14 number of people attending the movies. They do not, unfortunately, differentiate between male and female viewers. There is little written about audience members, and even less about female filmgoers, their reactions, their likes and dislikes in Russian press at the time. Yuri Tsivian points out that there are a few instances where turn-of-the-century Russian film critics and writers have commented on the overall democratic/diverse composition of the film audience in Russia, noting one critic for instance who remarked that “absolutely everyone – goes to the cinema.” 1 Tsivian goes on to mention that a more complete description of the film audience was given in 1912 by A. Serafimovich in The Russian Gazette [Russkie Vedomosti]: If you look in the auditorium, the composition of the audience will amaze you. Everyone is there – students and policemen, writers and prostitutes, officers and girl students, all kinds of bearded and bespectacled intellectuals, workers, shop assistants, tradesmen, society ladies, dressmakers, civil servants – in a word: everyone. 2 According to Serafimovich, attending the cinema was a pastime enjoyed by all rungs of the social/economic ladder in Russia. 3 The one member of the audience who 1 Yuri Tsivian, “Early Russian Cinema and its Public,” trans. Alan Bodger, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 11.2 (1991) 105. Despite comments like this from contemporaneous viewers, however, Yuri Tsivian has argued that cinema in Russia was in fact primarily a middle-class phenomena. 2 Tsivian is quotes A. Serafimovich’s comments in “The Machine Age Approaches” [Mashinnoe nadvigaetsya], The Russian Gazette (Jan 1912) n.p. in both his article “Early Russian Cinema” 106 and his book Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception, trans. Alan Bodger (New York: Routledge, 1994) 34. 3 Besides providing us with some insight into the Russian film audience, the attempt to illustrate the democratic nature of cinema with the inclusion of women from all socio-economic levels, also serves to differentiate the cinema from the theater and it’s historic association as a primarily masculine sphere. Several historians have also noted the presence of the prostitute in Nineteenth Century theaters (those these women were ‘working’ and not viewing), and the fact that theater owners sent complementary tickets to houses of ill repute and even built balconies to accommodate the needs of patrons. See Richard Butsch, “Bowery B’hoys and Matinee Ladies: The 15 stands out from the students, intellectuals and society ladies, is the prostitute and, as Tsivian points out, Serafimovich was not the only critic to remark on her presence in the cinema. Other writers, like K. & O. Kovalsky, S. Lyubosh, Andrei Bely, and G. Chulkov, all point to this unique category of filmgoer. 4 The repeated mentioning of the presence of the prostitute in the cinema belies the place and fascination she held for intellectuals and the general public at large. 5 Not only was the prostitute a regular member of the cinema audience in Russia by accounts of contemporaneous writers, but according to Tsivian: Evidently the figure of the prostitute, by comparison with the other members of the audience, expresses a higher collectivity; she represents, as it were, the image of the whole audience in the same way that this image stands for society as a whole. 6 The prostitute then is emblematic for the Russian filmgoer and Russian society as a whole, a fact which separates cinema from other art forms and other national cinemas. 7 In fact, Tsivian goes on to note that in other countries, such as France, cinema was born (i.e. with the first screenings) as part of ‘legitimate’ practice, where they were shown as scientific demonstrations. In Russia, however, cinema was often considered the despised offspring of the other arts, as an ‘illegitimate’ bastard child, Re-Gendering of Nineteenth-Century American Theater Audiences,” American Quarterly, 46.3, September 1994 and Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 4 Tsivian, “Early Russian Cinema” 105-107. 5 I will discuss this general fascination with ‘working’ girls in more depth in Chapter Three. 6 Tsivian, “Early Russian Cinema” 106. 7 It is interesting to note that while the prostitute was visible in Nineteenth century theaters in England and the U.S., she was there for ‘work’ purposes. In Russia, she seems to leave work aside and goes to the cinema for entertainment; she is just a member of the audience. What separates the prostitute in Russia from prostitutes in other countries is the discourse surrounding her, in no other country does the prostitute become symbolic for society as a whole. 16 born in a brothel. It is telling that one of the first film screenings in Russia took place among the ‘show-girls’ and patrons of Charles Aumont’s café chantant, located on the fairgrounds in Nizhny Novgorod. 8 By 1917, the Russian prostitute was a member of the audience and a representative of the audience, and by extension a representative of urban society itself. A witness at cinema’s inception into Russian culture, the Russian prostitute was also seen as a metaphor for the entire filmgoing experience. Tsivian notes that: The cheap luxury, the emotional repetitiveness, the sense of entering a perverse and criminal world, of being totally immersed in the life of the city, and finally the egalitarianism of the street – these are the qualities which drew cinema and prostitution together… 9 The immediacy of both cinema and prostitution was strengthened initially by the fact that there were no set times for cinema, films were shown continually, day and night. 10 The dark space in which the cinema and the prostitute operate was both thrilling and entertaining, and became intertwined with notions of the bustling modern city. What Tsivian glosses over, or rather fails to comment on, is the connection that both the prostitute and the cinema has to commodity culture. 11 8 Tsivian, “Early Russian Cinema” 107. While Aumont’s establishments were known for their luxurious décor and talented performers, and while they were not officially brothels, it was commonly known how the ‘show-girls’ made their money. 9 Tsivian, “Early Russian Cinema” 108. 10 This changed gradually, as films became longer thus dictating specific running times, so that spectators could arrive at the beginning of the show. 11 Like the cinema, the prostitute addresses a demand for entertainment as well as release from the pressures of the modern world. The prostitute herself, or rather her body, is the source of the commodity available for purchase, with the price of goods depending on the quality and location in which they can be found. In much the same way, the cinema (i.e. the production companies) is not only the source of the commodity, it is also the site (i.e. theaters) in which the product is consumed. And, like the prostitute, the cost of the experience depends on the location of the theater as well as the quality of the films (i.e. first run versus second or third run) being shown. 17 Though it is difficult to definitively depict the Russian moviegoer at the turn of the century, by studying the implications of Bauer’s title “Woman’s Director’ it is possible to explore several inferences of the female filmgoer: what movies she liked to watch and how those movies addressed her, her concerns, and her desires. This is not meant to imply a single subjective position for all female audience members, but rather a means through which to explore multiple subjective positions. As we have already noted, the Russian audience included not only prostitutes, but also young female students, shop assistants, tradeswomen, dressmaker and society ladies, each bringing along her own set of knowledge and experiences. I would like to suggest that the designation, ‘woman’s director’ refers not only to Bauer’s ability to coax great performances out of his female actresses (like George Cukor, a subsequent ‘woman’s director,’) but also to the popularity of his films among a wide variety of female audience members. 12 By studying Bauer and his films, therefore, we can garner some insight into the popular tastes at the time, and we can construct a serviceable framework for understanding the films within their cultural context. Film scholar Lauren Rabinovitz’s book For the Love of Pleasure addresses many of the same problems (i.e. lack of audience studies and first person accounts) of discussing spectatorship, in particular female spectatorship, in early cinema in the United States. Rabinovitz notes that “what is most important about cinema as history is how audiences were 12 It should be noted that Cukor’s films were also very popular among female audiences. 18 taught to make sense of such a spectacle.” 13 The Khanzhonkov studio’s monthly publication Pegasus, on cinema and the other arts, provides us with one example of how audiences, particularly Russian female audiences, were taught to make sense of the cinema and Bauer’s films about women in particular. 14 Pegasus has the distinction of being one of the first non-trade film journals in Russia. Trade journals were available for general consumption but they were primarily geared towards distributors and exhibitors, with information designed to help promote films, highlight new performers and sell the latest equipment. Khanzhonkov successfully determined that there was a need for material that catered specifically to the needs and interests of the filmgoing audience. In his insightful book, When Russia Learned to Read, historian Jeffrey Brooks discusses many of the ways in which readers were taught to make sense of what they were reading. He also argues that as readers in Russia became savvier, a reciprocal connection developed between readers and the publishing industry. Brooks focuses specifically on the development of commercial publishing in response to the taste of the less culturally endowed, i.e. the newly literate, the semi-literate and women. Brooks notes four specific forms of popular publications that evolved during the turn-of-the-century in response to the interests of lower-class readers. Lubochnaia literature was comprised of single booklets on a variety of topics, and these were often a peasant’s first 13 Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of- the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998) 3. 14 Yuri Tsivian in his book Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception discusses the many of the ways in which the Russian spectator (a generic, genderless figure) was taught how to understand the cinema. 19 introduction to reading. There were serialized novels published in inexpensive newspapers, and detective and adventure novels sold in installments, with both of these available in bound form or one could pay for the installments to be bound once they had all been collected. 15 Finally, there were “woman’s novels that won a large and diverse audience” in the period after the 1905 Revolution. 16 If Russia’s less educated, lower classes had some effect on the publishing industry, then it is probable that the film industry sought to cater to lower class tastes as well. In what ways did the rhetoric or reviews surrounding Russian films influence film viewing in Russia, and how did the preferences of Russian film viewers influence the types of films being made as well as the rhetoric surrounding the films? The “Woman’s Director’ What more damning comment on the relations between men and women in America than the very notion of something called the ‘woman’s film?’ And what more telling sign of critical and sexual priorities than the low caste it has among highbrows? Held at arms length, it is, indeed, the untouchable of the genres… -Molly Haskell 17 There are several issues surrounding the ways in which film rhetoric influenced viewing practices, and the ways that viewers influenced filmmaking, and these can be encapsulated and addressed when we examine the term, “Woman’s Director.” As I have stated, Evgenii Bauer had the reputation for being a “Woman’s Director,” which is a very complicated appellation to unpack. At the time, the phrase 15 Bound books became a status symbol of sorts, visually illustrating that one was educated. 16 Jeffrey Books, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Culture, 1861-1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) xiii- xvii. 17 Molly Haskell, “The Woman’s Film,” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (New York: New York University Press, 1999) 20. 20 implied several opposing connotations, both derogatory and laudatory. In the opening quote for this section, Molly Haskell discusses American association with the concept of a ‘woman’s film’ and yet despite its negative connotations she discusses the popularity of such films. The same dynamic could be applied to the idea of ‘women’s films’ in Russia at the turn of the century, they were at once noted for their association with low culture and yet immensely popular. Film companies like Khanzhonkov, the bulk of whose films could be considered ‘women’s films’ struggled not only to legitimate cinema as an art form, but also to legitimate female driven melodrama as a respectable genre. The concept of ‘women’s films’ is further complicated because it also implies the power of women as consumers, in other words, these films are a result of the industry recognizing and addressing the needs of its consumers. 18 The designation ‘Woman’s Director’, like ‘woman’s film’ simultaneously refers to the target audience for the films being made as well as the types of character portrayals and issues being covered in the films. As employed by competing film studios, the title would imply that Bauer was somehow less of a director because he made films that appealed to women and that dealt with women’s issues. In retrospect, I think the term also refers specifically for the ways in which the films spoke to women and the ways in which women might have interpreted the films and female representations. 18 Jeffrey Brooks talks about this specifically (i.e. how the publishing industry addressed the desires of female consumers, a growing customer base, and increased publication on topics of interest to women in the boulevard presses) in regards to the publishing industry in When Russia Learned to Read. 21 Films about women The voyeuristic latitude granted spectators more than ever in the cinema of narrative integration was particularly pronounced for women, viewers not normally accustomed to looking freely and openly in polite society. Negotiating a place for female viewers within cinema’s imaginary topography was made all the more troubling by the vice pictures: their sexually frank subject matter was assumed to repulse women, yet observers could not ignore women’s evident attraction to the material. Shelley Stamp 19 As I will discuss in more detail in the following three chapters, Evgenii Bauer made films about women. Throughout the corpus of his work, Bauer’s films dealt with women at almost every level of the Russian social ladder, and if observations like those of Serafimovich are correct, they also reflected the film audience itself. The subjects of his films range from a jaded café chantant singer to naïve young schoolgirls, and from domestic servants to young socialites. By addressing the full range of Russian society in his films, Bauer created a space where there was someone for female audience members to identify with in any given film. Film scholar Heide Schlüpmann remarks that, “On an international scale, early cinema responded to the erosion of familial patriarchy precipitated by modernity and, in retrospect, often displayed a remarkable affinity with the female perspective.” 20 Bauer’s films especially, show a marked ‘affinity with the female perspective.’ 21 The plots for Bauer’s films about women varied as much as the types of characters who appeared in his films. For instance, he made films about a young 19 Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) 94. 20 Heidi Schlüpmann, “From Patriarchal Violence to the Aesthetics of Death: Russian Cinema 1909-1919 (Pordenone, 1989),” Cinefocus 2.2 (1992) 2. 21 This affinity for the female perspective is compounded by Bauer’s inclusion of ineffectual males, a subject I discuss in further detail in Chapter Three. 22 women, who is unable to put off the advances of her husband’s boss and, in the end agrees to be his mistress to save her husband’s job. Another film is about a café chantant singer who has all but given up on love. When a young man professes his love for her, she is too cynical to see his sincerity. The suffering young is driven to suicide, and only then does she understand the depth of his passion and all that she has lost. Yet another film shows a young woman who juggles a host of lovers so as to support her spending habits, only to have several of them show up at the same time. A final example of the plots and themes of a Bauer film is one where a mother forgoes her own happiness in an effort to protect her fragile young daughter. While Bauer worked in a variety of genres, he capitalized on melodramatic themes that appealed to women, and on plots that featured sophisticated women in urban settings, caught up in sex, scandal, and even murder. Films for women Mr. Bauer allowed himself just one weakness. All the women in the picture, even the clerk’s wife (whom Amfiteatrov describes as plump and common), are beautiful. But this failing of the director’s is as understandable as it is forgivable. Cinema audiences like to see beautiful faces on the screen, and in their own way they are right, since art is the truth of life, rendering tribute to seductive delusions. 22 Evgenii Bauer not only made films about women, he made films for women. Bauer used some of the most talented actresses working in cinema at the time, and according to the review of his 1916 film Nelly Raintseva he also used some of the 22 Review of Bauer’s 1916 film Nelly Raintseva in The Cinematographic Herald [Vestnik Kinematografii] 122 (1916) 17, quoted in Silent Witnesses: Russian Films 1908-1919, eds. Paolo Cherchi Usai, Lorenzo Codelli, Carlo Montanaro, and David Robinson, Research by Yuri Tsivian (London: British Film Institute, 1989) 348. 23 most beautiful actresses. He tried to ensure the filmgoing experience was a complete one by using the most talented actors and actresses at his disposal, using well-crafted and interesting stories, creating lush sets to visually titillate and add meaning to the package, and even introducing ‘mood music,’ a compilation of familiar tunes that would aurally prepare the viewer and complement the visual image on screen. 23 It is interesting to note that according to the reviewer Bauer is forgiven his transgression of filling his film with beautiful women because “Cinema audiences like to see beautiful faces . . .” What this statement belies is the importance of specular relations in Bauer’s films. Looking, seeing, recognizing, and even misrecognition, play an important role in the narratives of many of Bauer’s film. Bauer understood that the visual nature of the medium went beyond his characters looking and paid particular attention to creating a pleasurable viewing experience for his audiences. If Bauer uses beautiful women in his films, it is part of an entire aesthetic package. Bauer wants the viewer to identify with and enjoy the act of looking, watching, and reading the film. Consuming Women Bauer’s status as the “Woman’s Director’ became a useful marketing tool, a way of selling Bauer’s films to women. The invention of and propagation of the film industry coincided with a rise in women’s consumer culture in Russia. As industrialization spread throughout Russia it marked the increase of consumable 23 Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception 78. 24 goods in the Russian markets that was accompanied by the need to market these goods. More often than not, these goods were being marketed to women as the decision makers in household purchases. Advertising agencies, a surprising number of which were run by women, 24 learned early on that in Russia because of widespread illiteracy, the power of the image exceeded that of the printed word. Advertising was made possible by new technologies in printing and was followed by an increase in commercial publication in a variety of print formats ranging from newspapers, lubochnaia literature or penny presses, to home journals. Initially print advertising borrowed the simplicity of style and intelligibility from both the lubok and the shop sign. 25 The connection between the image and advertising directed at women is continued on even in early cinema. In her dissertation, A Cut Above: Fashion as Meta-culture in Early-Twentieth-Century Russia Elizabeth Durst discusses fashion as an indication for changing cultural values in Russia. She also addresses the convergence of contemporary fashion with cinema, in particular she mentions an early Khanzhonkov production entitled Behind the Drawing Room Door (1913) in which the “references to fashion inform the narrative . . . fashion operates as the 24 Sally West, Constructing Consumer Culture in Imperial Russia to 1914, diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1995, (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1996, ATT 9624535) 35. 25 The Lubok is an early form of mass printing made from woodcuts and later copper plates. The lubok which initially replicated religious imagery and icons but later took on more complicated secular topics, were simple in design, and were meant to be “hung on the wall and studied from a distance and this made fine detail undesirable.” Interestingly the distance required to properly see the lubok initiated future filmgoers in the proper space in which to read a film frame. See, Alla Sytova, The Lubok: Russian Folk Pictures 17 th to 19 th Century, trans. Alex Miller, (Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers, 1986). 25 film’s primary attraction with the narrative stalling on occasion to allow the actress to overtly model a dress.” 26 Despite the fact that most studios during this time did not have costume houses from which to choose wardrobes, actresses were still expected to dress in the most current fashion. Evgenii Bauer’s actresses are no exception, a prime example can be seen in many of his early films (which I will discuss later in other chapters) such as Twilight of a Woman’s Soul, Child of the Big City, and Silent Witnesses, which all were made after the Tango craze hit Russian and of course all the leading women are wearing the latest in Tango fashion, from their headdresses to their shoes. This attention to popular culture and contemporary fashion was just one of the many ways in which Bauer’s films appealed to women. Aleksandr Khanzhonkov was an extremely savvy businessman and a quick study on what appealed to the viewers of his films. His production company started as a small commission agency in 1906, selling films and projection equipment, and quickly developed into one of the most successful production companies in Russia before the revolution. Like many American film companies at the time, A. Khanzhonkov & Co. was vertically integrated, meaning Khanzhonkov controlled the production, distribution and exhibition of his films. 27 26 Elizabeth Durst, A Cut Above: Fashion as Meta-culture in Early-Twentieth-Century Russia, diss., University of Southern California, 2003, (Ann Arbor: UMI, 2003, ATT 3133262) 72. 27 Khanzhonkov continued to distribute foreign films in addition to his own films. For example, he is responsible for the importing of films like the Italian film Cabiria directed by Giovanni Pastrone in Russia. And when Russian production decreased after the revolution, Khanzhonkov wrote to Jack Warner requesting to be the Russian distributor for Warner Bothers films; the letter can be found in the general archive at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, Ca. 26 Aleksandr Khanzhonkov was one of the first producers in Russia to understand the drawing power of the star (i.e. actors, writers and directors). Khanzhonkov made every effort to hire the most well known actors and actresses, but he also sought out additional marketable elements, including experienced directors and crews, along with writers with established popularity among Russian readers. Popular writers, like Mikhail Artzybashev, the author of the racy novel Sanin, and adventure writer A. V. Amfiteatrov, brought people into the theater. 28 For example, Denise Youngblood notes that Khanzhonkov took out a two-page advertisement, with letters three inches high, in the trade journal Cinematographic Herald (Vestnik kinematografii) 29 announcing that prima ballerina Vera Karalli had joined the studio. 30 Khanzhonkov was known for his ability to capitalize on these kinds of marketable investments. The Khanzhonkov Company occasionally used the covers of the film magazine Cinematographic Herald to promote his films and his stars to distributors, exhibitors and to the general public. By including a film still or poster art from an upcoming film, or the photograph of a popular actor or actress, Khanzhonkov increased name and face recognition for films and his stars. In doing so Khanzhonkov created a recognizable commodity, a certain type of film, an assurance of quality. Khanzhonkov also highlighted the studio’s many behind-the-scenes 28 Khanzhonkov hired many former stars of the stage, including the famous tango dancer Elsa Kruiger and prima ballerina Vera Karalli. 29 The Cinematographic Herald was the Khanzhonkov Company’s trade journal published in Moscow from 1911 to 1917. 30 Denise J. Youngblood, The Magic Mirror: Moviemaking in Russia, 1908-1918 (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999) 28. 27 members, and included some of the more famous writers employed by his studio on the front cover of his publication. Evgenii Bauer, however, has the sole distinction of being the only director to appear on the cover of the Cinematographic Herald. (Figure 1.1) Figure 4.1 Cinematographic Herald, Evgenii Bauer. 31 Bauer’s appearance on the cover of the journal is significant for several reasons. In the first place, it connects a face with a well-known name, creating a sense of familiarity between the director and the viewer. In addition, the chiaroscuro lighting used in the portrait, a type of lighting for which he was well known, calls to mind many of his moody, sensational films. The pose in the photograph is one of introspection; it almost appears as if he was caught unaware, thus implying a 31 Cinematographic Herald [Vestnik Kinematografiia] 6.118 (June 1916) cover. 28 connection to cinema’s voyeuristic tendencies. Finally, the cover piece acknowledges the importance of Bauer to the studio, listing him as the Chief Director (glavnyi rezhisser) of the Khanzhonkov Film Company. Pegasus Trade journals like Moving Picture World and Variety first appeared in the United States in 1907. While trade journals in the U.S. and in Russia were available for purchase by the public, “trades did not address the individual whose role within the film industry was solely that of audience.” 32 In the United States the hubbub over Florence Lawrence, known only as “The Biograph Girl,” 33 in 1909 not only called the studios’ attention to the drawing power of film stars, it also intimated the existence and the tastes of film fans. Fan magazines like Photoplay and Motion Picture Story began publication in 1910 to cater to the needs of a growing film audience at the same time they helped to sculpt these needs. In Russia, 1910 marks the introduction of the first trade journals for Russian film companies. 34 According 32 Ann Morey, “‘So Real as to Seem Like Life Itself’: The Photoplay Fiction of Adela Rogers St. Johns,” Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, eds. Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002) 334. 33 At this time, films were made without extensive credit sequences; usually just the title and production company were given. Occasionally, the director or writer would be listed if the name was well know and would attract viewers, but for the most part actors were not listed in the credits. In 1909 Florence Lawrence made approximately 65 films for the Biograph Company, she garnered quite a following among filmgoers and they clamored to know the name of “The Biograph Girl.” Carl Laemmle, who founded the IMP Film Company, understood Lawrence’s drawing power and after hiring her, he spread a rumor that she died so that he could resurrect her as “The IMP Girl” capitalizing on her star status and the media hype to launch his new film company. 34 Youngblood, Magic Mirror 33. There was a two year lag behind the first native productions and the first trade journals, as companies established themselves and started earning the capital to publish such journals. 29 to film critic Arkadi Bukhov “The public is now evolving its own tastes, even beginning to have its favorite actors and actresses…” 35 The first issue of Pegasus hit the newsstands in November of 1915, and it ran until the October of 1916. There was no explanation given regarding the shutting down of the journal, but several factors could have contributed to the end of the publication, including Russia’s increasing involvement in the First World War, shortages of paper that greatly affected the publishing industry, and unsure conditions at home in the months preceding the February 1917 revolution. While the run of the journal was short, it covered perhaps the pinnacle year of pre- revolutionary Russian filmmaking. Despite the war, Russian native production was at an all time high, and Russian filmmakers were turning out quality films, making a name for themselves at home and abroad. 1917 marks the decline in Russian filmmaking because of the two revolutions, a civil war, and the mass exodus of many of the industry’s most talented professionals, including actors, actresses, cameramen, and directors. A. Khanzhonkov & Co. was the first studio to publish a non-trade journal on film that was intended, primarily, for the general public, or more specifically for a middle-class moviegoer. Khanzhonkov named this new journal Pegasus: A Journal of Art (Pegas’ zhurnal isskustvo), drawing on the company’s already well known logo. Many film companies developed logos early on as a means of preventing piracy as well as creating a recognizable brand. Perhaps the most famous was the 35 Arkadi Bukhov, “On Cinema Authors” [O kinomatograficheskikh avtorakh], The Cinema [Kinematograf] 1 (1915) 9 as quoted by Yuri Tsivian, “Early Russian Cinema and its Public” 111. 30 Pathé Frères rooster, which often appeared on surfaces within the film frame as well as in the titles. Figure 1.5 & 1.3 Logo used in the journal Pegasus on the right and the logo used by Khanzhonkov's production company on the left. By utilizing the company’s already well-known logo on the front cover, and as the title of the journal (see Figures 1.2 and 1.3), Khanzhonkov was able to capitalize on an already well-established brand. Film fans would associate the winged horse on the cover of Pegasus as a Khanzhonkov publication without having to open the journal. Additionally, the image of the Pegasus calls to mind connections to Greek mythology and classical literature, thus linking Khanzhonkov’s films and the journal with history, the classics, and all that is high brow and legitimate in the arts. It is also possible to link Khanzhonkov’s choice of logo to the theme of influential women. Pegasus was a horse god said to be the offspring of Poseidon and the Gorgon Medusa and he was either born from Medusa’s neck as she was beheaded by Perseus, or he was formed when Medusa’s blood mingled with sea foam. Pegasus 31 was then captured by Athena, goddess of wisdom, who tamed him and put him in the service of the Muses. Like the American fan magazines Photoplay and Motion Picture Story, Pegasus included story adaptations of Khanzhonkov’s productions, film stills, and discussions on a variety of other topics of interest. It is important to note, however, that Pegasus was not presented as a fan magazine, instead it was considered a ‘journal of art’ and as such was modeled on the successful literary magazines in Russia. Fandom, and the acceptance of it as a valid preoccupation, was of course implied as fans of cinema were the target market for such a journal. Film historian Shelley Stamp notes that beginning during the nickelodeon boom of 1905 in the United States the use of terms like ‘photoplay,’ “connoted a dignified sphere of leisure far from the world of cheap urban amusements with which cinema might otherwise have been associated.” 36 Going beyond Photoplay, Khanzhonkov puts an even greater emphasis on the high/low distinction by overtly claiming that Pegasus is a journal of art. Specifically avoiding referencing other cheap amusements, Khanzhonkov instead wants the reader to associate Khanzhonkov productions with high art and culture. 37 Stamp argues that within the American context serialized story tie-ins (i.e. the literary reproduction of the film stories) had an important impact on the film industry 36 Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) 11. 37 There were at this time other trade journals which grouped film with other cheap, low- brow entertainments such as vaudeville, variety theaters and skating rinks. 32 since, “serials were used to increase cinemas audience by drawing in readers of newspapers and women’s magazines, production companies exploited new methods of sustained, advanced publicity to promote chapter plays…” 38 Khanzhonkov’s journal Pegasus worked in much the same way, by connecting itself to the other arts, primarily literature. By replicating the format of literary journals, the studio was able to increase the readership of Pegasus (beyond that of the trade journals) to a broader audience and thereby create new interest in the cinema and cinema-going. Overall Structure of the Journal The journal tries to assuage a film viewer’s guilty pleasure by associating film with the more elite art forms like literature, painting, and opera. It accomplishes this association through the literary retelling of the films, but also through regular columns on literature, art exhibits, theater news, etc. Set up like contemporary literary magazines, the journal presented the films, or rather the plot summaries of the films in literary format, as: film-play [kino-p’esa], film-novella [kino-novella], film-romance [kino-roman], and even film-poem [kino-poema]. In her article “Gendering the Icon: Marketing Women Writers in Fin-de- Siécle Russia,” Beth Holmgren notes that in literary journals names and portraits of women writers began to be placed alongside names and portraits of male writers. By figuratively placing Anastasia Verbitskaia next to Lev Tolstoy, it served to validate her as an authentic writer—like classic writers, Verbitskaya’s writing were now 38 Stamp 115. 33 desirable as something one should own and display. Pegasus follows a similar tactic with the images it placed on the cover of the journal. Figure 1.4 Pegasus, Lev Tolstoy, Nov. 1915 Figure 1.4 Pegasus, Vera Kholodnaya, May 1916. From November of 1915 to October of 1916 a total of ten issues of Pegasus were released. The inaugural issue of Pegasus was released with a photograph of Lev Tolstoy on the cover, commemorating the anniversary of his death. Subsequent issue covers feature: Russian stage actor V. I. Kachalov, Italian stage actor Tomaso Salvini (also commemorating his death the month before), film actress Lidiya Koreneva, film actress Vera Kholodnaya, film actor Vitol’d Polonskii, and the original Italian Diva, stage actress Eleanora Duse. 39 The journal covers not only serve to equate cinema with classical arts, especially literature and theater, but they also elevate film actresses and actors to 39 Three covers appear to be missing from the micrographic reproduction of the journal. Instead, these issues only show the second page of the journal, a rendering of a temple-like structure in the clouds, reinforcing the connection to classical mythology and the classical arts and implying that cinema is a high brow art form. 34 ‘cultural’ star status. Just as Tolstoy was a literary star in Russian culture, by virtue of such reverential treatment, Koreneva and Kholodnaya attained the status of stars of Russian culture as well as cinema. That, at least, is what Khanzhonkov wished his viewers to believe, with his films, and these women stars, equated with the latest Tolstoy publication. In addition to this, the journal privileged female film stars and also further appealed to women by the fact that the cover pictures of the actresses were featured before the one male film star. Lidiya Koreneva, for instance, appeared on volume two, issue number four, and Vera Kholodnaya appears on volume two, issue number 5. Vitol’d Polonskii, on the other hand, did not appear until volume two, issue six/seven. Connection to women consumers In his book When Russia Learned to Read, Jeffrey Brooks comments on how women became the primary readers of boulevard literature – stories about intrigue, sex, scandal and debauchery. Capitalizing on this idea, Khanzhonkov’s Journal Pegasus appealed to female readers on several levels. First, rather than giving the story synopses for all their films, the journal instead chose to highlight films that would appeal to female readers – stories with urban settings, tragic love stories, middle class melodramas, etc., or as Laura Engelstein notes, the types of stories that “provide ordinary women with the stuff of dreams.” 40 A sampling of titles from the pages of Pegasus illustrates that Khanzhonkov knew how to provide his female 40 Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de- Siècle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) 40. 35 readers with the “stuff of dreams.” For instance, he includes literary retellings of such stories as: “Mistake of the Heart,” “Narcotic,” “Optical Illusions: Tragedy of a Beautiful Girl,” “Love Tornado,” “The Dance of Life,” “Lunar Beauty,” and “The Heart of Lina.” Thus, Khanzhonkov increased his readership as well as his viewership by including stories that would specifically appeal to women The literary retellings of the films play a very interesting role. First, they transform the film plot into a work of literature, thus elevating its status as a work of art. And second, they instruct the reader in how to “read” the film. Figure 1.6 Pegasus, excerpt from the novel Irina Kirsanova 41 For example, Figure 1.6 is an excerpt from the novelization of the Evgenii Bauer film Irina Kirsanova. The story itself is divided into sections by the three asterisks that form a triangle. The sections imitate edits between scenes and sometimes shots, teaching journal’s readers how to “read” the film. A translation of the lines immediately preceding and following the triangle, would read: “She took Boris by the hand and walked onto the terrace // On the terrace Irina asked Boris…” Thus in 41 Antalek, “Irina Kirsanova: A Novel,” Pegasus [Pegas’] 1.1 (1915) 10. 36 this instance the asterisk cluster replicates a cut on action. In reading the story, one could envision the couple (in a long shot) walking towards the terrace door and the scene cutting to them (perhaps a medium close-up) outside on the terrace having a serious discussion. Placing the asterisk clusters in spots where scenes changed or where shots would be cut provided readers with a double-fold example of filmic editing. The text itself, the story, was broken down into these small sections/pieces, just like the film is broken down into smaller sections, scenes and shots. The asterisk clusters also visually divide/cut the sections of text while at the same time create unity by connection the various sections together. In the same way, the film edits both divide the individual pieces of the film and also unites the film as a whole. Reinforcing Evolution of Star System The images included in the journal itself were even more important than the images contained on the covers of Pegasus. Khanzhonkov featured his star players in an interesting and subtler manner between the covers of the journal Pegasus. With a core of about fifty actors and actresses, the actresses are more prominently featured. Photographs that display women outnumber those with males. In addition to this, more actresses are given solo shots. Aside from the director Evgenii Bauer and actor V. A. Polonskii, no other males were given that much space. The actresses that are highlighted include Vera Kholodnaya, Zoya Barantsevich, Ada Shelepina and Lina Bauer. 37 The images feature thoughtful, proud, independent and desirable women. The stills give the reader virtually no clues about the type of film she will be seeing, instead the focus of the image is on the woman herself, her personality, her posture, her makeup, her clothing. In this, the actress becomes someone to emulate as well as someone to view, and therefore a recognizable/consumable product. Even when the Khanzhonkov’s actresses are shown in the same frame with male actors, they are somehow prefigured and highlighted; most often this is done through the framing of the photograph. Women are almost always placed predominantly within the frame. Figure 1.7 Pegasus, Burning Wings 42 Figure 1.7 shows a page from Pegasus featuring a still from the Khanzhonkov production Burning Wings. The lead actress, Vera Karalli, is the focal point of the 42 The caption reads “V.A. Karalli in the picture ‘Burning Wings’,” Pegasus [Pegas’] 1.2 (1915) 45. 38 frame. Karalli holds the position of power over her male counterpart, who is not even identified in the caption. The male actor is in a position of submission/supplication, kneeling and pleading with the female character. Vera Karalli on the other hand is standing, turned away from the man in rejection (and disgust, judging by the look on her face). The woman has the power of choice; does she stay with the man or does she abandon him? This is yet another way in which Pegasus reinforces the predominance of the actress over the actor. Often stills were included that show several actors in the frame, when two of them are women they are shown to form a triangle with the male actor. The focal point of the image is then split between the two women and the male seems lost in the back of the frame. Figure 1.8 Pegasus, still from Happiness of Figure 1.9 Pegasus, still from Retribution Eternal Night Figure 1.8 is a still from one of Bauer’s films, Happiness of Eternal Night, in which we see Ol’ga Rakhmanova, Vera Karalli and Vitol’d Polonskii. The framing of the characters sets Vera Karalli up as the central figure in the frame as well as in the 39 film. The whiteness from Ol’ga Rakhmanova’s blouse and Vera’s face draws a connection between the two women (who are mother and daughter) and unites them as central figures in the frame. The male character, is almost lost within the frame implying that, while he is central to the plot, he holds a lesser position that the two women. In Figure 1.9, we see another still from a Bauer film entitled Retribution, starring Vera Karalli, Lydia Ryndina and Vitol’d Polonskii. Finally, in other cases the stills are shot in such a way that even when a male does hold the predominant space in the frame, there is always something that draws your attention away from the male towards the female. Figure 1.10 Pegasus, still from the Bloodless Figure 1.11 Pegasus, N. N. Nel’skaia and Duel O. N. Frelikh 40 The images themselves encourage the reader to become a viewer, to feel free to look at the film star. According to Anne Friedberg, “As an object transformed in a commodity system, the film star is marketed not for pure use, but for his/her exchange value. The film star is an institutionally sanctioned fetish.” 43 In all of the images (see Figure 1.10 and 1.11 as examples), the actresses are glamorously dressed in contemporary urban fashion, given that very few historical or rural films are featured in the journal. The actresses become attractions of a sort, something for the female readers to take in, emulate and consume, they become a commodity in themselves. The film stills function as advertisements selling sophistication, independence, sex and, of course, tickets. The journal Pegasus mastered the art of selling a product, by creating and promoting their female stars. Pegasus allowed contemporary scholars a view at how Khanzhonkov placed many of his actresses (not just Kholodnaya and Karalli, but also Barantsevich, Bauer, Shelepina, Rakhmanova, etc.) in the firmament, and in doing so Khanzhonkov ensured name and face recognition for his stars, an audience of female viewers and a healthy box office draw. Conclusion The notion of a ‘woman’s cinema’ or of a ‘woman’s director,’ especially one who is a male, is fraught with all sorts of misogynist associations and undertones. Mary Anne Doane’s assertion that the instant the camera is pointed at a women is 43 Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993) 43. 41 equivalent to a terrorist act, takes us nowhere in understanding the popularity of certain films and the work of certain directors. The work of a director like Evgenii Bauer in particular begs us to question the validity or usefulness of her statement. 44 When read within the contemporary cultural context, the appellation of Bauer as a “Woman’s Director” was both negative and positive. When one takes into account what that meant for women in Russia at the time however, I think the positive affects prove interesting. This is especially true when one considers, as we have the role of the Khanzhonkov studio’s publication Pegasus. The nature of the journal, the fact that once a reader purchased it, she would have the freedom to peruse it at her own leisure, allowed spectators (women) to take their time looking over the images, paying attention to detail in such a way that is not possible to do when watching a film. Women were given permission to look and instructed in the art of the gaze throughout the pages of the journal. The journal simultaneously indoctrinated women into commodity culture at the same time that it addressed their needs and desires with stories they were interested in reading. Bauer’s position as ‘Woman’s Director” and the pages of Pegasus did not solve problems that contemporary women faced but they did call them into question, asking viewers/readers to find solutions. While women were granted full and equal rights immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, a full transformation 44 It should be noted that Doane herself has moved away from such extremes. The reason for using her quote at all is because it points not only to the extremes of feminist scholarship but also to the difficulty feminist scholars have had in reconciling male authored texts with female spectatorship. 42 of the Russian woman into the New Soviet Woman would not have been possible if Bauer and Pegasus hadn’t been pushing the boundaries of patriarchy and provoking women to look and answer questions for themselves. 43 Chapter Three Women on the Loose: The Modern City, Urban Space and Gender The city and urban space played an important role in the evolution of early cinema; this is just as true for Russia, regardless of its late entry onto the film scene, as it was in other countries. Filmmakers in Russia both before and after the Revolution were preoccupied with the growing dichotomy between urban and rural life. In the years preceding the Revolution, many filmmakers turned to the city for inspiration, drawing upon everyday life, as well as the fantastical urban tales that were becoming increasingly popular among the penny presses in Russia. This is especially true for pre-Revolutionary filmmaker Evgenii Bauer, whose work strongly reflects the influences of Russia’s burgeoning urban landscapes. The majority of Bauer’s filmic endeavors are set in the space of the modern city, and most were physically filmed on the streets of Moscow and other metropolitan areas; replete with electric lights, telephones, automobiles, a plethora of windows for shopping, bustling crowds, mansions and slums. The city plays an important role in Bauer’s films not only as a dynamic location in which to shoot, but also in dictating the types of characters and types of stories that get played out in his films. In order to understand the ways in which the city affected the evolution of Bauer’s characters and his spectators, it is vital to understand the importance of the city and urban space in the evolution of Russian cultural consciousness. 44 To compliment our understanding of modern urban space, I would suggest considering the trope of claustrophobia, an anxiety disorder that originates in a fear of confined/enclosed and crowded spaces. 1 The increase in confined/enclosed spaces was especially prevalent in the center of Moscow with the move away from large mansions towards luxurious town homes and lavish apartments for the growing middle classes. The advent of industrialization and burgeoning technology led to an increase in products was well as the people who consumed them. The urban environment was filled overnight with manufactured goods in windows and advertisements on walls, cars, trolleys, bicycles and even the people themselves contributed to the limitations of space. Everywhere you looked the byproducts of industrialization and urbanization accosted you and hemmed you in, physically and emotionally. In Russia, claustrophobia had some all too realistic and dangerous manifestations, as we shall see later in this chapter. In her examination on architecture in early twentieth century Germany, Christa Johnson points out that modernity and industrialization contracted spaces, it made them “traversable and mobile, penetrable and fluid.” 2 Urbanization meant vast city spaces would be tightly packed with factories, shops, theaters, and living spaces. With the aid of industrial technology like the automobile, electric trams and trolleys, 1 The term claustrophobia was first coined in 1979 by Benjamin Ball. Sigmund Freud, “In his early writings, he interpreted claustrophobia as the result of an excess of unused libido. He related it to castration anxiety, produced by the repression of oedipal desire. Here, the emergence of free anxiety was displaced and projected onto the phobic object, in this case an enclosed space.” See “Claustrophobia,” Answers.com (December 21, 2007) < http://www.answers.com/ topic/claustrophobia?cat=health>. 2 Christa Caroline Johnson, Engendering Space: Architectures of Sexual Difference in Early Twentieth Century Germany, diss., Stanford University, 1998 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1988, ATT 9837110) 27. 45 the telegraph and the telephone vast distances were able to be navigated in no time at all, making large urban spaces feel small, constricted, and even claustrophobic. The modern urban city itself became contradiction; opened up, grand in scale and size, yet easily, even instantaneously traversable. The great irony and one of the many paradoxes of Russian modernism is that its cities could appear large in scale, yet life in the city for the average working class Russian could be very insular, as one tended not to travel far form the place one lived and worked. The city was at once a new ever-changing, ever-expanding vista and a small neighborhood where one was trapped by the drudgery of daily existence. The cinema was particularly effective in exploring this paradox. The cinema has the ability to take us beyond the walls of the cinema, to expand the place we live and to simultaneously make spaces appear traversable, fluid, small and thanks to the size of the screen and the theater itself, even claustrophobic. In this chapter, I will examine the development of urban spaces at the turn of the century and the juxtaposition of public versus private spheres in a Russian context. 3 It will be necessary to discern what role women held in these urban environments and how those roles were then created/perceived visually (i.e. through art and advertising). The sexuality of the female characters in Bauer’s films, like the Russian spectator, is a product of the chaotic and sometimes claustrophobic urban environment in Russia. How did Bauer’s characters and real Russian woman relate to this urban setting? What is it about the city that led to an excessive sexuality, or 3 It is interesting to note that there really is no concept of or even a word for private space in Russian during this time in history. 46 rather fear of an excessive sexuality in women? What effect did the public or private sphere have on this sexuality? Were these spaces yet another means by which women and their sexuality were contained? If so, how was this containment thematically and visually manifested in the cinema? How does Bauer utilize ambiguity as a means of covering controversial issues in relation to the changing landscape of the urban space in Russia? The ‘Modern’ Russian City Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest. -Walter Benjamin 4 The modern Russian city, which allowed one to lose oneself, would not have been possible without the most influential reform to be enacted under the reign of Alexander II, namely the March 3, 1861 decree to emancipate the serfs. Pre- emancipation Russia, still relied on a land-based economy with some ninety percent of the Tsar’s subjects having been born and bred in the countryside, and while there was industrial growth in the early nineteenth century, it was slow, hindered by peasant ties to land and agriculture. 5 Post-emancipation Imperialist Russia had a great deal of modernizing and industrializing to accomplish before it could compete with Europe and America in a capitalist market. As a result of these conditions, the 4 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, Ma.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996) 598. 5 Robert Service, A History of Modern Russia: From Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003) 9. 47 socioeconomic aspects of modernity reached an apex much later in Russia than in other European countries. 6 The Emancipation decree in 1861 did not immediately set Russia on the path toward modernization, but many of the conditions of Emancipation acted as a catalyst for the process. Rather than releasing serfs from their bondage overnight, the proclamation required a waiting period of nine years before the serfs were truly free. In addition to this, peasants were not given the land that they were working outright. Instead, they were allotted a smaller piece of land, and the previous landowner was paid by the government. The peasant then was required to pay the government the cost of the land, plus interest and taxes over a period of 49 years. This left most peasants with approximately thirteen percent less land than they had worked under the landowners, and some peasants were allocated no land at all. 7 Slavic historian Joseph Bradley notes that while peasant land ownership steadily increased after 1861, the size of the allotments decreased in size, so by 1900 the average allotment for a male peasant was only about seven acres, two-thirds of what it had been in 1861. 8 In other words, a plot of land that could feed two people in 1860 had to feed three mouths in the early Twentieth century. 9 In any case, 6 In Russia this socioeconomic zenith occurred around the turn of the century. For a more substantial discussion of modernity see Chapter Two. 7 There were various reasons why a peasant may have ended up landless, from the type of service the serf performed prior to Emancipation (i.e. some domestics) to the amount of arable land versus the amount of male peasants working for a landowner. See Service 6 and Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) 12-15. 8 While women could technically own land, the allotments were settled on male heads of households and males of working age. 9 Bradley 12-22. 48 income from crops rarely provided enough to house, feed and clothes one’s family. Historian Richard Rowland notes that “urban in-migration [peasants moving from the country to the city] was apparently the dominant factor in the substantial urban growth and urbanization in late nineteenth century Russia.” 10 Thus, faced with less land to farm and newly acquired monetary obligations, when coupled with inconsistent crops more and more peasants were forced to look elsewhere to supplement their incomes and so many of them flooded into the cities for work. The influx of peasants into major metropolitan areas took its toll on urban planning and design. Historian Robert Service observes that due to the rapid changes caused by industrialization and population growth, Russian cities were marked by their inability to adjust quickly enough. The Russian Empire was deeply fissured between the government and the Tsar’s subjects; between the capital and the provinces; between the educated and the uneducated; between Western and Russian ideas; between the rich and the poor; between privilege and oppression; between fashion and centuries old custom. 11 Urban centers, such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, were emblematic of Russia’s crash course in westernization and industrialization. While the Empire may have been deeply fissured, clear lines of demarcation became blurred and Russian cities grew, teeming with paradox; they housed the old and the new, as folk and urban, religion and secularism, peasant and civilized intelligentsia, and the poor and the wealthy came head to head and lived side by side. New Russian cities were hotbeds 10 Richard F. Rowland, “Urban In-Migration in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia,” ed. Michael F. Hamm, The City in Russian History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979) 117. 11 Service 9. 49 for radicals and revolutionaries at the same time that they were breeding grounds for tsarist ultra-conservatives. While many industrialized countries went through similar transformations, what separates Russia is the fact that it the massive changes happened relatively recent in its history, as well as the rapidity with which these changes took place. Additionally, Russia stands apart from other nations because, in her cities and throughout the country as a whole, she was also torn between western culture/modernity and folk culture/tradition and between identifying with the east or the west. The two main capitals, St. Petersburg and Moscow, exemplified and embodied the country’s split between identifying with the east versus the west; with St. Petersburg being associated with the west and Moscow closely identified with the east. In 1703, Peter the Great built St. Petersburg to be the “gateway to the Western world.” To accentuate this, the city’s design and architecture were modeled after major European cities. Slavic scholar Katerina Clark examines the mythic origins of Petersburg in her book, Petersburg, The Crucible of Cultural Revolution, noting that Peter intended “to affect the transformation of Russia from a ‘rude and barbarous,’ semi-Asiatic country to a respected member of the concert of Europe.” 12 Clark goes on to note that it was Tsar Peter’s will that transformed the ‘boggy wilderness’ into a center of culture, science, intellectualism and the seat of power for 12 Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) 4. 50 the Russian Empire, in other words culture won out over nature. 13 What goes unstated is the implication that Moscow, the previous capital of the Russian Empire, was unable to free itself from its barbarous past and the implications of its Asiatic roots, and thus a new capital was needed to bring Russia into the modern age. Moscow, it was assumed, was mired in anti-cosmopolitanism. Designed as a circular city emanating from the Kremlin and strewn with onion domes, the city exhibited an attempt to hold onto its ties to the east. 14 When the city was burned in 1812, it rose again from the ashes much the same as it had been before. In his work Moscow Diaries, Walter Benjamin remarked that Moscow in the 1920s still had the appearance of a sprawling ‘urban village,’ in other words the city was horizontal rather than vertical and offered a striking contrast to other modern western cities. 15 Despite having the appearance of a sprawling urban village, Moscow in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a city growing (both vertically and horizontally) with ‘mind-bending speed’; it was a “commercial center poised on the entrance to a new era.” 16 13 Clark 4. 14 The onion domes refer to the bulbous, onion shaped spires on top of Russian Orthodox churches. There is some disagreement as to when the first domes appeared in Russia, many scholars point to the Mongol invasion of Russian in the thirteenth century as the starting point for their introduction. Architecture changed during the Petrine era and the onion domes began disappearing. The domes then refer back to Russia’s past and to Russia’s ties to the east. 15 Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996) 43. Blair Ruble notes that by 1912 more than 90 percent of Moscow’s buildings were still only one to two stories high and while Moscow did grow appreciably in size between 1912 and Benjamin’s visit in the twenties, one can understand how he came by that impression. See Blair A. Ruble, Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka (Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Cambridge University Press, 2001) 77. 16 Ruble 22-23. 51 Regardless of the ideological and cultural differences between Moscow and St. Petersburg, they both faced many of the same problems in relation to the effects of industrialization and population growth. Both cities were able to grow moderately prior to 1861, thanks in part to a tradition known as otkhodnichestvo, which permitted serfs to leave their farms for short periods of time for seasonal work in factories and other jobs in the cities. In addition to this, many landowners sent serfs off to the cities to learn a trade and to remain and work there as a way of increasing the landowner’s profits. The popularity of these two traditions is attested to by estimates that approximately fourteen percent of the rural peasant population was ‘away,’ which meant they were working in other towns or cities, in the years leading up to 1861. 17 Even though the Russian Empire covered approximately one-sixth of the earth’s land mass and had a total population of 129 million, Russia only had 19 cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants and only two cities where the population exceeded more that one million. 18 In 1914, Russia was the only other country, besides America, to have two major cities (St. Petersburg and Moscow) ranked in the world’s top-ten according to population. 19 The influx of peasants into Russian urban centers marked the growth of metropolitan areas with the expansion of the working class, who filled openings in industrial, commercial and domestic positions. In addition, there was an 17 See Robert Eugene Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979) 30 and Bradley 26. 18 Service 4 and Henri Troyat, Daily Life in Russia under the Last Tsar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961) 15. 19 Ruble 5. 52 unprecedented parallel growth of a wealthy middle and upper class. Corresponding to this rise in income levels, there was also a rise in the types of leisure activities available in Russia. The publishing of popular literature was on the rise, as were a variety of other entertainments ranging from amusements parks, to miniature theaters, to roller skating rinks, to movie theaters. 20 Thus rapid industrialization created an ever-expanding group of individuals who no longer had to work for their daily bread; instead, their wealth allowed them to enjoy all the luxuries inherent in the new modern age. Rapid urban growth offered new opportunities and adventures for the migrant peasant worker, but it also posed many problems. Burgeoning urban expansion brought severe overcrowding in all of Russia’s cities and there was a shortage of adequate housing. 21 For instance, by 1900 St. Petersburg “had nearly 50,000 one or two room apartments with an average of four inhabitants per room.” 22 A particularly characteristic form of housing for the poor was the “cot-and-corner” (koechno- kamorochnaia) apartment. This type of apartment was a residence jammed with as many cots and artificially created corners as the physical space allowed. Nearly 20 Miniature theaters were much like vaudeville houses and offered a variety of entertainment formats. 21 The lack of adequate housing was a major problem in Moscow and persisted well into the Soviet Era; Abram Romm’s 1927 film Bed and Sofa [Tretya Meshchanskaia] playfully addresses the problems of the housing shortage. 22 Michael F. Hamm, “The Breakdown of Urban Modernization: A Prelude to the Revolutions of 1917,” The City in Russian History, ed. Michael F. Hamm, (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979) 196. 53 175,000 people (one-sixth of the total population) were crammed into such housing accommodations in the turn of the century Moscow. 23 In conditions like this there were no distinctions between public and private. “Observers reported that crowding, fetid air, and the stench from courtyard latrines set these areas apart as places of terrible squalor.” 24 This lack of clean air or a clear delineation between public and private space increased one’s growing sense of claustrophobia. In these growing areas known as trushchoby [slums], “there was no territorial border to separate ‘decent’ from ‘squalid’ rental lodgings; both often existed in the same neighborhood or even next to each other.” 25 The paucity of clearly demarcated boundaries between neighborhoods seems to be one of the hallmarks of rapid urbanization. According to historian Blair Ruble, in Russia as in other countries “factories, commercial avenues, rail yards, and tenement blocks produced an urban environment that was disorientingly mutable . . . impermanence became a trademark of the ‘modern city’.” 26 In other words, the modern Russian city (like other major urban centers) meant the dissolution of traditional borders. Modern cities were constantly morphing due to the permeability of its boundaries, and with the advent of technology like the automobile, it helped to create the impression that the city was one large over-crowded tenement house. There was no way to escape the stench, the noise, or the people. 23 Daniel R. Brower, The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) 143. 24 Brower 143 25 Brower 142 26 Ruble 8. 54 Moscow For the more decorous elements of society, the late-nineteenth-century large industrial town became a ‘cesspool city’ marked by ‘the promiscuous mingling of classes in close proximity on the street.’ 27 Let us discuss the significance of Russia’s rapid industrialization and urban growth, in Moscow more specifically. Moscow is preeminent as a Russian city for many reasons, perhaps first and foremost, and for the purpose of this dissertation, because it was Russia’s equivalent to Hollywood. 28 Many of the distribution offices, production companies, film studios and laboratories that processed the films were based in and around Moscow. In addition to this, many studios, in an effort to keep production costs down, set their films in Moscow or used the city as a backdrop to stand in for other cities. In other words, the city of Moscow played a central role in Russian film history. We must also look to Moscow, as a sample Russian city, because the effects of urbanization seem to have been magnified there due to its hurried expansion as a modern industrial center. 29 Blair Ruble notes that another aspect that set Moscow apart was that the fact that it was not a “traditional center with firmly entrenched high-minded cultural elites” as was St. Petersburg. Instead, the city “drew on upstart 27 Ruble is paraphrasing Elizabeth Wilson’s discussion of the city in her book The Sphinx and the City in Second Metropolis 9. 28 The consolidation of production and distribution offices in Moscow however precedes the formal creation of Hollywood as the film capital of the United States by a few years. While some filming took place in the area known as Hollywood, it wasn’t until 1911 that the Nestor Company became the first of many to set up shop permanently in Southern California. 29 Again, there are striking similarities to the rapid growth and development of Hollywood. 55 talent from every direction . . . creating pools of innovation.” 30 These ‘pools of innovation’ were both helped and hindered by the fact that by 1914 Moscow was ranked the 9 th largest city in the world, it’s population grew by some 300 percent, from just over 600,000 in 1871 to just under 2 million by September, 1917. 31 Moscow is also an interesting site for discussion because the city had gone through numerous permutations leading up to the end of the Tsarist Regime in 1917. Prior to Peter the Great’s decision to move the capital of Russia to St. Petersburg, Moscow had the distinction of being the cultural and political capital of the Russian Empire. The composition and design of Moscow also changed frequently and significantly, while at the same time still maintaining its overall circular design, in the period following the fires of 1812. 32 Given a virtual clean state due to the fires, Moscow was able to rebuild/recreate itself as a major city. It soon became the home to migrant workers, as well as “peasant traders, Old Believer merchants, German and British industrialists and adventurers of all hues who could never be admitted to Petersburg high society…” 33 Its lack of homogeneity and shifting societal boundaries allowed Moscow the freedom to embrace creativity and ingenuity, which in turn allowed the city to flourish. Moscow was a major metropolis in every sense 30 Ruble 22-23. 31 Ruble 5. 32 The majority of Moscow burned during Napoleon’s Russian campaigns of 1812, reports vary as to how or who set the fires. 33 Ruble 70. 56 of the word, except politically, that right was granted to St. Petersburg from the moment Peter the Great relocated the capital of the Empire. 34 Figure 2.6 Map of Moscow, 1893 35 As Figure 2.1 illustrates, by the late nineteenth century, railroads determined Moscow’s multiple realities beyond the center-defining Garden Ring Boulevards. “Building up layer on layer of new rings, the city’s diverse and differentiated functions nestled in a circular pattern focused around a single, grand, central landmark, the Moscow Kremlin.” 36 The various rail lines spread out from the city center like spokes on a wheel, with a concentration of railway lines to the east of the 34 Ruble 70. 35 John Murray, "Moscow," Handbook for Travellers in Russia, Poland and Finland (Paris, 1893) < http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/moscow_1893.jpg>, Sept. 12, 2007. 36 Ruble 74. 57 city center, which meant that major industrial plants needing rail lines to transport goods clustered there. “Workers’ slums followed, in part because of the paternalism of employers who provided a bed in a company barracks, and in part because the chronic inefficiency of public transit required laborers to walk to their jobs.” 37 Rather than growing vertically with tall buildings like most European and American cities, Moscow spread horizontally, emanating out from the Garden Ring in the center. While approximately half of the city’s population lived inside the Garden Ring in the years proceeding Emancipation, Moscow’s industrial expansion to areas outside the city center caused the population to shift to outlying areas, so that by 1917 only one quarter of the total population was living inside the Garden Ring. 38 Moscow quickly became Russia’s leading manufacturing center; with the textile industry predominating, accounting for 90 percent of industrial labor. By 1902 about 60% of the Moscow’s workforce was employed in large factories and small artisanal shops, the remaining laborers were comprised of professionals, domestics and a few entrepreneurs. 39 Despite the blue-collar nature of Moscow’s workforce, the city quickly became the wealthiest city in the Russian Empire. According to historian Henri Troyat, by 1910 Moscow had the highest number of people earning over 1,000 rubles a year; the number increased from 515 in 1903 to 76,610 by 1910. 40 The rise in yearly income in Moscow marked the birth of and subsequent rise of a Russian middle class. “Moscow was a city of commerce and 37 Ruble 75. 38 Ruble 77. 39 Robert Johnson 15-18 and Ruble 88. 40 Troyat 89. 58 industry, of wealth and poverty. The city was noteworthy in short, for the diversity of its human experience, as may be seen in the variety of its housing stock.” 41 Housing in Moscow ranged from large luxurious townhouses built by the wealthiest merchants, to the new apartment houses of the ‘middle class,’ to the poorest of residents living in make-shift lean-tos, basements, factory barracks, a rented cot in any available corner, some even split the cost of a bed, sharing with another laborer who worked an opposite shift. 42 Women in the City With the end of serfdom in 1861, peasants’ ties to the land were weakened and they began to look elsewhere for income. The city provided just the opportunity. This is evidenced by the fact that the majority of in-migrants were peasants between the ages of 20-39. For every 115 male peasants who moved to the city, 100 females did the same. The number of women leaving the countryside for work, while it was lower in Russia than in other countries, is still significant, especially when one considers the lack of power, education or legal rights possessed by women at the turn of the century. 43 While women had few opportunities in the countryside, other than serving as a wife, a mother, or a farm hand (and often all three), the city provided a wealth of new opportunities. Domestic service, which included jobs such as: chamber maid, wet-nurse, cook, scullery maid, nanny and housekeeper, was one of 41 Ruble 89. 42 Ruble 90. 43 Richard F. Rowland, “Urban In-Migration in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia,” The City in Russian History, ed. Michael F. Hamm (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979) 118-119. 59 the prime sources of employment. Women also found work in various industry jobs; chemical, tobacco, glass, sugar refining, rubber processing, and the textile industry. 44 Women worked their way into almost every industry, and in the process they invaded and destabilized traditional male domains. While women were not necessarily taking jobs away from men, their very presence and proliferation in the workplace served as a continual reminder of the changing times. Nowhere was this more evident than in the urban home. Under the influence of Orthodoxy, Russia had a long history of misogyny and even within marriage “female sensuality was viewed as ‘the devil’s gateway,’ a perilous force which every husband must tame and repress.” 45 The ideal way to tame and repress this potentially dangerous sexuality was through motherhood. 46 Modern urban life however, posed problems for the containment of womanhood, as marriage and motherhood were often postponed so that young women could work and contribute to the family coffers. Many industries, such as domestic service, frowned upon women with husbands and children, instead preferring young, unattached girls. Many mothers who worked in the city were forced to leave their children to be raised by relatives in the country. In an 1883 study, only 4 out of 174 factories in Moscow 44 Jane McDermid & Anna Hillyar, Women and Work in Russia 1880-1930: A Study in Continuity through Change (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998) 28-35. 45 Francine du Plessix Gray, “The Russian Heroine: Gender, Sexuality and Freedom,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (Fall 1989) 701. 46 Leo Tolstoy provides us with a perfect literary example of the repressive nature of motherhood with Natasha from War and Peace. In the first part of the novel Natasha grows into a lovely young woman, overflowing with youthful exuberance and newly blooming sexuality. By the end of the novel, Natasha has become heavy and disheveled in appearance. In devoting herself to raising her children and maintaining her household, she loses interest in the trappings associated with a sexual woman of high society. 60 offered any kind of child care for their employees and mothers were frequently denied permission to nurse young babies. Many more factories had unofficial policies of only hiring childless women. 47 In addition to this, as I mentioned earlier, the housing situation in a city like Moscow was not very conducive to raising a family, “with low wages and terms of employment making it virtually impossible for workers to secure separate living quarters of their own.” 48 According to historian Robert Johnson, “Women, it seems, had to choose between raising families and migrating for wages. To the extent that they did assimilate themselves to the urban- industrial order, their rates of marriage went down.” 49 While some women did choose to have children and raise families in Moscow, their numbers were low when compared to a new class of single, unattached women in Moscow. Working women in modern urban cities like Moscow not only destabilized men in the workplace, they also threatened patriarchal order as traditional familial roles disintegrated, and female sexuality went unchecked. Film scholar Mary Anne Doane remarks that, “the conjunction of the woman and the city suggests the potential of an intolerable and dangerous sexuality, a sexuality that is out of bounds precisely as a result of the woman’s revised relation to her space, her new ability to ‘wander’ (and hence ‘err’).” 50 Female sexuality had long been feared in Russia, as the Domostroi attests, yet with its strict guidelines, the strength of the patriarchal 47 Robert Johnson 53-56. 48 Robert Johnson 52. 49 Robert Johnson 61. 50 Mary Anne Doane, “Melodrama, Temporality, Recognition: American and Russian Silent Cinema,” Cinefocus 2.1 (Fall 1991): 20. 61 system, and the confinement of village life it had long been contained. The urban woman’s ability to ‘wander’ again leads us back to the prostitute and her growing visibility on the streets of Moscow. Through her ability to wander, the modern metropolitan prostitute becomes the embodiment of Benjamin’s notion of “porosity” in late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century discourse as she traverses the limits of societal norms. In the 1890s, Cesare Lombroso, and Italian forensic psychiatrist offered biological determinism as a means of explaining the prostitute, suggestion that some women are just born with excessive, masculine sex drives. 51 Dr. Veniamin Tarnovskii, a follower of the Lombroso school, described the prostitute as a: Retrograde type who behaved in a manner more appropriate to normal men – she was egotistical, self-assertive, and sexually aggressive. Part criminal, part insane, the female prostitute was not . . . the passive victim of male lust, male deception, and economic misfortune . . . but an enterprising and resourceful figure responding to commercial opportunity. 52 For Tarnovskii, the prostitute, laden with her masculine traits, was an entrepreneur of sorts, she saw a need in the market and capitalized on it. 53 The prostitute was far removed from anything resembling motherhood or femininity, she was an entrepreneur, and her entry onto the marketplace allowed her to transcend her gender and become manlier than the men she seduced. 54 51 Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de- Siècle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) 134. 52 Dr. Veniamin Tarnovskii, quoted in Engelstein 134. 53 Tarnovskii’s description of the prostitute can be compared with women in business and even film actresses. In order to be a successful film star, a woman had to be self-assertive, enterprising, resourceful and even aggressive in order to land the best parts and make the most money. And of course, sometimes she even had to sleep with someone to get the part. 54 Engelstein 134-135. 62 In addition to being more visible in the workplace and around the city in general, women at this time were also more visible in politics, or rather in violent political activities. From the mid 1800s on into the Revolution of 1917, terrorism was a major component of political activism. Women in the intelligentsia were frequently the most violent proponents of terrorism, and there were several specific women who frequently made headlines. Sof’ya Perovskaya, the daughter of the governor of St. Petersburg, stepped out into the limelight with her escape from a Kharkov prison. Following this, Perovskaya became an executive member to a group called The People’s Will (Narodnya Volya), a group dedicated to terrorist acts aimed at the tsarist regime. After two failed attempts on the Tsar’s life, on March 1, 1881 under Perovskaya’s guidance they were finally successful in killing Tsar Alexander II with bombs made by Perovskaya and another female revolutionary Vera Figner. Perovskaya and five others was secretly tried for their treason and then publicly executed. Another infamous terrorist was Katerina Breshkovskaya, an Apostle of Terror, who because of her age was known as Little Grandmother [Babushka] of the Revolution. Babushka was a member of another group, the Socialist Revolutionary group and she traveled around the countryside teaching peasants to read and to know their civic duty – violence against the oppressive Tsarist regime, in other words she promoted terrorism. 55 55 Margaret Maxwell, Narodniki Women: Russian Women Who Sacrificed Themselves for the Dream of Freedom (New York: Pergamon Press, 1990) 50-151. 63 Acts of terrorism perpetrated and propagandized by women did much to add to the general unease of the time. The figure of the urban woman and the apprehension she caused was a fertile source of material in Russian melodrama and she became the sight of male anxiety and unease over the many dangers posed by the city and by modernity. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the films of Evgenii Bauer where woman becomes the ‘nodal point’ for condensing a wide array of anxieties and apocalyptic fears concerning modernity, industrial-ization, the work place, and political change. In addition to these specific anxieties, it was the sheer act of condensing these fears into an amorphous mass and erasing or weakening the boundaries between them, that made modern woman so troublesome, for she was the one who was violating or eroding the boundaries, a concept linked to the function of modern urban space and Walter Benjamin’s notion of ‘porosity.’ Urban Space and Bauer One of the many key concepts in Walter Benjamin’s representation of urban space is the issue of ‘porosity,’ which “refers to a lack of clear boundaries between phenomena, a permeation of one thing by another, a merger of, for example, old and new, public and private, sacred and profane.” 56 As I mentioned earlier, Russian cities were intended to be enlightened, civilized and orderly spaces, but the realities of industrialization and rapid urbanization left them porous and more closely resembling Elizabeth Wilson’s teeming ‘cesspools,’ with their constantly shifting 56 Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996) 25. 64 boundaries, conflated and claustrophobic spaces, and intermingling classes and genders. The urban/metropolitan films of Evgenii Bauer clearly illustrate this sense of urban porosity. However, the ultimate fear/desire of many cultural and intellectual elites was the possibility that the city offered for the erasure of the boundaries between male and female. 57 Bauer adds an additional layer to Benjamin’s notion of porosity by blurring the traditional boundaries between the gender distinctions of male and female. As we shall see, permeability of the modern city space creates, or rather permits, slippage in gender identification which in turn creates a space for alternate readings of the films characters and the films themselves. Twilight in a Woman’s Soul Twilight in a Woman’s Soul [Sumerki Zhenskoi Dushi] was Bauer’s first film as director in 1913, and the first of his seemingly cautionary tales of urban life. From the opening word in the title, this film addresses female movement into a liminal zone, a transitional space in between two opposites; a spatial violation that is presented in both the narrative and in the stylistic choices in the film. Twilight tells the story of how the city almost destroys a young society woman and how in her struggle to survive she leaves behind two dead. Because of the film’s frank depiction of the heroine Vera’s downfall, her rape and her subsequent murder of her 57 In chapter 3 I discuss the Symbolist’s desire to eliminate gender difference by doing away with feminine sexuality and gender. 65 rapist, Sweden banned the film for being too shocking. 58 In other words, the film itself crossed the line, blurring boundaries of what was an acceptable topic for film viewers. Shocking or not, Twilight of a Woman’s Soul brings to the fore many of the issues Bauer was concerned with throughout his successful career as a filmmaker. Twilight tells the story of Vera, a wealthy young woman, the daughter of a Countess, with a well-developed blasé attitude. Vera is bored by her high society life and longs for something more exciting, or at least something with which to occupy her time. To escape the boredom and the claustrophobia, Vera gladly agrees to help her mother, the President of the Philanthropic Society, distribute food and alms to the poor in the slums. Vera decides to devote her life to helping the poor and in doing so is tricked by Maksim, an injured apprentice whom she tries to help. Maksim rapes Vera and in retaliation she kills him with a broad knife. 59 After the rape and murder, Vera’s life continues on much the same as it had before until she meets Prince Diulskii. They fall in love, but Vera is tortured by visions of her past. When Diulskii proposes, Vera sees visions of Maksim, and the strain is too much for her and she falls ill. When Vera’s health improves, she agrees to marry Diulskii. Still plagued by her past, Vera shares her experiences with her new husband, but rather than forgiving her for her past as he promised he would, Diulskii rejects her. Vera leaves him and goes on to have a successful career as a 58 Paolo Cherchi Usai, “Twilight in a Woman’s Soul,” Silent Witnesses: Russian Film 1908- 1919, eds. Paolo Cherchi Usai, Lorenzo Codelli, Carlo Montanaro, & David Robinson, (London: British Film Institute, 1989) 206. 59 This is a painter or plasterer’s tool, which means Maksim, was an apprentice in construction-related skilled labor. 66 stage performer under the pseudonym Ellen Kay. Diulskii, regretting his rash decision searches for Vera in vain for several years until a friend suggests he go to see the newest star of the screen, Ellen Kay. During the performance of La Traviata, Diulskii recognizes Vera. After the performance, Diulskii begs Vera’s forgiveness, but she tells him it is too late. The film ends with him dying of heartache, and Vera continuing on with her life. With the rape of Vera and the murder of the perpetrator, Bauer is challenging his viewer’s ideas of moral justice, and testing the boundaries between good and evil, right and wrong. In the past, the justification of a man’s murder would require more than the crime of rape. In fact, the rape of a woman was historically considered more a sin than an actual crime, and while reform in the legal code in 1903 set severe penalties for rape, it also made it extremely difficult to prove. 60 In the film Bauer does not blame Vera for the rape, neither does he overtly punish Vera for the murder of Maksim; instead Vera’s husband Diulskii, whose crime was his inability to forgive and forget, is punished with death in the end. One could argue that Vera is perhaps punished for her crimes by losing Diulskii’s love and the safety of familial relations. Bauer however negates this assumption both cinematically and narratively. In the final confession scene, it is Vera who takes the moral high ground, when after Diulskii’s rejection of her, she proudly takes her hat and coat and says, “ I pity you, Prince” before leaving him 60 See Daniel H. Kaiser, “’He Said, She Said’: Rape and Gender Discourse in Early Modern Russia," Kritika 3.2 (2002): 197-216 and Laura Engelstein, “Gender and the Juridical Subject: Prostitution and Rape Laws in Nineteenth-century Russian Criminal Codes,” Journal of Modern History 60.3 (1988): 472. 67 forever. Bauer then cuts to a long shot of Vera walking out of Diulskii’s country home. The shot, filmed at a canted angle, is 26 seconds in length and pans across the house to follow Vera as she leaves, without once looking back. 61 The length of the shot and the slowness of Vera’s pace give the scene a funereal overtone; thus Vera mourns the loss of a private family life and walks towards a life in the public sphere of the city. Thus narratively, Vera goes on to challenges society’s notions of acceptability by being single and successful. The subject matter of such films by Bauer reads more like contemporary headlines in a tabloid newspaper than a well-mannered society melodrama. Thanks, however, to its well-defined narrative, Bauer’s Twilight in a Woman’s Soul is very modernist example of Russian cinema during the 1910s. The film portrays one of the effects of the increasing socioeconomic problems in Moscow and other cities, the rise and proliferation of slums and an impoverished working class, as well as the disappearance of traditional boundaries and borders. The lack of traditional boundaries is evidenced, at one point, by Maksim’s ability to slip into Vera’s room and look at her while she is sleeping, violating not only class lines but also the private space of her boudoir. In addition to this, the film also incorporates many of the visual tropes of metropolitan life especially the condensation of modern urban space through mass communication (the proliferation of popular press, newspapers), the spread of advertising (a friend sees the ad for La Traviata and it figures 61 This shot is almost a mirror image of the scene where Vera goes off to help Maksim, only here rather than decreasing in size as she gets closer to her destination, she gets larger symbolizing her success and future star status. 68 prominently in the plot), and transportation (Vera defies social constrictions and leaves her husband in her own car). Vera is emblematic of Benjamin’s notion of porosity, her experiences mark the weakening not only of social boundaries between class and gender, but also of the moral lines between good and evil, darkness and light, those Manichean lines usually upheld by traditional melodrama. Bauer uses the technique frequently found in melodrama; of displacing the moral dilemmas onto the mise-en-scène; where Vera’s entrapment and confinement are palpable and help explain or perhaps even justify her crossing various lines. In the opening sequence of the film Bauer shows Vera as being physically hemmed in by her surroundings. Figure 2.7 Twilight of a Woman’s Soul, Vera in her bedroom. While the character Vera may have been sitting in a wide open room, the framing of the shot serves to condense and flatten the space within the frame. Bauer’s tendency 69 to fill the frame serves to enclose and constrict the space, leaving both the character and the viewer with a sense of claustrophobia. In the above film still, the darkness of the curtain, chair and two plant stands in the foreground of the shot contrast with the lighted background, and block out almost two thirds of the entire frame. In addition to this, the objects behind Vera, the bed, the lamp and dressing table, also hem Vera in within the flattened space of the shot. There is a very minute amount of open floor space to the left of Vera, the implication being that despite her social standing, Vera has little room for movement, and she is hemmed in not only by objects but also by her social standing. Another example of how Bauer uses his camera to illustrate the oppressiveness of Vera’s space, how she is hemmed in and never truly alone, is in the party sequence. Once again, Vera is bored, with a party going on inside the house that fails to hold her attention. As Vera moves from place to place unable to find solace, Bauer uses one of the first tracking shots in cinema to follow Vera as she sits down and tries to shut out the party. 62 As the camera follows closely on Vera’s heels, Bauer uses the camera to violate her personal space, further hemming her in, a trope which is continued the minute she sits down. 62 This has been noted as the first use of the tracking shot in Russia. While this may not have been THE first use us a tracking shot in film history, Cabiria, the film noted for the first use of a tracking shot, however, was not released until later that year. 70 Figure 2.8 Twilight of a Woman's Soul, Vera avoiding the party. Sitting on the right side of the frame, Vera is almost engulfed by the lush floral arrangements. The flowers extend to the left side of the frame, which is accentuated by the slight leftward angle of the camera. Through the gaps in the greenery one can see men and women enjoying the party. The frame is literally full of objects and people, so much so that Vera is almost lost within the frame, just as she is lost without some worthwhile endeavor to occupy her, a symptom of modern urban life. Vera has an excess of energy and a need for action that she is trying to reconcile with her position as a member of the upper class and as a woman. The chaotic, over-crowded frame is altered significantly when Vera leaves the confines of her private space (her home) and goes out into the wide open city. The series of shots following Vera’s decision to participate in her mother’s 71 philanthropic endeavors, establish for the viewer that the city is the predominant location of the narrative. 63 In a succession of subsequent scenes Bauer contrasts three very different types of urban housing. In the first shot, we see a car pull up outside a large urban townhouse/mansion, and Vera and her mother exit the house and get into the car waiting for them on the street. Figure 2.9 & 2.5 Twilight of a Woman's Soul, the basement. The next series of shots are from inside a basement, as can be seen in Figures 2.4 & 2.5, above. As discussed earlier in the chapter, the basement apartment was typical housing for the lower class and urban poor in Russia. In this series of shot reverse shot, we see three men are sitting, drinking, fighting and playing cards while four children (a young girl and three small boys) run around in the background (see Figure 2.4). 64 Rather than objects to hem in the subjects, in this case Bauer uses 63 For the first four minutes and forty-two seconds, the viewer is given no other location cues than the intertitle “At the Countess Dubovskaia’s.” It isn’t until the two women exit their urban mansion onto the city street with a car and driver waiting for them that we are given any clue as to location of the narrative. 64 This small space could potentially be housing three different families or one very large family. It is interesting to note that the men, all of working age, are loafing about that there are no women shown, perhaps implying that women are out working, contradicting the assumption that the urban poor are all shiftless and lazy. 72 darkness, and while there is no such thing as private space in such situations, the sleeping areas are kept dark and out of view of the camera/viewer. Bauer quickly establishes the connection between basements and the city by cross-cutting between the men playing cards and a view of the window looking out onto the busy street outside. 65 In Figure 2.5 we see the lower half of Vera walking past the window on her way into the basement. 66 The scene privileges the spectatorial position of the men, despite their class and social standing. The men view the arrival of Vera and her mother, unbeknownst to the two women, and even when the women enter they seem to be unaware that the men are patronizing them, mocking them and making rude gestures; a fact that does not bode well for Vera’s future. The two women continue their ministering to the poor, ending up at a small hovel occupied by Maksim, an apprentice. The intertitle calls Maksim’s living space a ‘kamorka’ which translates roughly to closet or very small room and harkens back to the “cot-and-corner” (koechno-kamorochnaia) type housing mentioned earlier. 67 The room is a roof top/attic closet with light pouring in from the poorly constructed walls and the room itself seems as if it is still used for storage. The space is not even a proper ‘cot and corner’ as Maksim has no bed to speak of and sleeps on the floor. The Countess’ reaction, waving her hands in front of her face and covering her nose with her fur, indicates that both the small space and Maksim smell bad and could use 65 A very similar shot will be repeated in Romm’s film Bed and Sofa. 66 Even though the framing is such that we do not see the faces of Vera or her mother, Vera is dressed in a very distinctive coat with fur trim and matching muff, which you are able to see clearly in the shot. 67 Kamorka and kamorochnaia share the same root and both refer to a small box-like space. 73 a good cleaning. As in the previous scene, Vera is oblivious to Maksim’s reaction to her. Maksim briefly looks directly at the camera, and this look makes the viewer aware of, and complicit in, his lewd intentions. The viewer recognizes Vera’s innocence and oblivion to Maksim’s advances, yet is unable to warn her of impending misfortune at the hands of Maksim. Bauer uses the basement apartment as a transitional location, moving both Vera and the viewer from sites of posh upper class living to the slums of the urban poor. Through the use of cinema, Bauer is able to add an additional layer to the porosity of urban boundaries; through the use of editing we instantaneously move from one location to the other as if they were right next door to each other. In addition, this movement becomes a filmic equivalent to the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century pastime of slumming. 68 Through Vera, the film also illuminates some of the moral/political issues that problematized the modern Russian city. While charity work was an acceptable past time for groups of society women, Vera makes her first mistake when, sure of her independence (a purely modern concept), she sets out alone in the dangerous city. 68 This was a relatively popular pastime for the urban wealthy in many countries, where groups, including young women, would travel to the slums to see how the other half lived. For an example in the American context see Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998) 18-19. 74 Figure 2.6 Twilight of a Woman’s Soul, slums. Vera’s solo trip to the slums is literally and figuratively her downfall. The scene, shot at an angle follows Vera downhill, into the depths of the slums. By using a canted angle and forced perspective to film this scene, Bauer calls attention to the location and draws the viewers in, allowing them the sensation of the downhill descent and establishing a visual connection between the viewer and Vera. 69 As I mentioned earlier this visual motif is repeated towards the end of the film when Vera leaves her husband to set out for a life on her own in the city. In the scene pictured above, Vera is shown walking away from the camera, towards urban decay and death (of her innocence and of Maksim). In the second sequence, Vera’s path is reversed; 69 The filming of this scene is in direct contrast to the rest of the movie, in which scenes are filmed at a ninety degree angle from the action. In other words, throughout most of the film, the 90 degree angle allows the viewer to become a passive observer of the action, the angle in the slum scene draws one in closer to the action, allowing for identification with the protagonist. 75 she walks towards the camera, towards the city and a new life as a modern, liberated, independent woman. Child of the Big City In a second film by Bauer, Child of the Big City [Ditya bol’shogo goroda] released in 1914, he introduces another female figure who works as a nodal point, condensing fears of the double threat of female sexuality and freedom. The central female character in Child of the Big City is Mary, a young working girl, a seamstress who longs for the better things in life. It is significant to note that the profession of the seamstress has long been associated with prostitution in Russia, a cultural coding which let the viewer know that Mary’s innocence is questionable at best. 70 While window shopping and wallowing in self-pity over the luxuries she does not have, she meets Victor a wealthy man doing a bit of window-shopping of his own. Viktor, like many of Bauer’s male characters, is a well-to-do playboy with money on his hands and time to kill. An intertitle tells us that Viktor is in search of (or rather, on the prowl for) the perfectly innocent and uncultured woman. The main action in the film is predicated on Viktor’s, inability to recognize the difference between a woman who is uncultured and innocent and one who is uncultured, yet ‘street smart.’ Viktor surrounds himself with Grecian statues of beautiful women, signifying that he, like the Symbolists, is searching for pure, innocent, beauty, and for a living 70 Yuri Tsivian mentioned this fact several times during a course he taught on Early Russian Cinema at the University of Southern California, Spring 1994. 76 example of the Symbolist notion of the ‘eternal feminine.’ 71 Viktor however has determined that this pure woman must be “uncultured.” He has, in fact, an entire photo album filled with pictures of the “cultured” women he has ‘known,’ but who turned out not to be the kind he was looking for. If it weren’t for the fact that he was so busy searching for a perfectly ‘innocent’ and ‘pure’ girl to add to his list of conquests, he would make the perfect flâneur. Thinking he is adding another conquest to his list, Victor seduces Mary, or so it seems. Mary is seduced both by Viktor and the promise of luxuries to come. Once she has become Viktor’s mistress she acclimates well to Viktor’s social circles and has no trouble spending his money and replacing him when his finances take a turn for the worse. Viktor, on the brink of poverty, pleads with Mary to leave the city, to live a simple life with him in the countryside. When Mary rejects him and adds insult to injury by offering Viktor a few rubles to heave her alone, he kills himself on the steps of her apartment. The film ends with Mary exclaiming “They do say that a meeting with the dead brings happiness…” and calmly stepping over his dead body for a night on the town with Viktor’s old friends. If meeting with the dead brings happiness, then Mary should be ecstatic as Bauer chose to bookend the film with death sequences. Bauer first introduces Mary as a small child in a brief opening scene that lasts less than one minute but is crucial to establishing Mary as literally a child of the big city. The initial intertitle sets the 71 The use of Symbolism in Bauer’s films will be discussed more fully in Chapter Three. 77 stage for the action, “In a dirty basement, where the laundry was done, Little Marya spent her childhood.” Surrounded by her fellow washerwomen, Mary’s mother dies of consumption (see Figure 2.7). While brief, this sequence illustrates the desperate living and working conditions of Moscow’s urban poor. Blair Ruble notes that almost ten percent of Moscow’s apartments were located in basements and those basement apartments house 8-9 people per apartment. 72 According to Johnson, workers in many industries slept in the place where they worked, and children often entered the work force as early as the age of five. 73 Figure 2.7 Child of the Big City, Mary’s mother dies. 72 Ruble 267. 73 Johnson 52. 78 Bauer creates a sense of claustrophobia by filling the frame with washer women, the young Mary and Mary’s dying mother, who only has a curtain partially separating her work place from her death bed. 74 Even in death Mary’s mother is not allowed privacy, instead she is surrounded by on-lookers. Blair Ruble comments that: Moscow was the most poorly housed of Europe’s major urban centers at the turn of the century, surpassed only by St. Petersburg for the title of the continent’s least healthy city. Only the Russian capital could compete with Moscow’s depleted housing stock, exhausted public health facilities and devastating outbreaks of infectious diseases. 75 Contagious diseases were a reality of the overcrowded living conditions of the urban poor in many countries. A contagious disease like tuberculosis would probably have been severely aggravated by the damp conditions of the Mary’s mother’s profession and her close living quarters. What little childhood Mary had was most likely spent with her mother, living, working and dying in that dirty basement. Orphaned at a young age, Mary grows up then, quite literally the child of the big city. Bauer cuts immediately from the death of her mother to an intertitle telling the viewer that nine years had passed. The next scene opens with a room full of women working. Mary is now an adult. She sits in front of a sewing machine, having progressed from washer girl to seamstress. Mary’s line of work alludes not only to the prevalence of the textile industry in Moscow but also to the rise in demand for ready-made goods. As Ruble notes, “up-to-date clothing became a 74 There are approximately 10 women, including young Mary who live and work in this basement apartment. 75 Ruble 267. 79 source of pride for the urban bourgeoisie and village peasant alike. To consume was to move up the social scale.” 76 Mary’s choice of profession, while common among women in the inner city, only serves to reinforce the double threat she posed. Her position allows her unusual freedoms as a woman, including the opportunity to wander the city on errands, or interact with a variety of classes while on deliveries. And yet this freedom of movement within the city is often associated with the epitome of sexual freedom – prostitution. 77 As I mentioned in Chapter One, the very act of visiting a prostitute was equated with the experience of film viewing, the repetitiveness and the implication of illicit activity. Like the prostitute, the seamstress also bears a connection to cinema. The work of the seamstress is similar to the process of film editing, with both stitching things together. Like the editor, Mary sutures together disparate material, which when taken separately have no meaning, but together create a whole dress. This ability to combine unrelated material is yet another way in which Mary crosses boundaries, and this further serves to connect her to the city. 76 Ruble 204. 77 So not only is Mary’s ability to wander the city streets associated with prostitution, the profession of seamstress in Russia also has cultural connections with that baser profession. 80 Figure 2.8 Child of the Big City, Mary daydreaming. If Mary’s connection to the city was unclear, it is reinforced when Mary gets up from her sewing machine and sits by the window. An intertitle tells the viewer, “Often Marya’s dreams would carry her off to a make-believe life of luxury and wealth.” Following the intertitle, Bauer cuts to a medium shot (see Figure 2.8) of Mary sitting before a large window beyond which we see the bustling city. The shot lasts for fifteen seconds, in which time Mary ponders her desires, sighs heavily three times and looks out the window at the city which holds the key to all her dreams and desires. Mary’s life, work and future happiness are all connected to the city and what it can offer her. 81 Figure 2.9 & 2.10 Child of the Big City, window-shopping. Mary is motivated by ambition and desire for material gains, for her consumption is clearly equated with social status. When her job requires her to run errands, she takes the opportunity to enjoy one of the perks of her profession and does a little window-shopping. Bauer uses a two shot sequence to establish Mary’s connection to consumerism and desire for material goods. The entire sequence lasts nearly a minute. In the first shot (see Figure 2.9) Mary stands in front of the shop window admiring the vases and floral arrangements, behind her is a dress shop and perhaps one of the entrances to Moscow’s Upper Trading Rows, an arcade style department store built in the 1890s. 78 This first shot lasts 30 seconds, during which time the viewer is able to take in not only Mary’s consumerism but also that of the bustling crowds behind her. In the next shot (see Figure 2.10), Mary stands in front of a jewelry shop, looking in the window and breaking down in tears over the things she wants but cannot afford. It is no coincidence that this is also where she first meets Viktor and 78 The Upper Trading Rows, was located in an area known as Kitai-gorod [Chinatown] on the edge of Red Square. The department store was renamed after the Revolution in 1917 to the Gosudarstvennyi Universalnyi Magazin [State Department Store], reffered to simply as GUM. 82 agrees to go with him, establishing his ability to buy her the things she desires, and her willingness to be so easily seduced. Viktor mistakes her tears of consumer driven frustration and desire, for a moment of childlike innocence. This supposition of ‘pure innocence,’ is what attracts Viktor and eventually leads to his downfall. Viktor and his friend invite Mary to dinner, and Victor protects her as she tries to ward off his friend’s advances. Viktor takes this as yet another sign of her purity and innocence. Figure 2.11 Child of the Big City, the kiss. The seduction scene ends (see Fig. 2.11) with Mary shyly kissing Viktor, in the first of three scenes that include a tango motif. 79 The tango was first introduced in 1913, and it was a craze that was sweeping through Russia at the time Bauer made 79 The tango scenes serve as a refrain, similar to the nightmare scene in The Dying Swan [Umiraiushii lebed’], the dead wife’s braid in Daydreams [Grezy], and the position of the actors in Silent Witnesses [ Nemye Sviditeli]. 83 this film. Tsivian has observed that the tango “tells the sad story of desire, with its painful joys and sweet torments…The tango tells the story of experience, after-taste, resentment; it tells us about the fatality of sexual drive.” 80 In other words, the Tango tells the story of Mary’s life. Viktor and Mary’s first kiss resembles a move from a Tango, with “its suggestion of rebelliousness, sensuality and bodily freedom.” 81 The street smart, not-so-innocent Mary, rather than being shocked by such an advance from a man she barely knows, willingly participates in the kiss; she is an inveterate Tango dancer. 82 The outcome of dancing a tango is evident in the following scene when we see that Mary has become Viktor’s mistress. Bauer repeats this shot of Viktor and Mary’s first tango kiss (seen in Figure 2.11) later in super imposition, reminding the viewer of the event that started Viktor on this dangerous path. Viktor doesn’t realize until it is too late that Mary’s worldly physicality is all too prevalent, and that she is not an incarnation of the “eternal feminine.” This is reinforced at the end of the film, when Mary calmly steps over the dead body of Viktor, lifting her dress just enough to show off her extravagant shoes, a style designed specifically for Tango dancing. In her consumption of the latest styles, Mary has finally achieved the social status that she so desired early in the film. 80 Yuri Tsivian, “Russia, 1913” 207. 81 Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture, Entertainment, and Society 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 15. 82 See Chapter Three for a more detailed discussion of the significance of the Tango and it extensive use in this film and in the film Silent Witnesses. 84 Figure 2.12 & 2.13 Child of the Big City, tango scenes. The tango becomes a refrain throughout the film, marking moments of melodramatic misrecognition, and the eventual decent that leads Viktor to his suicide. Living out the life of the anti-Sophia, Mary dedicates herself to the decadent pursuits of physical and material pleasure. After Mary has turned down Viktor’s offer for them to lead a “simple” life, he walks in to see her and the butler (see Figure 2.11) in the middle of a tango influenced kiss, reminiscent of their own first kiss. The shock of catching her with another man, and a butler, no less, prevents him from seeing clearly. Viktor raises his gun to shoot Mary and himself, but he only succeeds in shooting their reflections in the mirror located on the far left side of the frame. This deadly combination of the tango, an emotional shock, and a gun ready- at-hand, is repeated again in the penultimate scene in the film. Viktor tries one last time to convince Mary to come away with him. Irritated and distracted when the maid interrupts her dance, Mary misinterprets his message and sends out money for him, so that she can return to her dance (see Figure 2.13). It is the callousness of this 85 misunderstanding that causes Viktor to shoot himself on Mary’s doorstep. Unburdened by Viktor’s sentimentality, Mary is free to pursue her excessive, decadent lifestyle. Figure 2.14 & 2.15 Child of the Big City, Mary’s apartment and Viktor’s hovel. While the film is book-ended with scenes of death, the interior of the film plays out a neat little melodramatic plot twist; a complete reversal in the circumstances of both Mary and Viktor. By the end of the film, Mary has not only crossed class boundaries, she has also taken on masculine traits, and she now has the money and the power in her relationship with Viktor. As we saw in the opening scene the viewer is introduced to Mary, living in near abject poverty. Mary’s initial living/working space, the basement in which her mother died was crammed full of other women, with female bodies filling the frame, and again Bauer uses a claustrophobic frame to reinforce the film’s urban setting. In Figure 2.14 we see Mary leisurely reading in the boudoir of her luxurious multi-room apartment. She is unable to deny her lower class upbringing, and has overloaded her apartment with things (every square inch of space is filled with some sort of furniture, chintz or 86 chachke) instead of people. The result is a frame so full, one hardly knows where to look and Mary becomes lost amidst all her new possessions. Her over-extravagance is initially contrasted with Viktor’s flat from earlier in the film where his study is filled with lamps and Grecian statues, yet it is a spacious room, not overloaded. The contrast with Viktor’s flat after his ruin is more striking though (see Figure 2.15). Viktor’s poverty is reinforced by his dark, little one-room flat with barely enough room for a stove for heat, a table for eating and a sofa for sleeping. The room is dark and the only light comes from the window and the single candle lamp on the table, gone are the spacious rooms, the beautiful decorations, the telephone and the electricity. Viktor’s complete removal from the life he lead before is further accentuated by his long walk across the Moscow river back towards the center of the city, where he will eventually shoot himself on Mary’s doorstep. Like her western counterpart, the femme fatale, male fears were displaced onto women like these in an effort to come to terms with them. And yet, unlike the western femme fatale, the Russian femme fatale was not typically punished in the end. Like Mary in Bauer’s film Child of the Big City, the Russian urban woman’s sexuality and the threat she posed could not be contained. The nightmare continued, or rather indicated that a new future was dawning. The Thousand and Second Ruse Melodrama was not the only genre that allowed Bauer the freedom to explore the shifting boundaries of gender within modern urban space in Russia. He 87 was also well versed in the ways in which porosity could be utilized in comedy. Comedy is a genre rooted in the desire to break down boundaries of decorum, class consciousness and differences between genders. The majority of Bauer’s comedic endeavors star actresses in the lead roles, especially his wife Lina Bauer. 83 By having women be the source of the comedy, Bauer contradicted the fact that men, like Charlie Chaplin, Max Linder, and Anton Fertner, a Russian comedian, reigned supreme in comedy, and again pushed gender boundaries in a way that was provocative. In Bauer’s 1915 short comedy, The Thousand and Second Ruse [Tysyacha vtoraia khitrost], which was based on Vladimir Azov’s stage comedy One Thousand and One Ruses, which is itself a reference to the classic tales One Thousand and One Nights, 84 opens with an old husband who indicates through pantomime that he follows a book entitled the One Thousand and One Female Ruses, which teaches him the ways in which his young wife might trick him. He recognizes each trick she attempts to play upon him, stops her, and points out how he is not fooled because everything he needs to know is in the book. Like Scherezade, who creates on-going narrative to beguile her husband as a means of saving her own life, the wife in One 83 Lina Bauer appears in many of Evgenii Bauer’s films ranging from the lead role to short cameo’s which usually involve dancing sequences. Lina differentiated between the types of roles she played by using two names: Lina for comedies and Emma for serious drama. 84 See Alexander A. Khanzhonkov, The First Years of Russian Cinematography: a Memoir [Pervye gody Russkoi kinematografii, vospominaniia] (Moskva [Moscow]: Iskusstvo, 1937) 159 and Richard Stites, “Review: Dusky Images of Tsarist Russia: Pre-revolutionary Cinema,” Russian Review 53.2 (Apr., 1994), 10/1/2007 <http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00360341%28199404%2953% 3A2%3C285%3ADIOTRP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7>. 88 Thousand and Second Ruse creates a narrative that beguiles and tricks her husband. The wife creates a ruse that trumps all previous ruses, since it allows her to trick her husband into buying her the expensive bracelet she has been asking for, and she is able to carry on her affair with her much younger and more handsome lover without her husband suspecting her of duplicity. At the beginning of The Thousand and Second Ruse, the husband appears to have the upper hand in the narrative. The film begins with him, and the viewer gets the impression that this is his story, that he will be the star (see Figure 2.16). 85 Figure 2.16 One Thousand and Second Ruse, the old husband. The film establishes the husband as a dominant figure by the virtue of his age (he is old, so he must be wise), by his direct address to the camera (he is letting the viewer 85 The trope of a narrative couched within another narrative is a common theme in One Thousand and One Nights, yet all the while it is the female who is responsible for narrative production. 89 in on a little secret), and by his manifest knowledge (after all he has the book both to guide him and the viewer through the treacherous territory of feminine wiles). The husband’s relative position of power in the narrative, and in the marriage, is established early in the film when, after showing the viewer his book, she stands and peeks at his wife through the keyhole on the door separating their two rooms (see Figure 2.17). Figure 2.17 One Thousand and Second Ruse, the young wife. The husband appears to have the literal power of the gaze. He not only controls what will be looked at, but the husband also invites the viewer to participate in his voyeurism. 86 Not only is the husband able to look at his wife, or rather to keep an 86 This type of shot is reminiscent of many of the voyeuristic keyhole films found during the ‘Cinema of Attractions’ period, some ten years earlier. 90 eye on her whenever he chooses, he is able to do so clandestinely, because she appears to be unaware that he is doing so. On the surface the film seems to be following typical comedic conventions where women are involved. As Frances Gray states in Women and Laughter, “comedy positions the woman not simply as the object of the male gaze but of the male laugh – not just to-be-looked-at but to-be-laughed-at – doubly removed from creativity.” There are however subtle clues that let us know that this is not necessarily the case in many of Bauer’s film, but this one in particular. First, the husband in The Thousand and Second Ruse is not just old; he is a caricature of an old man, right down to his obviously fake bald head and old fashioned dressing gown. Second, while our first view of the wife is within a keyhole matte shot, implying voyeurism and her to-be-looked-at-ness, these impressions are contradicted by subsequent shots which imply her awareness of being watched. At one point through the use of the mirror in front of her, she is able to turn her gaze upon the spying husband and by extension the viewer. In this case, the wife is not portrayed as a naïve young girl, but as a modern woman: she is savvy about urban life, she smokes, and she knows a thing or two about the world and about men. She is aware her husband watching her through the keyhole, and like Mae West in I’m No Angel, she is aware of the trappings of femininity and performs and parades her femaleness. 87 87 Lina Bauer is several years West’s senior but they have much in common, particularly the way in which they use the physicality of their bodies for humor and to call attention to the ridiculousness of the trappings femininity. 91 The real comedy in The Thousand and Second Ruse arises from the fact that the wife is aware of the affect she has on men. Bauer’s portrayal of her as she demonstrates mastery over the various situations tells us that this is in fact her story, not her husband’s. Figures 2.18 & 2.19 One Thousand and Second Ruse, the wife takes a stroll. Bauer uses the city as a backdrop to call attention to the changing landscape of femininity, patriarchy and urban space (see Figure 2.19). In a scene where the wife decides to take a stroll along the city streets, she performs her femininity for the purpose of comedy. The wife knows what reaction her husband and the men on the street will have to her actions and she performs with careful calculation, illustrated by a subtle rolling of the eye even while the men’s and the viewer’s attention is drawn to her bare leg (see Figure 2.18). As she strolls through the streets of the city, she fiddles with her hemline each time she approaches a male passerby, and each time she gives a little laugh to let the viewer know that her plan to infuriate and befuddle men, including her elderly husband, is working. This scene is also interesting for a variety of other reasons – 92 namely that she is a modern woman in her desire to walk the city streets alone. She leaves her apartment stylishly dressed in the latest fashion. As mentioned earlier, fashion was one way of climbing the social ladder, which is perhaps what she has already done by marrying the well-off old man. The young wife confidently walks the city streets illustrating a familiarity bred in frequent strolls. It is only upon her husband’s insistence that she is accompanied, or rather followed. Figure 2.20 One Thousand and Second Ruse, window shopping. According to feminist film scholar Anne Friedberg, “as consumers, women had a new set of social prerogatives in which their social powerlessness was crossed with new paradoxes of subjective power.” 88 While the young wife may not control the purse strings, she is definitely a consumer (see Figure 2.20) and makes purchase 88 Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993) 35. 93 decisions based upon what she sees in the shop windows. At the same time, she realizes that it is exactly her subjective position that will enable her to trick her husband so that he will buy her the bauble she desires. The final scene of the film illustrates the wife’s cunning as her plans for the thousand and second ruse play out. We see that she is the puppet master of this elaborate scheme, and the two men are completely unaware that they are her puppets, each acting according to carefully laid out plans. When her husband retires, the wife phones her lover for him to come over. When the lover arrives, the wife lets him know that her husband is asleep in the next room and then proceeds to knock over a chair and break a glass so that her husband will wake up and rush over to her room to see what is going on. The lover is shocked by her supposed carelessness and afraid of discovery. When she suggests he hide in the wardrobe, he quickly acquiesces. She tugs at her hair to muss it a little and shifts her robe to reveal more skin before her husband enters, like an actress preparing for a scene she stands ready for her cue. Her acting style in this scene in particular is more reminiscent of the slow paced style common in Russian melodrama, than the quickly paced, over-the-top style seen in male driven comedy. Lina Bauer who plays the role of the wife in The Thousand and Second Ruse does not rely on the physical, slapstick comedy of the male comics of her time. Instead, I think she set the stage for women like Mae West; what Lina Bauer did with a gesture, West did with words. 94 Conclusion Urban centers were emblematic of Russia’s crash course in westernization and industrialization. Compounding this crash course, many of the social aspects of the city were changing as a result of the rapid industrialization such as rising education levels, increased opportunities for women, and the changing demands on the family and traditional gender roles. The modern urban landscape also magnified the problems that Russian women faced, trapped between traditional patriarchal order and the disorderly demands and distractions of the city. As Walter Benjamin notes, the modern city like Moscow was a porous place were where old and new, folk and urban, peasant and civilized intelligentsia, poor and wealthy, came head to head, lived side by side and intermingled. Modern technology like the automobile and the telephone added to the sense of porosity by condensing spaces, adding to a growing sense of claustrophobia as cities grew, expanded and filled with new things and people. Benjamin further elaborates on the power of cinema: By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a 95 snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. 89 Cinema, according to Benjamin, is the very incarnation of urban porosity; it like no other medium can take us out of the confines of our daily lives to worlds hitherto unimaginable. Bauer’s camera, for instance, knows no boundaries, with equanimity it gives the viewer access to the squalid living spaces of Moscow’s poor as well as the bedroom of a young woman, sitting before her vanity, half-dressed waiting for her lover to arrive. The cinema’s ability to transcend boundaries, by both expanding and constricting space, in combination with Bauer’s filmic techniques and spatial compositions, reinforce Benjamin’s notions of the porosity of modern urban space. Setting his films before this indeterminate, constantly changing landscape allowed Bauer to create new types of characters. The city played an important role in the evolution of Bauer’s cinema. Yuri Tsivian remarks, “Entering a cinema in the age of Symbolism, one comes into contact not with the film and not even with the cinema, but with the city, condensed into the cinematographic text.” 90 In Bauer’s films the city and the cinematographic text are both closely allied with the figure of the woman, and as mentioned in chapter one, especially with the prostitute or women who share some of her traits. The independent women in Bauer’s films, with their 89 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Theory of the Novel : A Historical Approach, ed. Michael McKeon (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) 682-683, USC ebrary, 11/27/2007, < http://site.ebrary.com/lib/uscisd/ Doc?id=10021596&ppg=701>. 90 Yuri Tsivian, “Early Russian Cinema and its Public,” trans. Alan Bodger, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 11.2 (1991) 110. 96 ability to maneuver around the city and modernity, are catalysts for change and therefore can be read as portents for the new Russia that was soon to emerge. In other words, the emerging Russian city offered Bauer the perfect context within which to set his films. The sexuality of the female characters in Bauer’s films, like that of the Russian spectator, was a product of the chaotic urban environment in Russia. For Bauer the city is a much a character as the people in the film. Bauer shows us a city bustling with life, shops filled with consumer goods, houses equipped with the latest technology and a landscape that is being constructed while we watch the film. 91 As a setting, the modern city provides a space for new and exciting adventures, dangers, and possibilities. The Russian city was the perfect space in which to set films about a new kind of woman. According to Natalie Davis “The image of the disorderly woman did not always function to keep women in their place. On the contrary, it was an image that could operate to widen behavioral options for women within and even outside marriage.” 92 Bauer’s women are disorderly in the sense that their behavior, their professions, and their social status preclude them from fitting nicely into any preconceived concept of traditional womanhood. Through the porous nature of both the city and the cinema, Bauer creates spaces where conventional boundaries become fluid and ambiguous. 91 In several of Bauer’s films, his shots of the characters include the city with construction going on in the background. Two good examples of this can be found in Child of the Big City and Yuri Nagornyi, which I will discuss in Chapter Four. 92 Natalie Davis quoted by Mary Russo in “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” Feminist Studies/Cultural Studies, ed. Teresa de Laurentis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) 215. 97 The ambiguity that Bauer establishes in his films is carried further in the connection between the city, the cinema and prostitution. Vera, Mary and the wife are not literally prostitutes, yet there are associations that could be made connection the women to prostitution. Vera in Twilight of a Woman’s Soul, for instance, chooses to become a stage performer after leaving her husband and actresses in Russia were often associated with prostitution as a way for them to afford their lavish costumes. 93 Mary in Child of the Big City progresses from washer girl to seamstress is also associated with prostitution in Russia, this of course is combined with the fact that she in essence sells herself to Viktor for a lavish lifestyle. The wife in The Thousand and Second Ruse has most likely married the old man for his money, she keeps a wealthy young lover, she also walks the streets of Moscow with the familiarity of a prostitute, and she is perhaps the most aware of the affect her sexuality has on the men around her. While these women are clearly not literal prostitutes, the associations serve to confuse the boundaries, illustrating the porosity that cinema allows between actual prostitutes and modern sexual women. It is precisely this confusion of boundaries coupled with the lack of moralizing on Bauer’s part that creates ambiguity which then allows for multiple interpretations of the text. 94 93 For more information on this see Catherine Schuler, Women in Russian Theatre: The Actress in the Silver Age (New York: Routledge, 1996). 94 The women in these three films are not punished for their excessive sexuality or independence, nor are they confined within the confines of marriage and patriarchal order, as is the case in melodrama in other nations. I will discuss other ways in which Bauer’s films work as melodramas in Chapter Three. 98 Chapter Four Filtering Culture: Modernity and Gender Construction The modern urban space in Russia around the turn of the century was not a place fixed in meaning. As the city was constantly changing, expanding upwards and outwards and new populations continuously cycling into the city, boundaries were repeatedly shifting, being crossed and developing anew. The very nature of a modern city requires that it be in a constant state of flux, and this constant state of change was one of the many symptoms of modernity. Bauer’s films, through their representation of the Russian city in all its chaos, exemplify many of the issues inherent in modernity and provide us with a better understanding of the shifting cultural landscape in Russian prior to the Revolution. As I noted earlier, Yuri Tsivian remarks that during the Symbolist period in Russian cinema, the city was condensed within the cinematographic text. 1 Bauer’s films in particular have contributed to that condensation through their use of various traits that have become associated with the city during modernity; the urban figure of the flâneur and his female counterparts, the flâneuse and the prostitute, the over- stimulation of visuality, and the danger/shock of the city street. The condensation of the city within Bauer’s cinematographic text was further enhanced by his incorporation of Symbolist tropes and his use of generic conventions intrinsic to 1 See Chapter Two. The Symbolist period lasted in Russia from the late Nineteenth century into the early Twentieth Century, reaching its apex precisely during the formative years of Russian cinema. 99 melodrama; a combination which serves to complicate issues surrounding gender construction during the Symbolist period. In addition to discussing the connection between Symbolism and Russian cinema, Yuri Tsivian in both his article, “Portraits, Mirrors, Death: On Some Decadent Clichés in Early Russian Films,” and in his book Early Cinema in Russia begins to map out early film reception in Russia and how it was couched in terms of cultural conditioning. 2 The concept of cultural conditioning as it pertains to Russia is crucial to a more complete understanding of how early Russian films functioned within Russian culture and Russian daily life and more particularly for helping to frame some of the issues surrounding spectatorship in Russia. This chapter builds on Tsivian’s conception of cultural conditioning and examines issues such as modernity, symbolism, and melodrama, and the ways in which these three issues influenced each other. I will explore how these spheres of influence affected how Bauer constructed gender in his films, and how his films might have been understood by contemporary viewers. The intersection of cinema and modernity provides an interesting site from which to discern changing modes of gender representation. Building on my discussion of Bauer’s use of the city as a location, in this chapter I take into account how Bauer uses urban-induced tropes of modernity, genre, set design, and other 2 Yuri Tsivian, “Portraits, Mirrors, Death: On Some Decadent Clichés in Early Russian Films,” Iris 14/15 (Autumn 1992): 67-69, see alsoYuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception, Trans. by Alan Bodger (New York: Routledge, 1994). Since the publication of these two writings, Tsivian has abandoned culture for form and now sees formalism as the primary method of determining the way in which a film makes meaning. 100 filmic techniques to construct meaning both visually and narratively. I will also explore both similarities and anomalies in Bauer’s representations of men and women in his films, as well as what these representations might mean in a larger cultural context. For instance, many of Bauer’s female characters objectify the incongruity between contemporary conceptions of the real women and an imagined ideal, as well as the contradiction between the possibilities and dangers of the city and its new technological advances. Bauer’s women are also a testament to the rise of consumer culture and its attention to women as consumers, as well as viewers of film. 3 In order to lay a foundation for reading Bauer’s films, I address distinct issues in three initial sections. The first section discusses the cultural and historical landscape of Russian modernity in order to establish the context in which the films were made and screened. This section also begins to address the problematic issue of gender in Russia following the turn of the century. The second section elaborates on the confluence between modernity, Symbolism, and melodrama as a genre in Russian cinema. The third section discusses the Symbolist conceptions of gender and their subsequent connection with psychoanalysis. Finally, I utilize the issues addressed in these sections to discuss Bauer’s use of them in his filmmaking. I will address narrative structure, in order to make the connection to Symbolism and the 3 This information comes from two sources: Jeffrey Burds, Peasant Dreams & Market Politics: Labor Migration and the Russian Village, 1861-1905 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), 141-185; and a comment from Yuri Tsivian when he taught a course on Early Russian Cinema, at the University of Southern California, Spring 1994. 101 use of melodrama in Bauer’s construction of gender more clear, but also blocking, set design and other filmic techniques as a method of constructing gender. The ultimate reason for unpacking Bauer’s use of modernity, Symbolist tropes and melodrama in such a manner is to provide an understanding of the ways in which he problematized gender construction by creating ambiguity. Bauer builds on the Russian literary tradition of the superfluous man [lishnii chelovek] and creates male characters that are not only inactive, but also laden with traits traditionally associated with women. 4 Again we see that the female character in Bauer’s films becomes a nodal point on which to displace concerns over class conflict and fears related to the dissolution of patriarchal order. By highlighting and challenging tropes of modernity, Symbolism and melodrama Bauer establishes a space in which alternative readings for female spectators are possible. The Cultural and Historical Landscape of Russian Modernity Modernity, for scholars like Walter Benjamin and George Simmel, is a ubiquitous term, meaning many things at the same time. Modernity has been used to refer to a vague period in history, by some accounts beginning during the Nineteenth century and extending into the 1950s. Generally speaking, and for the purpose of my dissertation, the height of modernity refers to the period in history around the turn of the nineteenth century. Modernity also refers to a phenomenon caused by 4 The superfluous man is a figure from Nineteenth century literature. He is a character with talent and promise, yet is unable to live up to his potential due to his own inaction or his propensity to test fate through unwise actions such as duels. This character was made famous by Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov. 102 industrialization and technological development and is integrally linked to commodity culture and the expansion of urban spaces. The concept of modernity not only refers to a time of rapid growth in industry, technology, and urban populations, but it is also associated with the dangers associated with this growth. For both Benjamin and Simmel, the city proved to be the quintessential site for modernity. Urban sprawl is a result of modernity and the urban sphere manufactures and perpetuates the various aspects of modernity, a situation that constantly recreates itself. According to Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, “modernity cannot be conceived outside the context of the city, which provided an arena for the circulation of bodies and goods, the exchange of glances, and the exercise of consumerism.” 5 Thus, modernity is inherently fused with our notions of modern urban space, just as the city is condensed within the cinematographic text. The connection between modernity, the city and the cinema is made even more complete by their dependence on bodies and gazes and their connection to consumerism. In his various writings on the phenomenology of the city that indoctrinated inhabitants, Benjamin points to the “fragmentation, commodification, interiorization and marginalization of experience” as key elements that constitute modernity. 6 The various elements of modernity as outlined by Benjamin are very similar to the ways that functions of cinema, i.e. a film is a commodity made up of fragments of 5 Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, introduction, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 3. 6 Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996) 7. 103 experience that both draws the viewer in and marginalizes them. Benjamin’s experience of the city is that it informs and shapes the experience of other elements of modernity, and at the same time that modernity informs and shapes the various elements of the city. 7 Modernity, then, can also be seen as the catalyst for these massive changes and cultural shifts, while the urban environment, as outlined in Chapter Two, provides the battlefield upon which the action takes place. In Melodrama and Modernity, Ben Singer points out that while it is difficult to pin down a specific time frame for modernity, like Benjamin he believes it is possible to discern traits that are consistent across geographical borders. Singer’s work offers a useful and concise look at modernity in relation to melodrama, highlighting several facets of the phenomenon that prove useful when looking at Russian modernity. 8 The first aspect crucial to our understanding of modernity is the issue of modernization, which incorporates rapid growth of urban centers, technology, the spread of mass communications, and the weakening of traditional family ties. 9 Modernization had the ability to simultaneously expand and conflate space, as we discussed in Chapter Two, much like the cinema. According to Singer this modernization is predicated on rationality, a new mode of thinking and logic that governed the way humans deal with the world. The result of this new rationality is discontinuity, marked by a rise in secularism that called into question contemporary 7 See also Charney & Schwartz 3. 8 The connection between modernity and melodrama will be discussed later in this chapter. 9 See Chapter Two. 104 values and morays. 10 Discontinuity was spurred on by an increase in mobility similar to Benjamin’s notion of a social and geographical “porosity,” that was a by- product of a rise in global capitalism. The discontinuity that is linked to industrialization and the expansion of urban spaces, made itself felt on the metropolitan landscapes of Russia. Daniel R. Brower states that, “In its ideal form the Russian city of the late nineteenth century was to be both an enlightened and orderly place.” 11 Because of rapid industrial growth and the influx of peasants that accompanied this growth, however, rational city planning was put aside in an effort to exert some sort of control over the unruly migrant populations and the crime that was becoming an everyday occurrence. 12 It is important to remember that the unruly crowd in the modern urban city was not only comprised of men; women were a very real presence in the crowded city streets from the window-shopping socialite to the strolling prostitute. In addition, the threatening masses of the crowd were increasingly “described in feminine terms: as hysterical, or, in images of feminine instability and sexuality, as a flood or swamp….while retaining its association with criminals and minorities.” 13 In other words, because of the unpredictability and irrationality of the crowd, it became associated with the feminine despite its very real connection to the typically 10 Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensation Cinema and Its Context (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 17-35. 11 Daniel R. Brower, The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) 140. 12 Brower 140. 13 Elizabeth Wilson, “Into the Labyrinth,” Gender, Space, Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, eds. Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, and Iain Borden (New York: Routledge, 2000) 150. 105 masculine world of crime. According to historian Joan Neuberger, “By 1912 Peterburgskii listok was portraying St. Petersburg as a city teeming with crime and disorder, against which the police struggled in vain.” 14 The desire to stem the flood of modernity and to control the ‘unruly masses’ is one that preoccupied politicians, philanthropists, and scholars in Russia at the turn of the century. There were many studies done to classify the criminal in an attempt to understand the reasons for his/her predilections. Figure 3.10 Advertisement for a lecture on "Criminals and Hooligans.” 15 For example, the above advertisement (Figure 3.1) is for a lecture on “Criminals and Hooligans,” one of many such lectures providing insight into the criminal mindset that circulated in Russian cities at the turn of the century. This preoccupation with crime pervaded the everyday lives of Russian citizens and also made its way into cinema. Film historians Liudmila Budiak and Vladimir Mikhailov note that of the 100 films made by Russian studios in 1912, 76 of them dealt with the 14 Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), Oct. 15, 2007 < http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/ view?docId=ft809nb565&chunk.id=s1.5.22&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ch5&brand=eschol> 15 Speech [Rech'] 20 (March 1913) 10. Translation reads: On Sunday the 24 th of March, 1913, In the concert hall of the Swedish church St. Catherine, A. I. Sverskii will read a lecture: “Criminals and Hooligans.” It begins promptly at 8 in the evening. Tickets are three rubles and cheaper sold at the offices of the magazine Rech’ in St. Petersburg [address and information about tickets sales and the day of the lecture are also given.] 106 theme of crime and criminal activity. Out of those 100 films, the protagonist turns out to be a thief or murderer in 38 of them, and 48 films featured torture, suffering and violent deaths. It should be noted as well, that these films were not set exclusively among the lower classes or the dregs of society, only twenty of the 100 films were centered solely on protagonists who were poor. 16 Even in the cinema, crime was prevalent among all levels of Russian society. Russian fascination with the crime caused by rapid urbanization is but one of the symptoms of modernity. For scholars like Singer and Simmel, the space of the city also came to be defined “by chance, peril and shocking impressions rather than by any traditional conception of safety, continuity, and self-controlled destiny.” 17 These notions irrationality, danger, spontaneity, and coincidental encounters inherent in modernity make their way into modern melodrama, as we shall see later. Simmel believed that these shocks and impressions and the “intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli,” directly influenced the psychological foundation of the modern urbanite. 18 Continuous exposure to the shocks of modern life both numbed and thrilled the inhabitants of the modern urban city. Inherent in the concept of modernity is also the public’s fascination with these aspects of danger and change. Russian newspapers illustrate this fascination 16 Liudmila Mikhailovna Budiak and Vladimir Petrovich Mikhailov, Adresa Moskovskogo Kino (Moskva [Moscow]: Moskovskie Rabochii, 1987) 22. 17 Ben Singer, “Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism,” Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 79. 18 George Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. and Introduction by Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972) 325. 107 with articles that sensationalize the dangers of urban life: traffic accidents, work- related deaths, suicides, and increases in crime, murder, prostitution and disease. Neuberger notes with the increase in news coverage of crimes, the rhetoric began to change; “gruesome murders, vicious brawls and attacks, pitiful suicides, and tragic accidents were all treated in more explicit and more dramatic prose than before. Reports in the crime columns emphasized heart-stopping details with vivid, gory language.” 19 As the public grew more used to crime reports in the papers, the newspaper industry upped the ante by providing lurid details in hopes of selling more papers. Newspapers and journals capitalized on the growing crime rate and the vicious nature of crime, and the public was more than willing to devour these ‘shocking impressions’ of modernity. In addition to a fascination with crime, one also begins to see a desire to partake in the technology that accompanied the advent of modernity, with advertisements featuring automobiles, bicycles, balloon rides, sewing machines and washing machines. Some technological inventions promised to make one’s life easier, while others contributed to the symptoms of modernity in the end and even proved fatal. Automobiles for example, allowed one to travel long distances in a shorter period of time than traveling by carriage. At the same time, the proliferation of automobiles on the city streets mingling with horse drawn carts and people caused confusion, honking horns jarred the nerves, and many deaths were the result of automobile accidents. 19 Neuberger <http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft809nb565&chunk.id= s1.5.22&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ch5&brand=eschol> 108 Figure 3.11 Advertisement for a patent medicine, Purgen. 20 Correspondingly, there were many advertisements that promised to help metropolitan inhabitants alleviate many of the effects of modernity, such as: machines to purify the unhealthy urban air (thanks in part to the automobiles and factories), and medicines to calm the nerves and deal with stress. 21 For example, the above advertisement (Figure 3.2) is for Purgen, a product produced by the German company, Bayer. 22 Purgen is a laxative designed to aid with gastro-intestinal disorders common in neurasthenics and women, who, according to the advertisement, could look forward to an easing of their symptoms, and the addition of good color to their faces. Neurasthenia is a modernity induced malady, a condition with symptoms ranging from fatigue, anxiety, depression, headache, 20 Russian Word [Russkoe Slovo] 13 (January, 1913) 8.Translation reads: Purgen/The ideal laxative for adults and children. Ask your Doctor./Left side: An excellent remedy for habitual constipation for neurasthenics and irritable persons. It functions tenderly, reliably and does not cause any pain./Right side: As a laxative remedy it enjoys a great reputation among women and girls since it is very pleasant to taste and wipes out fermentation in the intestines, giving cause for many different types if illness. Thanks to these merits it also give good color to the face and skin./Bottom: contains a description of the box and where it might be purchased. 21 The above comment is based on an extensive study of three St. Petersburg newspapers, Speech [Rech’], Day [Den’] and The Voice of Moscow [Golos Moskva] in the year 1913. 22 Note the Cleopatra-like figure in the ad, her costume is reminiscent of the designs Leon Bakst created for the ballet Cleopatra as well as the dancer in Child of the Big City. Her gloved hand also calls to mind a snake with its connection to Cleopatra, the medical profession and sexuality. Cleopatra calls to mind women’s sexual freedom in the modern city and the dangers it posed. 109 dizziness, flatulence, constipation and even impotence which could lead to “perverted sexual desires and excessive masturbation.” 23 While not a cure for these ailments, Purgen at least offered sufferers some relief from modernity induced neurasthenia. While neurasthenia could cause impotence, the reverse was just as true, and one could suffer a variety of illnesses related to sex. Rampant sexuality in the city led to a rise in sexually transmitted diseases. Thus we see advertisements, like the one below (see Figure 3.3), for products such as Arovin’ which is a Gonorrhea medicine in pill form. The medicine promises to be effective and discrete (i.e. no tell-tale smell emanating from the mouth), and it will even help with “pesky feminine discharge.” Figure 3.12 Advertisement for a patent medicine, Arovin. 24 23 “Neurasthenia Disorder,” Psychnet-UK Oct. 15, 2007, < http://www.psychnet- uk.com/dsm_iv/neurasthenia.htm> and “Neurasthenia,” Wikipedia Oct. 15, 2007 < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurasthenia>. 24 Speech [Rech'] 20 ( March 1913) 12. Translation reads: Against Gonorrhea/ a new internal remedy/Arovin/in capsules/acts quickly and energetically, assuages the illness, doesn’t give 110 The Russian urbanite was sure to find relief from such inconveniences thanks to the assurances of modern medicine and advertising. 25 The advertisements attest to a rise in urban promiscuity, an increase which is also confirmed by the rise in unwed mothers. 26 The proliferation of advertising for medicinal cures of sexually transmitted diseases coincides with another concept that defines modernity in Russia, what Singer refers as the moral/political concept, which stipulates that all norms and values are open to question. New technology and rapid urban growth continually put conservative morays and values to the test. 27 The public struggled in their efforts to redefine limits of acceptability in an ever-changing world. One of the principal issues occupying the minds of Russians, as is attested by the advertisements, was the issue of sexuality. As women became more visible in urban centers, debates on issues of sexuality could be found in all areas of Russian culture and daily life: science, religion, politics, literature and cinema. Both Igor S. Kon and Laura Engelstein, in their comprehensive works, elaborate on the role of the city in the evolution of off a bad smell form the mouth, and is perfectly harmless./It is recommended equally in chronic and acute situations, even for female discharge./This remedy has been tested by many doctors, sold in metal boxes, a large box costs one ruble fifty kopeks and a small box costs one ruble. 25 The snake in the advertisement is very interesting. It refers not only to the universal symbol of the medical profession (two serpents entwined around a staff), it also bears phallic connotations and connections to Cleopatra who died from a snakebite. The advertisement acknowledges urban sexuality and promises relief, not condemnation. 26 This rise was mentioned in Chapter Two. 27 Singer, “Modernity” 79. 111 sexuality and gender identity in Russia. 28 Kon points out new trends in sexual morality and conduct came into being in the cities through social, religious and moral reform initiated by the upper classes. According to Kon, “society could not be democratized without a critical review of patriarchal morality, including methods for social control over sexuality, and demands for ‘sexual liberalization’ were an integral part of the social renovation program that preceded the 1905 revolution.” 29 The reform Kon discusses was a testament to changing times and a reaction against the long established, misogynist rule book governing Russian households, the Domostroi. 30 Engelstein adds, “The erotic hunger that had been both stimulated and suppressed by the intolerant old regime and temporarily diverted by the revolution now emerged in all its force.” 31 In other words, modernity and the chaotic city space were the catalysts for changing notion of gender and sexuality. The ‘sexual question’ became a hot topic in medical and pedagogical literature from the 1890s to well after 1906, with the main issue being one of male sexual control. The topic interested many in the literary world as well, in 1889, the release of Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata, a story condemning excessive sexuality in both men and women, helped to define sexuality as a cultural issue. It was believed that hard work and industry would keep both the mind and body free of 28 Igor S. Kon, The Sexual Revolution in Russia: From the Age of the Czars to Today, trans. James Riordan (New York: The Free Press, 1995) and Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). 29 Kon 13 & 36. 30 The Domostroi was written in the later half of the Sixteenth century and predominated Russian living for over two hundred years. The Domostroi dictated guidelines for every aspect of life from how to keep one’s house clean to how a husband should beat his wife when she is insubordinate. 31 Engelstein 217. 112 sexual desires. Yet, as I illustrated in Chapter Two, hard work and industry actually freed women, at least temporarily, from the constraints of marriage and motherhood, allowing her the time and space in which to explore her newfound sexuality. In direct contrast to endless toil of the lower classes, the life of luxury and idleness, common in the upper classes, produced “hyperactive fantasy and untapped physical resources that fueled sexual self-indulgence” - - a mode of fantasy that found expression in Russian cinema. 32 Thus the modern Russian city itself becomes emblematic of the preoccupation with sex and sexuality, from its undulating crowds to its oversexed syphilitics. Through its shifting boundaries, it at once enables sexual freedom just as it warns against the dangers of those freedoms. Intersections of Modernity, Symbolism and Melodramatic Cinema The Russian film industry was born during the quintessential years of Russian Modernity and at the height of the Silver Age, out of the ashes of the Russian Symbolist movement, a movement that consciously reevaluated all existing cultural values. 33 “In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Decadence [Symbolism] – like most such movements – had varied sources. The pessimism and disgust with life expressed in various forms [including revolts, but most] notably in art, were an outgrowth of the philosophical and social thought” of the time and were 32 Engelstein 218 – 231. 33 The Silver Age in Russia refers to the literary period encompassing the first twenty years of the Twentieth century and includes literary movements such as Symbolism, Acmeism, and Futurism. 113 endemic of the tropes of modernity. 34 The Symbolist movement functioned in much the same way as modernity, calling into question traditional values and morays, pushing the boundaries of art, literature and philosophic thought, while at the same time clinging to a past that no longer existed. Many Russian films follow the nationalist trend of Russian Symbolism after the 1905 Revolution, and as Tom Gunning points out, “Symbolist writing constantly [and by extension, Russian cinema] reflects the sense of being on the brink of some great catastrophe, moving towards a cataclysm of change.” 35 In other words, the Symbolist movement was preoccupied with many of the crises (fluctuating boundaries, increased crime, sexual freedom, etc….) that arose from modernity. Many of Bauer’s male characters seem to originate in the self-absorbed, over-indulgent figure of the Dionysus character found in Symbolist literature. Furthermore, there is a connection between Bauer’s women and the Symbolist search for the ‘Divine Sophia’ which marks the need among Russians at the turn of the century to find wisdom in the face of modernity, the desire to return to nature in the rush of industrialization and the growing ineffectiveness of the Tsarist/patriarchal system. Despite some of Symbolism’s anti-rational traits (i.e. its dependence on traditional religious motifs, rather than the secularism that pervaded modernity), it did contribute to the modernity-induced phenomenon of discontinuity by calling into 34 Joan Delaney Grossman, Valery Briusov and the Riddle of Russian Decadence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) 2. 35 This is actually a sentiment that could be used to describe all of Russian culture and politics in the years prior to the 1917 revolutions. The comment within the brackets is my own. Tom Gunning, “Forward,” Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception (New York: Rutgers University, 1994) xx. 114 question Russian society and its values around the turn of the century. This discontinuity was further accentuated by the fact that as a movement Symbolism did a lot of questioning of values but offered not real or rational solutions, instead artistic emphasis was placed on the aesthetics of the exercise. While cinema existed in Russia before 1908, thanks to Lumière and Pathé Frères, it wasn’t until Russians began making their own films that one sees a continuation of the decadent, morbid and sensational currents of the Symbolist period, as well as its questioning of existing values, and its devotion to aestheticism. 36 Bauer’s films for the most part fall under the generic heading of melodrama, a genre, as we will discuss, that was well suited to the use of Symbolist tropes and aesthetics. 37 In his study of the confluence of melodrama and modernity, Ben Singer points out that discussing melodrama can be a complicated matter, as the meaning of the term has varied over time, and as Mary Anne Doane points out it also varies from country to country. 38 Singer outlines five aspects that are universally inherent in melodrama: pathos, overwrought emotion, moral polarization (the distinct demarcation between good and evil), non-classical narrative structure, and 36 There is an overlap between the birth of Russian cinema and the decline of Symbolism, but the Symbolist traits I discuss don’t fully appear in cinema until around 1913, coinciding with the turn of the century in Russia. This is also the year that Evgenii Bauer began directing. One possible reason for the delay was the industry’s initial preference for older, more established literary sources, i.e. Pushkin, Turgenev, Tolstoy, etc. By the early 1910s as filmmakers became more confident in their craft and the future of the industry, they began to tackle more contemporary themes. 37 Not all of his films were melodramas; he made several comedies during his brief career, most starring his wife Lina Bauer, see Chapter Two. 38 Singer, Melodrama and Modernity 37-58 and Mary Ann Doane, “Melodrama, Temporality, Recognition: American and Russian Silent Cinema,” Cinefocus 2.1 (Fall 1991): 13-26. 115 sensationalism. While all five elements can exist in the genre, for melodrama to be successful it must include at least moral polarization and sensationalism. 39 While I believe that Singer provides a very useful model for discerning the common traits that make up melodrama, I disagree with his minimum requirements, as they don’t allow for cultural specificity. For instance, moral polarization is nearly absent from Russian melodrama. 40 Instead Russian melodrama, especially as presented by Bauer, utilized overwrought emotion, non-classical narrative structure and sensationalism. As Mary Ann Doane has pointed out, the demarcation between good and evil within Russian melodrama is ambiguous, and it is not accompanied by the typical moralizing found in western melodrama “which reaffirmed rather than challenged contemporary hierarchies and was presumed, therefore, to leave its audiences satisfied with the status quo”. 41 In other words, in Russian cinema, the bad/evil characters are not generally punished and sometimes the good/moral characters are punished, or rather killed as a result of their innocence. The ambiguity created by this anomaly can perhaps be attributed to a peculiar reaction to modernity that is inherent in Russian Symbolism, as the Russian people of the time were calling into question the very notions of good and evil. Finally, besides the preoccupation with changing morality, perhaps the most important reason for discussing the confluence of modernity, Symbolism and 39 Singer, Melodrama and Modernity 37-58. 40 As mentioned earlier, out of the 100 films made in 1912, 38 of the films contain crimes perpetrated by the protagonist, someone whom we are meant to associate and identify with. See Budiak and Mikhailov 22. 41 Doane 21 and Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger, “Introduction,” Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) 6. 116 melodrama is their sometimes suppressed, sometimes overt connections to sexuality and psychoanalysis. Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger comment that melodrama as a genre actually anticipated both Marxism and Freudianism in that it too was “preoccupied with the return of the repressed, linked with social and political life.” 42 According to Russian historian Alexander Etkind, as a result of modernity “traditional regulators like religion, morality and law no longer functioned in their previous capacity and thus began a search for some practical application of the sciences and humanities.” 43 As a result the works of Sigmund Freud gained popularity from the 1910s to the 1930s, and “psychoanalysis was an important component of Russian intellectual life.” 44 That said however, Etkind points out that Freud himself was rarely quoted, yet his ideas and theories closely paralleled the work of Symbolist thinkers and were subsumed into the Russian consciousness. 45 Etkind notes that Symbolism and psychoanalysis functioned in similar ways, they were both “obsessed with the subconscious, language, the decoding of duplicitous, everyday signs, the exertion of influence on the individual personality, and the relentless organization of a worldview around a single mythological creature.” 46 For the Symbolists this mythological creature was Dionysus and for 42 McReynolds and Neuberger 8. 43 Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia, trans. Noah and Maria Rubins (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997) 39. 44 Etkind 3. Etkind also notes that Freud considered Russian interest in psychoanalysis more like an epidemic rather than simple fascination. 45 Etkind 39-52. 46 Etkind 43-56 and Eric Naiman, rev. of Eros nevozmozhnogo: Istoriia psikhoanaliza v Rossii, by Alexander Etkind, Russian Review 54.4 (October 1995): 631, 10/3/2007, <http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00360341%28199510%2954%3A4%3C631%3AENIPVR%3E2.0.CO %3B2-J>. 117 Freud it was Oedipus. The significance of the figure of Dionysus, often associated with womanly traits, is that he is important not only for his connection with excess, but also for the fact that he was born twice from both woman and man. 47 The figure of Dionysus, as well as that of the Divine Sophia, underpins the Symbolist concern defining and understanding gender and sexuality, concepts which also concerned Freud. Etkind points out that the controversial philosopher Vasily Rozanov was the first Russian to deal with sex/gender as an ‘intellectual subject matter’ and like Freud, he wrote about the expansion of our understanding of gender and that gender and culture were inextricably linked with one another. 48 McReynolds and Neuberger note that “gender roles, a central preoccupation of melodrama, are examined for their ability to focus moral dilemmas and reveal hidden strengths as well as hidden weaknesses of identity.” 49 Thus melodrama, like Symbolism and psychoanalysis are concerned with what lies beneath our consciousness and deconstructing gender, or rather using gender as a nodal point, is one way to chip away at the surface reveal the reality beneath. According to Rozanov however, “only in marriage did gender attain its normal, pure, and most aristocratic ‘form’.” 50 Rozanov, however, did not believe in the exclusivity of masculine and feminine traits, in other words any person could at any time display traits from either gender. Complimenting Benjamin’s notion of porosity, the 47 According to Greek myth his mother Semele died when she saw the father of her child Zeus. In order to save the child’s life Zeus took the fetus and sewed it into his thigh, thus he was born from both sexes. 48 Etkind 42-45. 49 McReynolds and Neuberger 11. 50 Etkind 43. 118 mutability of gender traits becomes a powerful tool in Bauer’s films, it allows him to play with traditional conceptions of gender and to the create ambiguity necessary to allow for multiple interpretations of his characters. Symbolist Themes and Bauer’s films Symbolist moments in Russian film closely resemble the phenomenon that Tom Gunning considers the “cinema of attractions,” or what Ben Singer terms the “hyperstimulus” of modernity. For Gunning, “the cinema of attractions directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle,” in much the same way that Symbolist writers elicited aural pleasure through their devotion to linguistic aesthetics. 51 The phenomenon of “hyperstimulus” was a reaction to the sensory overload, the physical and perceptual shocks caused by rapid industrialization. Symbolism is not only a reaction to the “hyperstimulus” of modernity; it also contributes to the sensory overload in its detailed attention to aestheticism. These moments of attraction, hyperstimulus or symbolism are encapsulated in the figure of Bauer’s urban woman, who, like the “flâneuse,” moves through the city in search of sexual and economic opportunity. 52 Ernest J. Simmons comments on the attention of Russian Symbolist writers to aestheticism in his introduction to Fyodor Sologub’s novel The Petty Demon (Melkii bes). Simmons notes that writers “developed aestheticism and encouraged an 51 Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant- Garde,” Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, eds. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute, 1990) 58. 52 Like her male counterpart, the flâneuse freely strolls through the city streets, taking in the sights, or window shopping. Her reasons for being in the city are mentioned earlier in chapter one. 119 antisocial posture in the arts…Combining great talent with conscious craftsmanship, they stressed the emotional value of the form and sound of the words instead of their exact meaning.” 53 The Symbolist emphasis on the emotional value of form and sound is reminiscent of the cinematic acting style in the 1910s. Russian cinema of the 1910s was noted for the immobility of its figures: “The psychologism of the Russian style was defined as a denial of the external sign of ‘cinematic specificity’.” 54 In other words, rather than relying on those things that are specific to the medium of cinema, such as high-speed action and editing, to create drama, the Russians used a slow tempo acting style to create the emotional tone and tell the story. Mary Anne Doane remarks that, “Bauer’s characters are frequently represented not acting but thinking, desiring, mourning, brooding,” 55 accentuated by the slow pace of acting, allowing the Symbolist influenced aesthetics of movement to unfold at its own pace. This style of acting often referred to as “the braking school,” was based in part on the theories of François Delsarte, which specified an alphabet of acting, each gesture carrying its own meaning. The style emphasized in the form of those gestures created a psychology of acting, and in essence gave a ‘visual’ sound to a scene. “A ‘full’ scene is one in which the actor is given the opportunity to depict 53 Ernest J. Simmons, introduction, The Petty Demon, by Fyodor Sologub (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962) vii-viii. 54 Yuri Tsivian, “Some Preparatory Remarks on Russian Cinema,” Silent Witnesses: Russian Film 1908-1919, eds. Paolo Cherchi Usai, Lorenzo Codelli, Carlo Montanaro, and David Robinson (Pordenone: British Film Institute and Edizioni Biblioteca dell’ Imagine, 1989) 28. 55 Doane “Melodrama” 23. 120 in stage terms a specific spiritual experience, no matter how many meters it takes.” 56 For the Symbolists the ‘specific spiritual experience’ was attained through the combination of words in much the same way that for Russian actors this experience was achieved through an aesthetic combination of gestures. Both melodrama and symbolism though their attention to aestheticism strove to appeal to one viscerally rather than cerebrally; and both created “an aesthetics of excess to explore the context of emotions lying repressed beneath the surface rationality of realism.” 57 The terms ‘decadence’ and ‘symbolism’ have been used interchangeably, but for many symbolist poets, such as Valerii Briusov there was a distinction. Decadence for Briusov was the “larger phenomenon relating to world outlook and lifestyles, while Symbolism was specifically the artistic method developed to express the perceptions, intuitions and feelings of Decadence.” 58 According to this conception, an embrace of decadence would lead to the morbidity, pessimism, and disillusionment that were a reaction to apocalyptic fears around the turn of the century, combined with the exhilaration and danger surrounding industrialization and technology. Symbolism was the way in which an artist chose to express these feelings, the techniques and tools she used to fashion her art. One of the philosophical bases for Russian Symbolism was indirectly derived from Vladimir Solovyov’s eccentric Russian Orthodox theology. 59 What the 56 Tsivian, “Preparatory Remarks” 28. 57 McReynolds and Neuberger 8. 58 Grossman 88. 59 Diane Greene, Insidious Intent an Interpretation of Fedor Sologub’s Petty Demon (Columbus: Slavica Publishers, 1986). 121 Symbolists took from Solovyov was his notion of the ‘Divine Sophia’ or the eternal feminine. Based on Saint Sophia, in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the Divine Sophia was the embodiment of divine wisdom. She was the representation of ideal love for Solovyov, the beautiful lady for Symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok, and an intermediary between heaven and earth for Symbolist poet and philosopher, Vyacheslav Ivanov. 60 “For Symbolists [the Divine Sophia] was the animating spirit of the physical world,” an earthly incarnation of the world spirit, inspiring men with her beauty and wisdom. 61 Associated with the apocalypse, the Divine Sophia came to represent something to strive for, a new hope for mankind. After the disillusion of the 1905 Revolution however, she changed, while still the ‘Beautiful Lady,’ for a writer such as Blok, she was no longer unattainable. The Divine Sophia was now “Neznakomka” (The Unknown Woman), the beautiful prostitute, in the bar, walking the street or warming up in the cinema as S. Lyubosh notes: After sauntering professionally for hours up and down the Nevsky or some other street it is so nice to be able to snatch a sandwich or a cake at Kvissisan’s and to sit in the warmth of a cinema and follow the extraordinary moving story of an elegant Parisian cocotte or some jilted baroness. 62 Thus again we have a connection between the prostitute and cinema, and her predilection for melodrama. While Bauer was a versatile director, the genre in which he primarily worked was the social melodrama set in the city. Bauer’s melodramas 60 Evelyn Bristol, “Saint Sophia,” Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. Victor Terras (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) 439. 61 Ewa M. Thompson, “Symbolism,” Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. Victor Terras (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) 462. 62 S. Lyubosh, The Cinematographic Herald [Vestnik kinematografii], 9 (1913) 3 as quoted in Yuri Tsivian’s “Early Russian Cinema” 106. 122 tended to be more progressive then other genres or media, testing the boundaries of what was and what was not acceptable. In her article on American and Russian melodrama, Mary Ann Doane states that the difference between urban and rural melodrama in Russia, centers on the question of sexuality. The city during modernity represents “sexuality unbound, freed from the traditional constraints of patriarch, family and home.” 63 Doane also notes that “the thrill of melodrama is often a sexual thrill, closely allied with the representation of women.” 64 In Bauer’s melodramatic films the sexual thrill is two-fold, compounded by the juxtaposition of his representations of errant masculinity. Male characters thrive on material, emotional and sexual excess, and female characters, with their confident femininity are free to roam the city streets. Though both male and female characters in Bauer’s films have complex inner lives, for the men, their excess is seldom manifested in outward actions, whereas Bauer’s women are active, and they move the plot along. Bauer’s Films In discussing the conflation of the genres of melodrama and romance in Russian and Polish literature, Beth Holmgren notes “The admixture of melodrama at once elevates the popular heroine and connects her meaningfully with a changing society conflicted about gender and class identity.” 65 The same could be said about 63 Doane, “Melodrama” 20, 64 Doane, “Melodrama” 15. 65 Beth Holmgren, “The Importance of Being Unhappy, or, Why She Died,” Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia, Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger, eds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) 81. 123 the combination of melodrama, modernity and Symbolism in the films of Evgenii Bauer. Now that I have established the connections between modernity, Symbolism and melodrama, I will discuss why these factors are important in the cinema of Evgenii Bauer. Through a discussion of the narrative, character development and various filmic techniques, I will illustrate how Bauer utilizes various traits from modernity, Symbolism and melodrama to elevate his female characters as nodal points where these issues are condensed, thus creating ambiguity in regards to gender construction. This ambiguity serves to create a space where traditional Russian gender roles are challenged and called into question, and allowing spectators the possibility for multiple interpretations as they create their own readings of the films. Silent Witnesses Bauer’s 1914 melodrama Silent Witnesses [Nemye Svideteli] incorporates many of the Symbolist tropes we have been discussing. The main character, Pavel, is a Dionysian type, who wallows in the excesses of his own emotions. The two main female characters, Elena and Nastia, are indicative of the split between the Divine Feminine and her more worldly foil, the beautiful prostitute. In perfect melodramatic fashion, Silent Witnesses tells the story Pavel Kostritsyn, a wealthy man of no occupation. Pavel is courting, though with no real haste, the beautiful Elena. In the meantime, as chance (or melodrama) would have it, one of the servants 124 has to return to her home in the country and Nastia, the granddaughter of the doorman offers to fill her place. 66 The true drama of the film takes place when Pavel’s mother leaves for Crimea and Pavel, by chance discovers the duplicity of his fiancée, Elena. 67 A modern woman in many ways, Elena has been carrying on behind Pavel’s back with the Baron von Rehren. Bauer plays with several tropes of melodrama here, not only is much of the plot predicated on chance actions or discoveries, he also utilizes a common narrative conceit where one or more of the parents are absent. Without a parent to guide him after the loss of Elena’s affection, lovesick Pavel becomes bedridden. 68 Pavel is struck down with a severe case of melancholia, a malady related to modernity-induced neurasthenia, brought on by the shock of Elena’s infidelity. Pavel’s friends and even his physician are unable to find a cure. One night, however, after wallowing in drunken self-pity, Pavel is unable to control his 66 The maid’s husband arrives dressed in peasant attire to fetch her home. One possible reason for her leaving would be a sick child left behind in the country under the care of relatives (as was the custom mentioned in Chapter Two.) 67 Louise McReynolds discusses the affect of single parenthood on the development of sexuality in young girls, but nothing is mentioned about its affects on young men. Pavel’s mother is clearly a matriarch; she gives order to servants as well as her son. Perhaps his emasculation begins with his relationship with his mother. See Louise McReynolds, “Home was Never Where the Heart was: Domestic Dystopias in Russia’s Silent Movie Melodrama,” Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia, eds. Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) 127-151. 68 For all intents and purposes though, Pavel is a grown man and should be able to fend for himself. 125 sexual impulses, he coerces Nastia to drink with him and when she is drunk, the scene fades to black, in other words he takes advantage of her. 69 In the meantime, Elena’s father finds out that the Baron has no intentions of marrying Elena. Elena, however, isn’t worried or even surprised by this fact since, as a modern woman, she has a plan. The next day she visits Pavel and starts up their romance again. Pavel is immediately cured of his melancholia. Although his mother disapproves of the match, Pavel proposes to Elena who accepts, all the while still planning to continue her associations with the Baron. Nastia catches Elena and the Baron kissing, and one can surmise, based on the tension between the two women, that perhaps Elena has threatened Nastia about her job or her grandfather’s job, if she says anything to Pavel. 70 Nastia, who loves the man who took advantage of her, tries to warn Pavel. Pavel, however, refuses to listen Nastia and marries Elena anyway, allowing himself to be drawn into a life of infidelity and unhappiness. 71 The film ends with Pavel and Elena leaving for their honeymoon and Nastia wiping her tears and going back to work. One reviewer writes of Pavel, played by Aleksandr Chargonin, that “it is impossible not to mention again the weak-willed, characterless whimperer exclusively preoccupied with his own pitiful ‘me’: in himself he sees the only thing 69 The rape or seduction of female employees was rather common in domestic service; see Jane McDermid and Anna Hillyar, Women and Work in Russia 1880-1930: A Study in Continuity through Change (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998) 34. 70 The film has been preserved with many of the intertitles missing, making it difficult to know exactly what happens between the two women. 71 Ostensibly, in his wake, Pavel leaves a ‘ruined’ Nastia, but that is open for interpretation. 126 of value in the world.” 72 Pavel a man of wealth has no occupation other than the pursuit of pleasure and is hardly a sympathetic figure. Like the Symbolist’s Dionysus, Pavel has the luxury of time and wealth, and he focuses his energies on himself, on his emotions and on his decadence. For the Symbolist Vyacheslav Ivanov, Dionysus was “the god who suffers and then is reborn.” 73 Pavel allows himself to succumb to, even to wallow in, his suffering and it is only through his relations with Nastia that he is reborn. In this sense their relationship is doomed and class aside will never have the possibility of progressing to marriage. Because of her role in Pavel’s rebirth Nastia, becomes a surrogate mother and their relationship becomes incestuous and cannot continue. The film itself, however, does not let the spectator indulge in Pavel’s self-pity for too long. While the bulk of the Silent Witnesses does focus on Pavel and his self- indulgence, both emotional and sexual, Bauer subordinates him to an inferior position within the narrative by beginning and ending the film with Nastia, the maid. 74 This story of male pathos, with its frequent long takes of Pavel wallowing in melancholy, is book-ended by the story of the misused, innocent Nastia. Bauer’s film not only privileges the working-class female, it also establishes her as the character with whom the audience will identify and works to emasculate the male character and disrupt the typical melodramatic storyline. 72 A review of Bauer’s film Silent Witnesses in Cinematic Herald [Vestnik Kinematografii], 88/8 (1914) 43 cited in Silent Witnesses 230. 73 Etkind 49. 74 Nastia is the first character that is introduced in the vignettes prior to the beginning of the film and literally the last character we see at the end of the film. 127 Bauer introduces the audience to both Nastia and Elena in an opening introduction sequence made up of short vignettes designed to introduce an actor and the part he or she plays in the film. This type of vignette was used during the early stages of the development of the star system in various countries. It helped the audience identify a face with actress or actor playing the role. The way in which Bauer chose to shoot these sequences also gives you some insight into the character’s personality. 75 Figure 3.4 Silent Witnesses, Nastia Figure 3.5 Silent Witnesses, Elena For instance, in Figures 3.4 and 3.5 Bauer gives us information about the women’s class as well as their personalities. Nastia is vaguely peasant-like with her shawl wrapped around her shoulders and simply dressed, the wardrobe befitting a lower- class servant. Elena on the other hand is dressed to the nines as if she were reading for an all night session of Tango dancing. Dressed in the latest fashion, Elena is clearly a wealthy upper-class woman. 75 One exception is Maxim in Twilight of a Woman’s Soul, V. Demert, the actor who played Maxim also wrote the script and he is shown as himself, not the character he plays. 128 Their demeanor also provides the viewer with a lot of information about the two characters. Nastia demurely tries to avoid looking at the camera, yet in her almost child-like innocence she can’t help it and coyly takes a peek. Unfettered by life’s disappointments, Nastia is brimming with happiness and joy; while Elena on the other had is nonchalance personified. 76 As you can see in Figure 3.5 she doesn’t quite address the camera, rather she looks just past it indifferently. Elena is sedate, controlled, a woman of the world. Nastia displays her femininity in these first few seconds of the film and they are reinforced in the opening of the film where we see her playing with a small kitten as if it were a child, further connecting her to femininity and motherhood. On the other hand, while Elena is adept at the trappings of femininity (the clothes) her demeanor is masculine and later in the film the only thing she plays with are the men in her life. Within the film Pavel and the Baron are set up as foils for each other, both representing two sides of the masculinity issue. Both men are roughly the same age, come from the same economic class (although the Baron is titled nobility), and their lives of luxury give them leisure to pursue the finer things in life, i. e. sexually free women. The Baron’s masculinity is not questioned, though Pavel’s masculinity is, as one can see in the opening star portraits during the film’s credits. 77 76 It is interesting to note that Nastia’s demeanor completely changes by the end of the film, where she wipes away her tears and resigns herself to disappointment and loss. 77 At the time, it was common to use short vignettes at the beginning of a film to introduce the main players/characters. These vignettes are usually not accompanied by intertitles, instead the viewer is asked to visually ‘read’ information about the types of characters in the film. 129 Figure 3.6 Silent Witnesses, Baron von Rehren. Figure 3.7 Silent Witnesses, Pavel Kostritsyn. Unlike the other characters, the Baron is dressed in top hat and coat, ready for a night on the town (see Figure 3.6). He is completely indifferent to the camera, never bothering to address it. His indifference allows him to keep his emotions and his sexuality in check, thus allowing him to be in control of both. The Baron’s unquestioned masculinity also lets him dictate the terms of his relationship with Elena. The character of Pavel is introduced in the vignette in a significantly different manner. Pavel tries to remain indifferent to the camera, but in the end, looks directly into the camera with a smoldering desire in his eyes, illustrating his inability to control his excessive emotions (see Figure 3.7). This type of direct visual address to the camera, is traditional in melodrama, and would usually establish a male character as master of the gaze and of the narrative. Pavel, however, is emblematic of the urban male emasculated by modernity, and his emasculation is reinforced in his association with, and subordination to, the women in the film. For instance, when we first see Pavel within the diegesis of the film, he descends from his rooms to the 130 kitchen, the feminine domain, and the heart of female domesticity. Rather than appearing uncomfortable because of his gender or superior because of his class, Pavel easily chats with the maid and the cook as if this were a familiar activity (he is “one of the girls”). Such action is juxtaposed with an earlier scene were Pavel’s mother also descends into the kitchen; she, however, maintains her distance from the servants, and commands respect, getting immediate response to her demands. Bauer also establishes Pavel’s questionable masculinity through framing and choreographed movement within the frame. The kitchen scene mentioned above is the only time Pavel commands the center of the frame, though his momentary control of the scene is denied by its very location – the kitchen, the domain of female domesticity. Figure 3.8 Silent Witnesses, the kitchen. Figure 3.9 Silent Witnesses, Pavel and women. Among these lower-class women he is able to maintain a position of masculine power and occupy the spectator’s attention. In the remainder of the film, however, when a woman is present in the frame, Bauer places Pavel in a subordinate position to women of his own class. Pavel either starts off-center, or moves to the side, so 131 that the female occupies the center of the frame and commands our attention. An example of this can be seen later in the film when Elena and Pavel visit his mother just before their marriage. Elena occupies the primary position – center frame. Pavel’s mother is to the right of her, while Pavel is at the extreme right, with his back to the camera. In the presence of these two women, Pavel becomes insignificant. Through his use of framing, Bauer calls into question traditional gender roles and hints at ways in which boundaries, like class distinctions, are being transformed by modernity. In addition to framing, Bauer uses movement within the frame to deny Pavel the pleasure and power of action. For instance, early in the film there is a long shot of a party scene. Pavel and Elena are flirting at frame left when the Baron saunters in from the right (see Figure 3.10), Pavel pouts and looks away as the Baron greets Elena by kissing her hand (for much longer than is acceptable by an acquaintance) . Figure 3.10 Silent Witnesses, the Baron Arrives Figure 3.11 Silent Witnesses, Nastia Observes The two men play a tug-of-war of sorts for Elena’s attention, and Elena allows Pavel to kiss her hand to level the playing field, though the fact that she gives her hand to 132 Pavel rather than him taking it like the Baron, belies her condescension and Pavel’s weakened position in the relationship (see Figure 3.11). The Baron always has the upper hand when the two men share the same space with Elena as is attested by the Baron’s position in center frame and Pavel’s to the far left. One should also note Nastia’s position in the frame in Figure 3.11, she is literally and visually set up as an observer by the space between herself and the other three characters. 78 Pavel eventually realizes his defeat and moves away. The way Bauer has the characters move across and within the frame resembles a well-choreographed dance. The dance trope is repeated later in a scene between Elena and Pavel. Figure 3.12 Silent Witnesses, Tango kiss. 78 The space also subtly accentuates her class position as well, despite her feeling for Pavel, she will never be part of their set. 133 Elena has come to Pavel to renew their relationship. Elena takes his hand, turns him around, grabs his head and kisses him on the lips (see Figure 3.12). Their movements resemble the slow erotic steps of the tango, only it is who Elena takes the lead, rather than Pavel. Bauer is also drawing on the viewer’s extra-textual knowledge that the woman playing the part of Elena is Elsa Kriuger a famous tango dancer. Yuri Tsivian discusses the influence of the tango in Russian culture in his article on Russia in 1913; he remarks that Russian theater critic/filmmaker Mikhail Bonch-Tomashevskii considered the tango “a perfect icon of the modern age because it conveys the idea of suppressed sexuality.” 79 Alexander Kugel wrote that “the tango is a dance of the neurasthenic Sex” and that its power to ignite spectators is that it never completes the story; the spectator is left to fill in the blanks. 80 At every turn, Bauer denies Pavel the traditional masculine role of the sexual aggressor, and even when he takes advantage of Nastia, he has to get her drunk first. Instead Pavel is aligned with passivity, with excessive emotions, with powerlessness, and thus with the feminine. 81 His life of luxury makes him self-indulgent, prone to excesses in emotion, as can be seen in the various shots of him moping, brooding and 79 Yuri Tsivian, is paraphrasing Mikhail Bonch-Tomashevskii’s book, The Book About the Tango: Art and Sexuality (Moscow, 1914) in “Russia, 1913: Cinema in the Cultural Landscape,” Silent Film, ed. Richard Abel (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996) 203-208. Note also that Elsa Kriuger who plays Elena was a well known Tango dancer. 80 Aleksandr Kugel, “Notes” [Zametki], Theater and Art [Teatr i isskustvo] 21 (1914) 466- 69, cited in Tsivian’s “Russian 1913” 207. 81 There is one exception when Pavel takes advantage of Nastia’s feeling for him and rapes her. This reinforces his self-indulgence and emasculation, and he is unwilling (or unable to act) when Nastia tells him the truth. 134 crying throughout Silent Witnesses. These excessive desires make him less of a man than the Baron, and allow the women in his life to control him. Melodrama is typically a genre riddled with tension, in Silent Witness Bauer created tension not only through framing and movement within the frame, but he also accomplished this through his incorporation of the Symbolist influenced Dionysian traits for Pavel. Not only is the Symbolist Dionysus associated with narcissism and sexual desire, he is also the god who suffered and was reborn. Thus the brooding, solipsistic Pavel nearly dies when he is denied Elena, and then he is reborn when she returns to him. Elena chooses to continue her relationship with the Baron, and therefore this scenario could potentially play out ad infinitum, creating further tension in the film by denying the viewer any sort of satisfactory ending. 82 In one of the final scenes of the film (see Figure 3.13), Elena and Pavel say their goodbyes to friends and family before leaving on their honeymoon. Bauer uses a beautifully constructed overhead shot as way of incorporating action on multiple layers within the shot. 82 Louise McReynolds discusses the dystopic family melodrama in Russian, focusing her attention on the problems that arise from single parents raising daughters in a modernist environment. She does not address the implications of a single-over bearing mother raising a son… 135 Figure 3.13 Silent Witnesses, deception. As Nastia move in and out of the frame taking care of guests, Pavel says goodbye to his mother in the center foreground of the frame. While the trio on frame left are very animated, the column separating the right-hand side of the frame helps to draw your attention to Elena and the Baron. If one didn’t know better, based on the way the Baron kisses, caresses, and holds on to Elena, one would think they were the happy couple joined in matrimony, but that is not the case. Despite Pavel’s marriage to Elena, traditional family values are not reinforced, because the implication is that there will always be Pavel and Elena plus the Baron. Many Symbolist’s had an aversion to marriage in the traditional sense of the term and Bauer’s allowing Pavel to entangle himself in such a way reinforces the modernist and symbolist questioning of traditional values. 136 Conclusion After seeing the exhibition of Evgenii Bauer’s films at Pordenone, Mary Ann Doane wrote, “What is striking about the pre-Revolutionary Russian cinema is the extent to which it seems to give little or no direct evidence of its own historical context. One would expect to see symptoms, signs, or even traces of political unrest and the impending revolution.” 83 This of course was not the case, as these early films are heavily coded with the historical context in which they were made. In utilizing the tropes of modernity, Symbolism and melodrama, Bauer is successful at shifting from the macro-sphere of politics of the Russian Empire and political unrest, to the micro-sphere of the Russian home and shifting gender identities. In the essay “Male Hysteria and Early Cinema,” Lynne Kirby states that “cultural displacement as massive as nineteenth-century mechanization and urbanization – made of its traumatized victims something like female hysterics. In other words, it emasculated men, even if only, for some, those of a certain class.” 84 Russian cinema is indebted to industrialization in many ways, especially in the way it restructured daily life, allowing for the invention of leisure, which in turn opened a world of possibilities for both men and women. In Russia, it was not just the collapse of time and space and a bourgeoning population that caused trauma that was associated with modernity. Many of these factors, including the city itself, served to emasculate the Russian male and liberate the Russian female from traditional sexual roles. 83 Doane 24. 84 Lynne Kirby, “Male Hysteria and Early Cinema,” Male Trouble, eds. Constance Penley and Sharon Willis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 78. 137 Many scholars have contended that the working class was the one class that bore the brunt of modernity. And yet, as I have argued here, with reference to the work of Evgenii Bauer, that it was the middle and upper classes that were hardest hit by modernity in Russia. Their life of luxury and idleness was a significant side effect of modernity, one with fatal repercussions resulting in the loss of traditional sexual roles. No longer bound by the tight strictures of patriarchal order, Bauer’s wealthy men could indulge themselves in all manner of excesses. And yet the over- stimulation caused by the city, and by excessive self-indulgence, created a class of emasculated males confronting a class of sexually empowered women. The clash between the two resulted in the complete castration and subordination of males to female characters, as was the case for Pavel and Viktor, or in madness or death, as was the outcome for Sergei and Count Glinskii. In a review of Silent Witnesses, one reviewer commented, “Running throughout the film is the idea that people have still not shed their prejudices over white skin and blue blood…” 85 So while one might expect a country on the verge of revolution to be preoccupied with class issues, instead one sees a preoccupation with issues of sexuality and morality. In the turmoil caused by modernity, we may propose that class conflict was displaced onto issues of sexuality. In this context, Bauer’s urban melodrama offers a re- examination of, and calls into question, the contemporary understanding of the modern Russian woman through images and themes borrowed from the Symbolists. 85 Review of Silent Witnesses from Cinematographic Herald, 88/8 (1914) 43 cited in Silent Witnesses 230. 138 At the same time, Bauer’s use of melodrama allows him to further question traditional gender roles and the validity of patriarchy, without providing any settled answers. In the end this allows the viewer to find an answer for themselves to the questions Bauer raises. 139 Chapter Five Death Becomes Her Building on themes raised in earlier chapters, such as urbanization, modernity, symbolism, and sexuality, in this chapter I now turns to a topic that, on the surface, would seem to be the end of everything, both literally and figuratively, namely death itself. More concretely, in this chapter I address the significance of the death of the central female character in four of Bauer’s films. We examined two of these films in earlier chapters, Daydreams (1915) and The Dying Swan (1917), and we will discuss them now according to this particular emphasis on death. In addition, we will examine two films for the first time - Yurii Nagornyi (1916) and After Death (1916). In this chapter we will explore the ways in which a woman’s death structures the action and creates the possibility for alternate readings at the end of these films. Specifically, I will argue that Bauer utilized and transformed familiar tropes of death and the female body in his films, leading to cultural constructions that belied some of the confusion about gender identity in Russia following the turn of the century. In her book, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, Elisabeth Bronfen proposes that narrative and visual representations of death can be read as symptoms of a culture, that the female body is ‘culturally constructed’ as a site of ‘otherness,’ and thus she becomes the perfect tool for the reenactment of 140 death. 1 This presupposition poses an interesting starting point when considering several of the melodramatic films of Evgenii Bauer. If, as I have shown, Bauer’s female characters are “culturally constructed,” and if Bronfen’s arguments are correct, then perhaps should we conclude that these heroines are merely symptoms of Bauer’s turn of the century Russian culture? This chapter will unpack the significance of Bauer’s “culturally constructed” female characters and also posit ways in which they might have been read by contemporary filmgoers. Bauer’s films primarily center on narratives of strong urban women, and in select cases these women meet with a foul end. The films that do figure dead women are particularly striking in their use of narrative and visual imagery. While Bauer’s work was highly original, there are strong visual similarities between his 1916 film Yurii Nagornyi and Cecile B. DeMille’s 1915 film The Cheat. In addition to this, and as discussed, many scholars have noted the “uncanny” similarity between Daydreams and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo. Rather than pointing to a pattern of influence, these parallels (particularly between Daydreams and Vertigo) suggest a common underlying psychodynamic, which can be illuminated with the help of feminist film theory and psychoanalysis, in particular Freud’s notion of fetishism and voyeurism. 2 What I hope to demonstrate here is that though this theory is relevant to understanding Bauer’s work, it must also be accompanied by an understanding of the cultural and historical specificity of the films in order to provide 1 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992) xi. 2 The work of Laura Mulvey, and scholars like E. Ann Kaplan and Mary Ann Doane who expanded on her arguments, will be particularly helpful. 141 us with insight into how these films may have been interpreted at the time they were released. In order to establish the cultural and historical specificity of these four films by Bauer, I will look more closely at the Russian concept of death, and how that concept informed the way in which the living dealt with the dead. I briefly examine how the prevalence of the modern women in Russian society led many artists and scholars to re-evaluate notions such as death, gender and sexuality. I also discuss how the emergence of cinema became an ideal location for addressing the spectacle of death, the spectacle of the city, and the female body as spectacle, and how these three spectacles were combined in the trope of the ‘dead sexualized body of the modern urban woman.’ Death in Russian Culture As I mentioned in earlier chapters, one of the ways in which modernity manifested itself in Russia around the turn of the century was with a preoccupation with death. Russian newspapers illustrate this fascination with modernity and death, in articles that sensationalize the dangers of urban life, including traffic accidents, work-related deaths, suicides, and increases in crime, murder, prostitution and debilitating, degenerative diseases. Coinciding with the articles decrying the affects of modernity, there were others predicting the apocalyptic end of the world around 142 the turn of the century in 1913. 3 Newspapers and journals were not the only source upon which the hungry public could feed their obsession with death and decay, many writers and artists of the day, such as Léon Bakst, Aleksandr Blok, Mikhail Kuzmin, Fyodor Sologub and Anastasia Verbitskaya, portrayed images of crime, sexual perversion, degeneration and death, all to great success. 4 These articles, advertisements, and artistic and literary works exemplify just how dangerous life in the city could be in 1913. Whether one was a pedestrian or a motorist, an upper class socialite or lower class working girl, death was everywhere. The infant mortality rate in Russia is fairly indicative of the country’s high death rate; with more than 25 percent of infants dying in their first year of life and another 20 percent that did not reach adulthood, numbers one would expect in a pre- industrialized society. 5 Thus, as an inevitable fact of life and culture in Russia, there were countless beliefs about the connections between life and death that were mirrored in prescribed methods for dealing with death and the dead body. According to ethnographer Elizabeth Warner, the Orthodox religion and Old Believer teachings 3 Many historians have noted a rise in fears of the apocalypse preceding the turn of the centuries, according to religious scholar Bruce Lincoln apocalyptic literature is concerned with a foreboding “sense of an immediate future pressing on the present. It also expresses profound dissent with the way things are.” See Charlotte Snow, “Apocalypse How?,” Chicago University Magazine, 10/8/2007 <http://magazine.uchicago.edu/9812/html/apocalypse.html>. 1913 was not only the turn of the century in Russia, it also marked the tercentenary of the Romanov Dynasty and with it the rising sense of unease and dissatisfaction of the general public. 4 Beth Holmgren and Helena Goscilo, introduction, Anastasia Verbitskaya, The Keys to Happiness: A Novel, Trans. and Eds. Beth Holmgren and Helena Goscilo. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999) xvii. Also see the article by Robert Nye mentioned in chapter two on the connection between neurasthenia and degeneration. 5 Christine Worobec, “Death Ritual Among Russian and Ukrainian Peasants: Linkages Between the Living and the Dead,” Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Stephen P. Frank (Ewing, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994) 11. 143 in Russia held that there was a liminal period between the death of an individual, the burial, and the fortieth day following the death. 6 For part of this time the soul stays near its earthly home, departing this world for ever only after the fortieth day. During this transitional time, and particularly in the three days before the funeral, when the corpse lay at home in its coffin, watched and prayed over day and night, many people believed there was some small risk that the deceased could be revived. This gave rise to many Russian tales, particularly from the north, collected in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, about corpses rising from the dead to terrify or harass the living, notably the grieving widow or, in the case of vampires, to devour livestock and human beings.” 7 Thus in addition to prescribing a period of mourning (forty days), Russian religious belief contemplated and feared the link between life and death, and sought to prevent the possibility of the dead resurrecting themselves and interfering with the living. The connection between the living and the dead can be traced to the Russian Orthodox belief in the immortality of the soul. “The deceased were not divorced from the living but continued to play an active role in society, communicating with the living in a variety of ways. At times they were benevolent and at other times dangerous to the well-being of the community.” 8 A constant vigil over the dead body before burial was required to prevent the corpse (note it is the corpse, and not the spirit) from tormenting the living. 6 The Old Believers are a sect that split off from the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1600s after Patriarch Nikon made changes in order to keep the Russian and Greek Orthodox churches in line with each other. Old Believers were heavily persecuted for not accepting the changes proposed and for over 200 years many fled or remained in hiding until 1905 when Tsar Nicholas signed the Religious freedom act. As mentioned in Chapter one Moscow remained a bastion for many Old Believers. 7 Elizabeth A. Warner, "Russian Peasant Beliefs and Practices Concerning Death and the Supernatural Collected in Novosokol'niki Region, Pskov Province, Russia, 1995. Part I: The Restless Dead, Wizards and Spirit Beings," Folklore 111.1 (April 2000) 67-90. 8 Worobec 16. 144 This preoccupation with death and the possibility of the corpse’s revival was carried over into other aspects of Russian life including the arts and philosophy. In her discussion on the Decadent movement in Russia, Olga Matich discusses how the symbolists, borrowing from Trubetskoy, sought to overcome death through the power of love as a means of immortalizing the body. 9 The desire to overcome death can be seen elsewhere in Russian culture as Irene Masing-Delic illustrates in her article “Transfiguration of Cannibals: Fedorov and the Avant-Garde,” 10 which elaborates on the influence philosopher Nikolai Fedorov had on the other philosophers, writers and artists such as Vasilii Chekrygin, Vladimir Solov’ev, and Pavel Filonov. For these men, the modern city with its materialism and excesses bred cannibalism, parasitism and vampirism. This drive to excess and subsequent degeneracy was seen to be like original sin, and the root cause of man’s mortality. It was the ‘cult of woman,’ in particular, that was the main obstacle to immortality for humanity. 11 Fedorovian thought purported that “it would be better for everyone concerned if Woman were restructured so that she would neither spread corruption nor be subjected to it.” 12 The image suggested by Fedorov’s “restructuring” is of a Frankensteinian androgyny, cobbled together from female body parts, yet devoid of the signifiers of 9 Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination In Fin-de-siécle Russia (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005) page 12. 10 Irene Masing-Delic, “Transfiguration of Cannibals: Fedorov and the Avant-Garde,” Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment, eds. John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) 17-36. 11 Masing-Delic 20-23 12 Masing-Delic 25. 145 her sexuality (breasts, uterus, vagina.) In the modern urban spaces of Russia, ‘Woman’ becomes not only the symptom for the decline of man, she is the cause, the virus which must be contained and altered so as to be rendered harmless. Masing-Delic points out that Solov’ev, in his reworking of Fedorov’s views conjures up the notion of the Eternal Feminine as “image of perfection that will become the norm for the immortal woman who will no longer bear mortals.” 13 In an effort to return to a state before the Fall of Man, followers of Fedorov called for ‘life- constructing’ (zhiznestroitel’stvo), or rather a re-constructing of the female body. 14 In other words, this newly constructed woman would be female, yet she would be devoid of sexuality – without sexual organs. With her immortal body, this recreated woman would occupy a liminal space between death and life, alive yet unable to enjoy the pleasures of life and living. Death and Cinema It is no wonder that the Russian preoccupation with death, immortality, the undead, and especially the dead female body, found its way to the cinema. In its early stages, cinema was often likened to the realm of the dead, a replication of life with figures moving and talking, but devoid of the color and sound of life. While some critics commented on cinema’s ability to capture the movement of life, others noted that the movement of human figures lacked the fluidity of living beings. Given the variable speed of hand-cranked projectors, people often appeared to move 13 Masing-Delic 21. 14 Masing-Delic 21. 146 about with the jerky stiffness of revived corpses. Tsivian discusses Viktor Shklovsky’s de-familiarization (ostranenie), “It is a complex game of similarities and dissimilarities, of the presence and absence of familiar features. The uncanny feeling that films somehow belonged to the world of the dead was prompted by mutually contradictory signals coming from the image.” 15 Lucy Fisher further extends the connection between life and death in film by equating the cinematic process with “cryogenics, the act of freezing live (but dying) individuals in order to thaw them out later, when a cure for their disease is found. Like cryogenics, the cinema stores a static or ‘frozen’ image of a subject that is later ‘defrosted’ through the heat of projection.” 16 Film itself, in its ability to record the presence of a living human being, fluctuates between life and death, in between the moments of light/life/presence we find an interstitial moment of darkness/death/absence. In this sense then, cinema, as a liminal space between presence and absence, is the perfect site to play out these notions of death and the female body. Bauer’s Dead Women In Bauer’s work the death of the female usually has an important structural function—it is the narrative that becomes restructured along with the female body. Whereas in Yurii Nagornyi and After Death, the death of the central female character 15 Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception, trans. by Alan Bodger (New York: Routledge, 1994) 6. 16 Lucy Fisher, “Marlene: Modernity, Mortality and the Biopic,” Biography 23.1 (Winter 2000) 196. 147 is the catalyst for the action in the film, in Daydreams and The Dying Swan, the two films we have already examined, the story quite literally ends with the death of the female heroine. Yurii Nagornyi Bauer’s 1916 film Yurii Nagornyi, alternately titled The Seducer is in essence a film with in a film. 17 Though neither film is actually about the famous opera singer Yurii Nagornyi, instead the plot centers around two important women in his life. The film stars Emma Bauer, Evgenii Bauer’s wife, in the lead role as a dancer who avenges the death by suicide of her young sister. 18 The film is structured in such a way that it is a film within a film, the only existing example we have of Bauer using this type of narrative structure. The main film opens with a professional dancer and her husband waiting backstage. When a group of men enter the room, the dancer recognizes one of the other performers. This female dancer is not mistaken (unlike her male counterparts in the instances we have discussed), and the man is in fact the opera singer Yuri Nagornyi. She follows him and watches him perform from the wings. When Yuri Nagornyi sees the dancer, he does not recognize her, yet is infatuated and waits around after the show to see her. He persuades him to give him her phone number; all of which occurs under the watchful eye of her husband. 17 This film, like several of Bauer’s films has been preserved without intertitles. While this makes it difficult to discern some of the subtleties of the story, reviews of the film and the narrative itself make the story clear. 18 Because the titles are lost we have no names for the characters, with the exception of Yurii Nagornyi; other characters include the dancer, the dancer’s husband, the dancer’s sister. 148 Nagornyi calls on the dancer and appears to seduce her, with her husband in the next room. On another day, the dancer even entertains Nagornyi and his friends, while her husband is home in his study, eventually leaving for a night on the town with Nagornyi and his gang. First they go to a club, where they all (with the exception of the dancer) are over-indulgent and drink excessively. Nagornyi is quite drunk when he and the dancer leave to go to his apartment. Briefly interrupted by a phone call from her husband, the dancer methodically lights Nagornyi’s room on fire, with Nagornyi passed out at the foot of his bed. He is apparently killed in the conflagration. The dancer returns home and tells her husband what she has done and why she has done it. This is how the film unfolded to mystified audiences. Why did she do this? In the telling of the why, we are shown the film with a film. This second story is the story of the dancer’s little sister. The story begins at a party. Yuri Nagornyi is watching all the dancers, and when a pretty young girl sits next to him, he flirts with her. This is the dancer’s younger sister. He arranges to meet the sister in the park the next day and they walk around the city, finally stopping in at his apartment. Yuri then gets the sister drunk and proceeds to take advantage of her. He then walks her home, but is too much of a cad to actually walk her to the door. At home, all the sister can think about is Yuri, as she stares lovingly at his picture and writes about him in her journal. One day a visitor arrives, a young man who wishes to court the young girl, when the father explains the situation she leaves the room upset. The sister goes to Yuri’s apartment to tell him of her situation, he is indifferent and breaks it off with her just as his girlfriend walks in the room. 149 The sister returns home and takes a gun from her father’s room, writes her intentions in her diary and then goes out into the woods and shoots herself. Bauer then cuts back to the dancer telling her husband the story, and he comforts her when she is done. The next morning he walks dejectedly into the bedroom and hands her the newspaper. Both are shaken by the news that Nagornyi somehow survived the fire. The film ends in a hospital room filled with women dressed in black watching the doctor remove Nagornyi’s bandages. One by one the women leave, and the dancer is the only one who remains as the doctor removes the last bandage. As the film ends, the dancer hold up a mirror, forcing Nagornyi to see his horrifically scarred face, the result of the dancer’s revenge for her sister’s death. This film incorporates many of the same tropes we have discussed in relation to Bauer’s other films, including nature versus city, innocence versus worldliness, Dionysian males, and of course death. For instance, the city again plays an important role as the site of Nagornyi’s seduction of the young sister. Figure 4.1 Yuri Nagornyi, seduction. Figure 4.2 Yuri Nagornyi, Yuri’s apartment. 150 The entire seduction sequence lasts two minutes in length and covers four different locations from the park to the street outside Nagornyi’s apartment. 19 The shot in figure 4.1 is very similar to the one we saw in Chapter Two, from the film One Thousand and Second Ruse. The main difference is that in One Thousand and Second Ruse, the wife knows the city, she is woman in charge of her own sexuality and knowledgeable of its affects on men. In Yuri Nagornyi, the sister is a young student, not yet comfortable with her own sexuality, and innocent of the dangers posed the city. Nagornyi’s final destination, seen in Figure 4.2 is his apartment on a shop- lined street. The location, and the fact that it is most likely a one-room flat indicates that he is well off, but by no means wealthy, a definite contrast to the spacious and luxurious multi-room apartment he occupies in the outer story. It is no coincidence that he lives above a shop called Paris, it implies his amorous intentions, loose morals and debase nature. And, of course, it is here that he takes away the sister’s innocence. The primary reason for discussing this film however is because of its story within a story, its mise en abyme. The use of mise en abyme is a common trope within art and literature; and again we have a connection with Scheherazade, who used the story within a story as a means of piquing the king’s interest and thus prolonging her life. What is most interesting in this film is how it is the death of a 19 The street where Yuri Nagornyi’s first apartment is located looks very similar to the type of shopping and housing located on the Arbat in Moscow, a pedestrian walkway within the Garden Ring. 151 female character which prolongs the story. In other words, it is the interior story, the sister’s suicide, which drives and extends the exterior story. Bauer connects the stories of the two sisters in subtle visual repetitions, alluding to the cyclical nature of the story within the story. The first instance occurs immediately after the dancer first meets Yuri Nagornyi at the theater. Figure 4.3 Yuri Nagornyi, the dancer. Figure 4.4 Yuri Nagornyi, the sister. Upon arriving home, the dancer takes from a box a photograph of her dead sister, she then takes out her sister’s diary and filled with grief, she begins to reread the story of what happened to her sister (see Figure 4.3). When the sister returns home after her rendezvous with Nagornyi, she takes his picture out of her muff and looks at it. She then takes a moment to revel in her new found love (see Figure 4.4) before writing about it in her journal. Bauer again connects the two sisters visually as well as narratively in the two scenes before the (attempted) deaths. 152 Figure 4.5 Yuri Nagornyi, retribution. Figure 4.6 Yuri Nagornyi, before the suicide. The dancer goes back to Nagornyi’s apartment, after a night on the town. Nagornyi passes out drunk at the foot of his bed, his drunkenness mirrors the sister’s when he took advantage of her. The dancer, contemplating what she should do, clutches a candle. Torn by her emotions, she eventually decides to set the candle on its side to set the room on fire and she leaves before knowing the final outcome of her actions. In the interior story, the sister returns home after having her heart broken by Nagornyi. She takes her father’s gun and walks into her room clutching a candle. Her decision made, she writes her final goodbyes in her journal and then goes outside to shoot herself in the woods. By repeating this visual trope, Bauer connects the two women and their actions. He also connects their positions as narrators, creators of the events taking place, the sister through her journal writing, and the dancer through her recounting of the events to her husband. The cyclical nature of the repetitions is reinforced by the fact that the filmic story does not end with the sister’s death. Instead, the filmic story returns, yet the action of the outer story is determined/initiated because of her death. 153 After Death This film opens with Andrei Bagrov, a young scholar, who leads a life of seclusion, buried in his study of photography. At the insistence of his friend Tsenin, he attends a party where he meets a captivating young woman Zoia Kadmina. 20 Andrei is enraptured and intimidated by Zoia, but in the end he leaves the party to avoid her. He encounters Zoia again at a literary soiree, where she is performing. Again Andrei runs off and refuses Tsenin’s offer of an introduction. Nonetheless, Andrei has gotten under Zoia’s skin and she determines not to let him go. Deciding it is time for a rendezvous, she sends him a letter, asking him to meet her, but not giving her name. While Andrei shows up for the meeting in a park, he refuses Zoia’s offer of love, choosing a life of seclusion over her. Three months later, Andrei reads about her sudden death/suicide in the morning paper. The paper lists “unrequited love” as the reason for her death. Upset by her death, and his own complicitousness, he decides he must meet her family. While her mother is too distraught to speak with him, her sister recounts the details of what happened and asks him to clear Zoia’s name from the allegation of unrequited love. Andrei convinces the sister to give him the girl’s diary and a photo of her. As he reads her diary and stares at her photo, the scholar/photographer dreams of the girl he dismissed and is visited by her spirit several times. The film ends with a struggle between life and death, between a living 20 Zoia Kadmina is played by the ballerina Vera Karalli. 154 woman (his aunt), and a dead woman (Zoia’s ghost). Death wins out and Andrei dies. Figure 4.7 After Death, Andrei’s mother. Within the first two minutes of the film, Bauer has already inserted the image of a dead woman into the film. A large portrait (a photograph) of Andrei’s dead mother hangs in his study (see Figure 4.7), watching over him as he works, and we are told that “the image of his dead mother ruled his imagination.” As we have seen, Bagrov is one of many male characters in Bauer’s films who is unable to move through the mourning process, hindered by a photograph of a dead woman who holds sway over his life. Not only does Andrei’s mother watch over him from the beyond through her portrait, but his matronly, spinster aunt also dotes and fusses over him as if he were a small child, unable to take care of himself. 155 Socially inadequate and emotionally stunted by the women in his life, Andrei is overwhelmed by Zoia’s composure and sexual self-assuredness. Through a series of shot-reverse shots, Bauer establishes the intense connection between Zoia and Andrei from their very first meeting. Figure 4.8 After Death, Zoia gazes. Figure 4.9 After Death, Andrei gazes back. Zoia’s role as an independent woman is established immediately through her ability to master the gaze, to be the subject rather than the object. . Zoia has no problem looking at or rather devouring with her eyes, the object of her desire. Andrei returns Zoia’s gaze, but he does so uncomfortably, shifting in his chair, unable to meet her gaze with confidence. He cannot maintain his composure and loses the staring contest. Intimidated by her gaze, and all that it implies sexually, Andrei runs for his life, as it were. 156 Figure 4.10 After Death, Zoia’s intense gaze. When they run into each other again at the literary soiree, we again see a series of shot-reverse shots that establish the sexual tension between Andrei and Zoia. This time, however, Bauer magnifies the intensity of Zoia’s gaze through a close-up of her face with her captivating eyes. Zoia becomes a medusa-like figure, freezing Andrei in his place, and it isn’t until she leaves the stage that he is able to leave as well, foreshadowing the influence she will have over him even in death. 157 Figure 4.11 After Death, remembering. After reading about Zoia’s death, Andrei is extremely distraught and retires to his room, recalling Zoia’s captivating performance at the literary soiree (see Figure 4.11). In this scene, Bauer plays on the notion of absence/presence with the way in which the scene was filmed. The shot is constructed through in-camera edit allowing Zoia to appear, as if my magic, in Andrei’s study. Rather than cutting back to the literary soiree or superimposing the image of Zoia performing onto the footage of Andrei remembering (all of which would signal her absence), Bauer actually has her physically standing in the same room, recreating her performance. Thus her presence is very real, as is evidenced by her shadow on the wall – frame left, and yet not real, as this is supposedly a figment of Andrei’s over-active imagination/memory. The scene in which Zoia’s sister recounts the tale of Zoia’s suicide to Andrei is significant for various reasons, first and foremost because Bauer chose to shoot the 158 death like a mini film within a film. Rather than using a matte shot or rack focus to transition the viewer into the suicide scene (which would indicate that someone is telling the deceased’s story and speaking for her), Bauer instead cuts from the sister talking to Zoia sitting in her dressing room. By using a straight cut, Bauer gives the viewer the impression that the suicide is not mediated by another and is not a pure retelling of an event. Instead, the viewer is allowed to witness the suicide first hand, thus Bauer implicates the viewer in Zoia’s death, which perhaps could have been prevented. Figure 4.12 After Death, Cleopatra. Figure 4.13 After Death, deathbed scene. We see Zoia swallow a vial of poison before going on stage for her performance as Cleopatra (see Figure 4.12). The connection between Zoia and Cleopatra works on several levels. They both can be noted for their excessive sexuality, both are seducers of men, and both die by poison. It is ironic that Zoia should play the part of Cleopatra, the ultimate seductress, after taking poison over a failed seduction. Zoia’s death scene again draws a connection between her and Cleopatra. The scene ends with a tableau shot (see Figure 4.13), something which 159 had been prevalent in early cinema, but by now had lost its popularity. The tableau is extremely painterly in its composition and is reminiscent of artistic representations of Cleopatra on her death bed. The significance of this tableau is that like Cleopatra, whose story lived on past her death, so too Zoia’s tale lives on in her sister’s retelling, in her diary and in Andrei’s memories of her. It is only in death that Zoia has the power to finally seduce Andrei. She exercises this power over Andrei by appearing before him in his dreams no less than seven times. 21 At first Andrei dreams of Zoia in a wheat field, dressed in a long flowing white gown with flowers in her hair (see Figures 4.14 & 4.15). Figure 4.14 & 4.15 After Death, dream sequences. In death, Zoia becomes the embodiment of the Eternal Feminine, the Devine Sophia. Her placement in the wheat field not only connects her to nature, but also to nourishment. The vision of Zoia is that which feeds both the body and soul, complicating her earlier associations with death (as Medusa and Cleopatra.) 21 This number has great significance in religious doctrines, God create the earth in seven days, there are seven holy sacraments, seven deadly sins, etc… 160 Bauer’s use of spatial relations in the dream sequences plays an important roll within the narrative. Each time Zoia appears to Andrei in a dream she gets closer to him, signifying her increasing power over him, and his willingness to join her on the other side. In the first dream (see Figure 4.14), she does not look directly at him and instead she leads him towards the back of the frame. In a subsequent dream, Andrei is lying on her lap, yet she still does not make eye contact with him and her physical contact is limited. Andrei’s fate is sealed when during one dream they make contact; they embrace and then kiss, an act that causes Andrei to collapse. When Andrei wakes up Zoia is gone, but a lock of her hair remains in his hands. Again Bauer is playing with our concept of absence versus presence, reality versus dream. Some of the dream sequences are filmed in a dream space like the figures above. In some sequences Bauer uses a superimposition when Andrei is in a state between asleep and awake. Finally, Bauer has Zoia physically in the room with Andrei while he sleeps, though by now the viewer has associated her apparition with Sergei’s dreams. Andrei’s ability to take a piece of her hair into his waking life destroys the barrier between presence and absence. 161 Daydreams The narrative of Bauer’s 1915 film Daydreams [Grezy], is centered on a male protagonist, while the focus of the film remains with the women in his life. 22 Like After Death and to a certain extent Yuri Nagornyi, Daydreams deals with the themes of obsession, madness and death. The film Daydreams tells the story of Sergei Nikolaevich Nedelin, a man who loses his young wife whom he passionately loved. Obsessed with his dead wife, Sergei, at her deathbed, cuts her single braid in an effort to keep a part of her with him. 23 Sergei surrounds himself with her portraits and her braid, which he keeps as a fetish in a glass box. A victim of his own excesses, Sergei is yet another of Bauer’s typically emasculated urban males. Sergei, like many of Bauer’s male characters, is a wealthy man with no profession to speak of and plenty of time to sit around wallowing in self-pity. During a leisurely stroll through the city streets (he is the quintessential flâneur), he sees a woman who looks remarkably like his dead wife. Sergei follows her, watching as she enters the backstage area of a theater. He then watches her perform a lead role of the Meyerbeer opera “Robert, the Devil,” where she plays a nun who is brought back from the dead. The staging of the opera stands out like the performance scenes in Yuri Nagornyi and After Death, as a moment of 22 While this many seem like a contradiction, it will become clear after a description of the film. 23 In Russian culture, unmarried women wore single braids to signal that they were still virgins. Many Symbolists believed that physical love was incompatible with the ideal of the Divine Sophia. For instance, Blok married Liubova, the actual woman who was his divine inspiration and their marriage remained unconsummated for over a year (from discussion with Jenifer Presto, Spring 2000). 162 attraction/spectacle, and the scene serves to heighten the emotional impact of Sergei’s obsession. The image of resurrection in the play is too much for Sergei, since he believes it is really his wife brought back to life, and in a fit of madness, he rushes the stage. Sergei meets and courts Tina, the beautiful actress who looks so much like his wife. He even tries to make her into the image of his saintly wife, going so far as to dress Tina, in his dead wife’s clothing and jewelry. Sergei insists that Tina pose for a portrait, not as herself, but as his dead wife. Tina, of course, is not his wife, and she functions more like Alexander Blok’s “Unknown Woman” [Neznakomka]. 24 Tina is shallow, uncouth, and materialistic, characteristics unbefitting the saint that Sergei has made his wife out to be. This is made painfully clear when Tina goes to Sergei to ask his forgiveness and to ask if he is ready to live in the present and love her for who she is. When she sees his study filled with images of his dead wife, she quickly becomes aware of the unearthly competition she is facing. Tina’s imperfect presence becomes too much for Sergei and the film ends with him killing Tina, strangling her with his dead wife’s braid of hair. Daydreams, like Child of the Big City, opens with the death of one person and subsequently ends with the dead body of another. In Daydreams, both characters 24 “The Unknown Woman” is a poem written by Blok, a renowned Symbolist poet, in 1906. The poem reflects Blok’s disillusionment with the Symbolist concept of the eternal feminine. The Unknown Woman is a beautiful woman in a bar, who delights and entrances and who most likely is prostitute. 163 are women who preoccupy Sergei’s life, his wife and his lover. 25 As I mentioned earlier, burial practices were clearly delineated to encourage the soul to pass on peacefully, straying from the prescribed practices or showing disrespect to the corpse could spell trouble for the living. Sitting with the corpse between the time of death and the time of burial was traditionally a woman’s job in Russia, as was the role of mourner. Bauer subverts tradition, and rather than having women sitting with the corpse to prevent it doing any mischief, as was custom, he has the dead woman’s husband sitting by her side, grieving over her in a manner unbefitting a man. Here then, Sergei is simultaneously performing two roles traditionally assigned to women; he is both sitting with the corpse of his dead wife and mourning over her loss. In addition to this Sergei breaks taboo and is disrespectful of the corpse when he kisses and then buries his head in the corpse’s chest as if she were alive. 25 By opening the film with a dead woman Bauer also foreshadows the end of the film and in essence kills the same woman twice as the actress N. Chernobaeva plays both the dead wife and Tina, the mistress. 164 Figure 4.136 Daydreams, cutting the hair. His maltreatment of the female corpse, and his utter disregard for tradition, does not end there. In a fit of grief, Sergei Nedelin grabs a pair of scissors and begins cutting (see Figure 4.16). Because of the angle of the shot, we are initially unclear of what is happening, but it appears that he is cutting the dead woman. What appears to be a heinous act of violence committed against the corpse is made clear when we see that he has cut off her braid. Still, the fact remains that he has tampered with her corpse, a socially taboo act in itself, and potentially problematic as it could (and does) lead to her returning to him in death. It is essentially his dead wife’s constant ‘presence’ in his life that prevents him from seeing and understanding another woman when he encounters Tina. Sergei holds the hair close, hanging onto some vestige of this dead woman, his wife, Elena. Hair, itself has a liminal status as something living, yet it is comprised of dead cells, and once hair is removed from the 165 body it can no longer grow or live. For Sergei, the lock of hair becomes a fetish object, a vestige of, and replacement for, his dead wife. For Sergei, his wife’s flawlessness is immortalized in that single plait of hair that he keeps close by in his study. Sergei’s wife’s connection to female perfection and the Symbolist notion of the Divine Feminine is reinforced in several ways, through the opening vignette of Sergei at his wife’s deathbed, as well as through Sergei’s visions and flashbacks. The opening vignette of Sergei and his dead wife (see Figure 4.17) illustrates Sergei’s propensity for Dionysian excess, as he has covered her dead body with so many flowers it is difficult to differentiate her from the flowers. This excess also connects her with nature, beauty and purity, which is accentuated by the fact that Bauer chose to have the background and top half of the frame black. The bottom half of the frame, with Sergei’s pale wife covered in a blanket of white flowers draws the eye downwards. Bauer also repeats this scene another time in the film, using it as a refrain, and another means of contrasting Sergei’s wife with Tina. Figure 4.17 Daydreams, deathbed. Figure 4.18 Daydreams, garden. 166 Later in the film, Bauer uses a flashback scene to differentiate between the two women. Bauer chose to film the two shots, where Sergei is remembering his dead wife, outside in a natural setting (see Figure 4.18). In these flashbacks, which are the only times we see Sergei’s wife Elena alive, the pastoral settings strengthen the association between his dead wife and the eternal feminine figure of the Symbolists. This sequence also serves to connect the wife and Tina through Sergei’s obsession with hair. The shot seen in Figure 4.18 ends with Sergei and his wife sitting down; Sergei fondly pets her loose flowing hair, an action he will repeat later on with Tina, his wife’s doppelganger. It is interesting to note that Tina is only shot within the confines of the city (in apartments, in the theater and on the city streets). While the wife is only portrayed as a corpse or a memory, Tina is an urban woman in the flesh and that is what the Symbolist both feared and desired. Tina is the anti- Sophia; she is the sexual being, the incarnation of earthly, not spiritual, love. Unable to move through the mourning process, Sergei becomes obsessed with his dead wife and surrounds himself with her pictures, with her fetishized hair always nearby, kept in a box beside his desk. 167 Figure 4.19 & 4.20 Daydreams, portraits of Sergei’s wife Elena. In a scene of Sergei in his study (see Figures 4.19 and 4.20), we see Elena’s face on nearly every surface in the room (walls, desk, mantle, fireplace, etc…). 26 The plethora of images presents an obstacle to the mourning process, “the photos necessarily originate in the lived body” and thus functions as evidence of the ‘referent’s’ embodiment, 27 like the hair, they too become a fetish for the dead/absent woman. Sergei literally surrounds himself with these mementos that ‘originated in the lived body’ of his now dead wife, and their presence/her presence prevents him from moving on with his life. The substitution of the image, in place of the real life woman, becomes especially clear in the second scene in the film, when the nurse who is cleaning Sergei’s study picks up a photograph of Elena, hugs it to her chest and then accidentally breaks the frame trying to return it. Sergei walks in and sees what has happened, grabs the photo from the nurse (see Figure 4.20), and exclaims, “Elena’s 26 There are at least eleven photographs/images strewn about the room, basically there some form of representation of her on every surface. 27 Laura E. Tanner, Lost Bodies: Inhabiting the Borders of Life and Death (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006) 111. 168 photograph,” as if it were Elena herself that fell. He stares at the photo, holding it tenderly and is about to kiss it when the nurse, puts a hand on his arm and leaves the room. Photographs have become replacements for the dead feminine corpse; they create a presence of sorts for the dead wife, by specifically marking her absence. Many scholars, Doane and Usai included, have remarked on the similarities between Bauer’s Grezy and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The similarities are striking, with “males obsessed with hair and portraits, madness, dead women and other women made up to replace them, and a fascination with femininity that throws masculine identity into question and crisis.” In Bauer’s films that crisis is emasculation and, for Sergei as well as Count Glinskii, that fascination ultimately means madness. Sergei’s inability to bring his wife back, and to regain his identity, results in the complete annihilation of his sense of reality, to nothingness and sheer madness. Unable to end his own life, he kills the imperfect version of his wife and, sealing his madness, strangles Tina with his virgin wife’s braid, so bringing the film to its conclusion. Fetishistic obsession is not the only thing Daydreams and Vertigo have in common, Tania Modleski points to Scottie’s faulty vision in Vertigo as proof that he “occupies a feminine position.” 28 A similar “faulty” vision also characterizes Daydreams. Bauer accentuates Sergei’s “faulty” vision in several scenes. Sergei first mistakes Tina for his wife when he first encounters her on the street. Sergei’s 28 Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988) 87 & 96. 169 confusion over and obsession with the image of his dead wife leads him to think Tina is his dead wife, Elena, a fact which is reinforced by Bauer’s decision to have one actress play both roles. 29 Sergei’s confusion over Tina’s identity and his inability to see clearly is further complicated when he watches her perform in a production of Robert the Devil, an opera by Giacomo Meyerbeer. This scene is critical for Sergei’s misrecognition/confusing of Tina as his dead wife. Bauer cross-cuts between Tina’s performance on stage and Sergei watching the performance from the audience (see Figures 4.21 and 4.22). 30 The fact that Tina plays the part of a dead woman in the opera only serves to further confuse Sergei and prevent him from seeing clearly. Sergei is not able to separate the two women in his head. His faulty vision is reinforced by the fact that one actress plays both parts, thus the spectator of the film is also not able to discern the difference between the living and the dead. The entire scene lasts more that six minutes in length. 31 The scene that we see in the film is Act III, Scene II – The Tombs of the Convent at St. Rosalie. 29 Like Sergei, the viewer too, cannot tell the difference between Tina and Elena. 30 Bauer uses this type of cross-cutting to establish faulty vision/misrecognition in several of his films. It serves to accentuate the misrecognition and to heighten the emotion of the scene. 31 This is a long time for a scene of this nature to last, a fact which calls attention to its importance in the narrative. 170 Figure 4.21 Daydreams, dead nuns. Figure 4.22 Daydreams, misrecognition. In this scene we see Bertram (Robert’s father and a disciple of the devil), in the portion of the cemetery where nuns who have sinned have been buried. Bertram wakes the corpses of the sinful nuns who rise from their tombs and under the guidance of their leader Helene, they dance a bacchanal in an attempt to seduce Robert, before descending again into their tombs. 32 Tina plays the part of the corpse of Helene, brought back from the dead. In this instance, we have a corpse that is not actually a corpse, a living substitution for a dead woman. The performance serves to further confuse the boundaries between the living and the dead, between the feminine corpse and female body that lives, breathes and loves. Sergei courts this actress, Tina, and falls in love with her, or rather falls in love with this ‘living image’ of his dead wife. Whereas Hitchcock signals Scottie’s vertigo graphically, Bauer uses ornate, overcrowded set design to imply mental derangement. Sergei’s house consists of two floors, but he spends the majority of his time in one room. The elaborate white 32 This information is based on the synopsis found at http://www.meyerbeer.com/rob- syn.htm, 10/01/2007. 171 design on the walls is overly busy. The room is full of furniture and other statuesque decorations, and wherever one looks there is a portrait of Sergei’s dead wife. The visual chaos of the room imparts a sense of claustrophobia, or neurasthenia-induced schizophrenia. There is no rhyme or reason to the clutter in Sergei’s house, other than keeping the viewer from looking at any one part of the frame for too long. Sergei, in Fedorovian fashion attempts to re-create his dead wife in the body of Tina. By having Tina’s portrait painted wearing Elena’s clothes and jewelry (signifiers for the dead women and Sergei’s fetishization of her), Sergei hopes to make the transformation complete. Like the painting of Carlotta in Vertigo, such portraits symbolically stand in for both women in life and in death. The painting also connects the men in both films with madness, and marks their inability to see clearly, to separate the living from the dead. Figure 4.23 Daydreams, the apparition. 172 Tina confronts Sergei regarding his necrophilia, telling him to “Go lie down with your dead wife…” Sergei is only able to come to terms with the fact that this dancer/actress is a streetwise, materialistic, crass woman and nothing like his wife, when Elena comes to him in a vision. Sergei is unwilling to accept that his eyes are tricking him until the end of the film. The vision of his dead wife, the perfect embodiment of the Solov’evian Eternal Feminine (in other words an asexual woman, maternal yet unable to bear children), materializes in a superimposition over the physical body of Tina, dressed in a gauzy white gown adding to her an ethereal appearance and her connection to the Eternal Feminine (see Figure 4.23). It is only then that Sergei can separate reality from wishful thinking. Unfortunately, it is too late, and the end result is death and insanity. Figure 4.144 Daydreams, The End of Tina. 173 The film culminates with an action reminiscent of the sex act, as Sergei, astride Tina, struggles to strangle her with the dead hair of his dead wife, Elena (a slippery slope of signifiers). Following the struggle, la petite mort, Sergei pulls away panting, and the film ends with Tina’s corpse in the center foreground of the film frame. 33 According to Elisabeth Bronfen, this feminine corpse serves as a displaced signifier for the dead body of a woman, 34 yet in Daydreams this displacement is doubled because Tina’s corpse is a signifier for not only her own dead body but also that of Sergei’s wife. The film is book-ended by acts of violence, therefore, in the first instance Sergei cuts the braid of hair from the corpse of his dead wife, and in the second instance he uses that braid to end the life of Tina (his wife’s double). In addition to the literal violence enacted on the feminine corpse, Bronfen also ponders “whether every representation of dying is not violent precisely because it implies the safe position of a spectator (voyeur).” 35 In other words, we as spectators, from our position of safety, are complicit in the act of violence perpetrated by Sergei, and also by Bauer, as the artist responsible for bringing the process of death to life. By choosing to end the film with Tina’s dead corpse in the frame, Bauer relies on persistence of vision to keep the image of Tina’s dead body in our mind’s eye. Thus Bauer perpetuates the act of violence, and carries forth the image of the feminine corpse beyond the walls of the cinema. 33 I am purposefully conflating the popular French idiom (le petite mort) for an orgasm, or rather the fainting spell following an orgasm and the phrase which means the small dead female. 34 Bronfen 52. 35 Bronfen 44. 174 The Dying Swan Bauer’s film The Dying Swan [Umiraiushchii Lebed’] (1917) provides us with another example of how he uses Symbolism, modernity and melodrama to complicate and create ambiguity in the sexual relationships that are developed. The film also utilized the themes of madness, obsession and death to create further ambiguity. The Dying Swan recounts the story of a young, mute ballerina named Gizella, who poses for the mad painter, Glinksii. 36 The film is based on the popular novella written by Zoia Barantsevich, who also was a frequent actress in Bauer’s films. Barantsevich wrote the scenario with Vera Karalli in mind. 37 In the film, Gizella lives in a villa in the country with her father, a ballet instructor. One day while out picking flowers in the countryside, Gizella encounters Viktor. They are attracted to each other and Viktor begins to court Gizella. When Gizella catches Viktor, kissing another woman, she is brokenhearted and asks her father to take her away. They go to the city so that Gizella may resume her dancing career. Meanwhile, the viewer is introduced to Count Glinskii, a painter who is obsessed with portraying death. Glinskii’s lack of success in capturing death on canvas drives him ever closer to the brink of madness. Through a friend, Glinskii hears of Gizella’s performance in “The Dying Swan.” After seeing Gizella’s 36 Gizella is played by Vera Karalli, who in turn was a real-life ballerina. This creates multiple layers and contributes to confusion between fiction and reality, between real and unreal. 37 Denise Youngblood, The Magic Mirror: Moviemaking in Russia, 1908-1918 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999) 99. 175 melancholic realization of the dying swan, Glinskii is enraptured with her ability to portray death and asks if she will pose for him in costume as the dying swan. Gizella agrees, which shows, as Denise Youngblood has pointed out, her complete independence from her father as she makes her own decisions. 38 Despite her father’s misgivings, Gizella continues to pose for Glinskii, and her independent decisions reveal a tragic error of judgment. This type of judgment, or rather misjudgment, is typical of melodrama, which is predicated on actions which cause missed meetings and mistaken identity. In the meantime, Viktor has been searching for her and, reading about her success as a ballerina, he decides to ask her forgiveness. They run into each other after one of her sessions with Glinskii, and the following day Viktor writes to her about his love for her. They meet, and once again Gizella asserts her independence as she accepts his proposal of marriage. Aglow with life and love, Gizella arrives for her last sitting with Glinskii. He is immediately aware that something has changed, and she no longer embodies the traits Glinskii has associated with death. Upset by the change that has overcome Gizella and worried for his painting, Glinskii “calmly breaks her neck, returns her to the ‘correct’ unnatural pose, and continues to paint.” 39 The ultimate irony is that killing Gizella is the only way for Glinskii’s art to become real and to have a life of its own. 38 Gizella makes many decisions on her own: to pose for the Count, to marry Victor, see Youngblood 99. 39 Youngblood 99. 176 Bauer’s filmmaking is especially known for his lush and carefully designed interiors, yet because exterior shots were infrequent in his films, the viewer learns to pay attention to them. In The Dying Swan, Bauer shot the entire opening of the film, with Gizella and her father in the country, in natural exterior locations. 40 The countryside scenes are idyllic in the way they are shot, with wide-open spaces, flowing rivers and lush plant life. Each time Gizella encounter Viktor, she is portrayed as the Symbolists’ ideal woman, the ‘Divine Sophia,’ dressed in white and seen by the river, picking flowers on the hillside (see Figure 4.25), or tending her garden. 41 Figure 4.25 The Dying Swan, Gizella. 40 This film was most likely shot in Riga, which accounts for the beautiful countryside shots and the more or less cheated city shots (all interiors). 41 As in the poetry of Zinaida Gippius, the female character or persona, in this case, Gizella is associated with nature. Also, as in Gippius, these initial encounters are accidental, or rather can be seen as acts of fate. 177 Her connection with nature and her inability to speak, to produce (language) also equates her with the Eternal Feminine. She is told several times early in the film that the beauty of her pure soul and expressiveness of her eyes negates the necessity for speech. In other words, as an idealized female, her mouth (as a site for production) is rendered useless. In contrast to the beautiful outdoor shots in the country, the portions of the film that take place in the city are for the most part shot indoors. There seems to be a disconnect, despite the possibilities offered by the city, and Gizella is visually confined by the city spaces. In spite of this, Gizella is a modern woman and as Denise Youngblood points out, “True, Gizella doesn’t smoke cigarettes (the telltale sign of the modern woman), but she has a career and wears a wristwatch (two other potent signs of female emancipation).” 42 Because of her status as a modern woman, Gizella is successful in the city and is able to secure the leading role in the ballet “The Dying Swan.” In the city Gizella becomes famous for her performance in the ballet “The Dying Swan.” Her success as a performer is predicated on her repeatedly, enacting a death scene. The way in which Bauer chooses to film Gizella’s performance, which supposedly would have been advertised in the popular news, is more reminiscent of films from the “cinema of attractions” period. Shot from a standard theatrical perspective, it stands out from the rest of the film, as one of two scenes in the entire 42 Youngblood 99. 178 film that are tinted, the purple tinted scene looks more like a Pathé vaudeville short than part of Bauer’s narrative. Rather than briefly show Gizella giving a performance, Bauer includes the entire performance of the death scene, almost a full three minutes in length, allowing the spectator and Glinskii to see Gizella/the Swan in the violent throws of death. The death scene illustrates Gizella’s ability act/create free from the men in her life who control her (her father, Viktor, and soon Glinskii). While the ballet was written, choreographed and directed by men, including Bauer, Gizella is able to transcend their influence to create something that is uniquely her own, yet she is still trapped within the decadent association between artistry and death. 43 In a series of shot-reverse shots, similar to those in Daydreams, we see that Glinskii has found the image he must paint (see Figure 4.27), the moment of her dying (see Figure 4.26), the beautifully posed feminine corpse (the first of a series of foreshadows). The cutting involved in such an editing technique, wherein the body of the film is cut (violated), is such that we have the foreshadowing of the dancer’s death. In which case, the film (the body that is the film) becomes metonym for the body of the woman/dancer. 43 Remember however, that the film narrative was written not by a man, but by a woman, one of Khanzhonkov’s other female stars, Zoia Barantsevich. 179 Figure 4.26 The Dying Swan, the swan dies. Figure 4.27 The Dying Swan, misrecognition. Another reason why this scene is important is because it plays with the melodramatic trope of recognition and misrecognition. Bauer films the majority of the dying swan performance in a medium long shot, but towards the end, when the swan/Gizella is in the final throws of death, Bauer cross-cuts to Glinksii reacting to the performance. This is followed by a medium close-up of Gizella, as death overcomes the swan, and then we cut back to Glinskii. The cutting back and forth to Glinskii during the death of the swan implies that he recognizes an accurate portrayal of death, when in actuality it is a misrecognition that will eventually lead to Gizella’s murder. The scene serves as a heightened moment of symbolism, with the form and the visual impression foreshadowing the end of the film. At the same time, this scene contributes to melodramatic tension in the film by creating a disruption in the narrative. 44 While Gizella is associated with both the Divine Sophia and the modern urban woman, Count Glinksii, is portrayed as the perfect embodiment of decadence, 44 Bauer frequently uses theses performances pieces in his films, to accentuate and create new understandings of his characters. 180 surrounded by lush spaces filled with flowers, works of art and icons of death. Like Pavel in Silent Witnesses, Count Glinksii is often seen brooding, lost in his preoccupation to portray death. Figure 4.28 The Dying Swan, Glinksii and the crown. When Glinksii appears in the frame (see Figure 4.28) he is almost always accompanied by some death artifact, his own attempts at painting death, or skeletal remains as in this image, where he is searching through a trunk of props. 45 Bauer also uses chiaroscuro lighting, emphasized by black and white features in the set design to further connect Glinksii with a fascination with the other world of death. 46 The Count’s complete fascination with death not only mirrors the decadent 45 This image is also important because the trunk is full of crowns with an ominous connection to Gizella’s nightmare in the next scene. 46 For example, Glinskii’s apartment is tiled with large black and white tile. 181 preoccupation with death, its beauty and its emancipating qualities, but it also is reflected in popular news of the day as I mentioned earlier. 47 Glinskii asks Gizella to pose for him, saying portentously that it would be a ‘miracle of art’. In the image below, we see Glinskii in his studio surrounded by death artifacts, the skeleton and his various attempts at capturing death. The first time Gizella enters his studio (which is starkly contrasted in black and white, from black and white tiled floor to the chiaroscuro lighting) he scatters flowers at her feet (see Figure 4.29). While beautiful, the flowers signify something that is alive and dead at the same time, their beauty always already marking their impending withering and decomposition. Glinskii hovers over Gizella’s posed body, foreshadowing the final scene when he will hover over her dead body. Figure 4.29 The Dying Swan, flowers. Figure 4.30 The Dying Swan, death triangle. When he begins to paint, we see an interesting triangulated power dynamic (see Figure 4.30), between Glinskii, Gizella and the skeleton. In other words, there are 47 This observation is based on a study of several newspapers and journals in 1913. Not only was a fear of the apocalypse still prevalent, it was now combined with fear of the dangers of technology and modernity. 182 three different representations of death which simultaneously attempt to attract the attention of the viewer’s eye: the skeleton is death after decomposition, Gizella is at once alive and yet dead (or rather her pose foreshadows her death), and Glinskii is the creator of death (it is he who paints the portrait, and it is his hand that will break the neck of Gizella.) The melodramatic tension in the film is further increased after Gizella receives a crown from Glinskii. That night, Gizella has a nightmare foretelling her future. The nightmare sequence is the second tinted scene in the film. Blue tinting was traditionally used for nighttime scenes; here however, the blue also adds a nice surreal quality to the chiaroscuro lighting and set design. In the nightmare Gizella finds herself in the atrium to Glinskii’s studio (see Figure 4.31), and a woman appears in nun-like dress and leads her down into a crypt under Glinskii’s studio. The woman tells her, “I, too was beautiful like you, I was incarcerated here, you are wearing my crown, and you too will die here.” 183 Figure 4.31 The Dying Swan, the dead nun. At this, the vision disappears, and the nightmare continues as hands appear out of nowhere, grasping at Gizella, foreshadowing her death by strangulation at Glinskii’s hands. Bauer may have intended that the contents of the chest belonged to dead women. Thus, if Glinksii has in fact killed others, then he is keeping the crowns from his previous dying swans as mementos, fetishes representing the once beautiful dead female corpses. The nightmare calls to mind the scene in Daydreams where the dead nuns try to seduce Robert the Devil, only in this sequence the nuns are trying to warn Gizella, of impending doom should she continue her relationship with the madman Glinskii. The dream ends with Gizella cowering from the multiple pairs of hands that appear out of the darkness to strangle her (see figure 4.32). 184 Figure 4.32 The Dying Swan, Gizella and the hands. Gizella’s nightmare sequence is a further example of Bauer’s use of aestheticism, stressing the emotional value of the image, using it to foreshadow the end of the film and to make the end even more horrific. While Glinksii strangles Gizella, Bauer inter-cuts the shot of the reaching hands, as if Gizella is recalling her dream, the image of the deathly white hands becomes an emphatic refrain. In true melodramatic fashion, Gizella, in love again, ignores the nun’s warning and shows up at Glinskii’s studio for what turns out to be her last session with him. Glinskii realizes something has changed. Unable to recreate Gizella’s perfect death-like pose, Glinksii asks “Gizella, are you alive? That won’t do at all.” 185 Figure 4.33 The Dying Swan, posing Gizella. Figure 4.34 The Dying Swan, handiwork. He then strangles her in order to finish his painting (see Figure 4.33). While she is dying Gizella, has a flash memory of the hands grasping at her from her dream. Glinskii stands back to admire his work, a shot reminiscent of when she first posed for him (see Figure 4.34). According to Bronfen, “The feminine body appears as a perfect immaculate aesthetic form because it is a dead body, solidified into an object of art.” 48 Glinskii finally has his true artistic representation of death. Gizella’s dead body has become the art object (see Figure 4.35). Ultimately, this is a film about art imitating life, but in the end, life becomes art, a familiar trope in Symbolist circles which works on several levels. First, Vera Karalli, a real life ballerina, plays Gizella. The trope of art imitating life and vice versa is continued later within the story, a painter attempts to paint death, but life interferes, and the artist must kill his model. 48 Bronfen 5. 186 Figure 4.35 The Dying Swan, the dead swan. The dead woman becomes the work of art herself, allowing, and enabling him to finish his painting. Gizella becomes immortal as a work of art, just as the film itself immortalizes the moment in which the actors and actresses appeared before the camera. Conclusion Within the spectator’s attraction to the cinema would seem to be two competing biographical impulses: one that is morbid and fascinated with death, and another that is vital and enchanted with immortality. Lucy Fisher 49 “Teresa de Lauretis argues that representations of violence cannot be separated from notions of gender, because the meaning that a certain representation of violence assumes is dependent on the gender of the violated object being 49 Fisher, “Marlene,” 196. 187 depicted.” 50 The violence in Bauer’s films works on several levels. First, we have the violent act of the murders, and second, we have the filmic representation of those deaths, the filming of which implies additional violence upon the feminine corpses. In these films by Evgenii Bauer, the violated objects are feminine corpses, signifiers for the dead bodies of Tina and Gizella. The have status as subjects, active performers, forever displaced by their transformation into objects. This, however, is further complicated by the role cinema plays in this process of signification. If as Tanner states, the photograph functions as evidence of the referent’s embodiment, 51 then the films too, as a series of individual photographs, function as evidence of the ‘lived bodies’ of Chernobaeva and Karalli. Tsivian notes that “Russian aesthetic thought in the age of Symbolism was still dominated by a fundamental axiom on the nature of art as formulated by the German Romantics: that art is a living organism.” 52 Thus, in addition to the films’ narratives marking shifting chains of signification, the films themselves add additional layers of signification, marking the presence/absence of the actresses, reinforcing the confusion about gender by calling attention to the female body. At the end of the film she does not die, she is transformed into a living work of art. According to Catherine Schuler “In a culture that still demanded silence, obedience, and invisibility from its women, actresses became highly visible representatives of, and concrete points of reference for both the preservation of old, 50 Bronfen 50, see also Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) 42. 51 Tanner 11. 52 Tsivian 8. 188 and the construction of new models of ‘zhenstvennost’ [femininity].” 53 In other words, by choosing to make the heroines of his melodramas stars of the stage, Bauer foregrounds the growing visibility and independence of working women in Russia during the teens. In her exploration of the combination of popular romance with melodrama in Russian and Polish literature, Beth Holmgren sheds some light on Bauer’s uses of melodrama, noting that “The admixture of melodrama at once elevates the popular heroine and connects her meaningfully with a changing society conflicted about gender ....” 54 Holmgren observes that the western model of melodrama is altered in Russian literature, by the death of the female character, signifying these conflicting views on gender. Bauer’s characters represent talented, successful, independent, sexually aware, urban women, and this new model of womanhood is not negated by their deaths in the films. According to Bronfen, “representations as symptoms articulate unconscious knowledge and unconscious desires in a displaced, recoded and translated manner.” 55 In other words, Bauer’s heroines, or rather their dead bodies, become the site of a cultural construction, where changing meanings about gender are played out and where cultural change is ‘borne’ at the expense their bodies. 56 Through the heightened attention to the violent deaths and the feminine corpses, 53 Catherine Schuler, Women in Russian Theatre: The Actress in the Silver Age (New York: Routledge, 1996) 11. 54 Beth Holmgren, “The Importance of Being Unhappy, or, Why She Died,” Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia, eds. Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) 81. 55 Louise McReynolds, introduction, Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia, eds. Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) xi. 56 Thanks again to Heidi Rae Cooley for helping tease out the point I wanted to make. 189 Bauer’s films end with the death/murder of the female protagonists. With the feminine corpse in the frame, Bauer gives them the last word; or rather calls into question any fixed meaning or identity assigned to the female body. 190 Chapter Six Afterthoughts Without fear of exaggeration, a wide use can be predicted for this invention because of its tremendous novelty. But how great are its results, compared with the expenditure of nervous energy that it requires? Is it possible for it to be applied usefully to compensate for the nervous strain it produces in the spectator? A yet more important problem is that our nerves are getting weaker and less reliable, we are reacting less to natural sensations of our daily life, and thirst more eagerly for new strong sensations. The cinematograph gives you all these – cultivating nerves on the one hand and dulling them on the other. The thirst for such strange, fantastic sensations as it gives will grow ever greater, and we will be increasingly less able and less willing to grasp the everyday impressions of ordinary life. This thirst for the strange and new can lead us far, very far . . . Maxim Gorky 1 Maxim Gorky was asked by the newspaper he was writing for to check into this new invention called the cinematograph, his reactions were both insightful and prophetic. While Gorky questions the wisdom of becoming enamored with this invention that both excites and dulls the nervous system, he predicts that it will have many uses far into the future. It is very interesting that Gorky defines cinema, with its inherent contradictions, in much the same way the George Simmel described the hyperstimulus of modernity, with the repetitive shocks of everyday urban life dulling the sensations and the subsequent thirst for new sensations to shock and thrill. It is cinema’s ability to mirror the effects of modernity, in combination with its ability, as Benjamin puts it, to “burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of 1 Maxim Gorky’s comments on the Cinematograph were translated by Leonard Mins and published in New Theater and Film (New York) March, 1937 and were quoted by Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) 20. 191 a second” that allows Evgenii Bauer the freedom to make films that question modern Russian gender construction. I began this dissertation with a quote from film scholar Alison Butler discussing the problems inherent in defining a ‘women’s cinema’, more specifically that it is a “hybrid concept, arising from a number of overlapping practices and discourses.” I used this quote as a way of framing my discussion of Evgenii Bauer’s appellation as a “Woman’s Director” and what that may have meant to audiences in Russia prior to the revolution. In her essay, “An Image of Their Own?: Feminism, Revisionism and Russian Culture,” Rosalind Marsh suggests, in a similar fashion as Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure,” that feminist revisions of male-authored texts basically are pointless, that male-authored texts are inherently phallocentric, and instead we need to look at how women counter these representations with works of their own. 2 I think the problem with Marsh’s assessment is that it only ever assumes that there is one possible reading of a text. At one point she even pontificates that real women reading these idealized versions of women in literary texts must have been overwhelmed with their own inadequacies – in other words she does not allow for agency on the part of the reader in managing the way in which she interprets these images. Evgenii Bauer made films about women for women. By taking into account Butler’s assertion that cinema for women is constructed through a series of 2 Rosalind Marsh, “An Image of Their Own?: Feminism, Revisionism and Russian Culture,” Women and Russian Culture: Projections and Self-Perceptions, ed. Rosalind Marsh (New York: Berghahn Books, 1998) 2-41. 192 overlapping practices and discourses, I have argued that it is possible to go beyond Marsh’s single noted assumptions and see that a feminist reading of Bauer’s texts is possible. By this I do not mean merely that Bauer’s films were intended for female audiences, though women did make up a significant portion of the filmgoing audience in the early Twentieth Century, what I mean is that there are subtle nuances or ambiguities in Bauer’s films that create space for the possibility of pleasure and empowerment of the female audience. Through our detailed discussions of Bauer’s incorporation of modern urban space, modernity and his use of mise-en-scene, narrative structure, lighting, I have clarified the types of female representations he created in his films and the implications they had for female audiences. I discussed cultural influences on Bauer’s films, as they add extra-textual meaning to our understanding of the development of his female characters and the viewers who watched them. I situated Bauer’s films historically, in order to create a fuller picture of the issues surrounding female spectatorship at the turn of the century in Russia. By looking at the overabundance of female representation in Bauer’s work, I explored how his films worked to supplant and subvert the culturally constructed lack created by Russia’s patriarchal order. The various aspects of Bauer’s career, including his use of melodrama, combined specifically with visual elements that replicate aspects of modernity. All of these elements worked together to create a liminal space, where traditional understanding of the types of roles and representations available to women were changing, allowing for new perspectives. 193 Much in the same way that work from the last few decades on women in Weimar cinema expanded our understanding of feminist scholarship and film history in Germany, it is my hope that this dissertation will add to a growing body of knowledge about the role of women as participants in, and active consumers of, culture in Russia at the turn of the century. My detailed analysis of the films of Evgenii Bauer and his role as “The Woman’s Director” will add to our understanding of early Russian cinema and Russian spectatorship during this critical period in Russian history, between the turn of the century and the Russian Revolution. My exploration of the films of Evgenii Bauer deals with such a small portion of what was produced in Russia in the years prior to the 1917 Revolution. In researching this dissertation I have become intrigued by the business practices of Alexander and Alexandra Khanzhonkov and the Khanzhonkov studio. I would like to do additional research on their two studio publications to explore in further detail the ways in which they promoted their female talent. In addition to this, I think a more complete examination of the work of other filmmakers employed by the Khanzhonkov studio is in order. Was Bauer the only filmmaker making films that addressed the needs and desires of the female audience or were his films part of a larger studio wide plan to increase sales by marketing to women? In that sense, how were other studios addressing their female audience members? I am also intrigued by the role women played in the production process in Russia. Women worked in various roles in the industry, as actors, set designers, editors, screen writer and even as directors, yet why is there so little written about them? 194 I think the role of the film industry in laying bare the problems of gender construction in Russia is not to be underestimated. Perhaps there needs to be more exploration into the relation of gender construction in Pre-Revolutionary film with the emancipation of women in the Soviet era. Finally, to end with death yet again, I think this work calls for more research into the link between artistic representation and death around the turn of the century in Russia. 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Demert. Cameraman N. Kozlovskii. Performers Nina Chernova, A. Ugriumov, and V. Demert. Star Film Factory [A. Khanzhonkov and Pathé Frères], 1913. Spring Tale [Lesnaia Skazka] drama, 545 m., Director E. F. Bauer. Performers: N. A. Chernova, Sud’binin. 1914 Marriage by Publication [Brak po publikatsii]farce in 4 parts, Director: E. F. Bauer. Operator/cameraman: B. I. Zavelev. Performers: D. L. Chitorina, A. Kheruvimov, *Child of the Big City [Ditya Bol'shogo Goroda] (Alternate title: Devushka s Ulitsy; The Girl from the Street). Drama. Director and Art Designer Evgenii Bauer. Cameraman Boris Zavelev. Performers Elena Smirnova, Nina Kozlyaninova, Mikhail Salarov, Aresnii Biblikov, Leonid Iost, Lidiya Tridenskaya, Emma Bauer. [A. Khanzhonkov], 1914. The Road to Hell [Doroga v ad] farce. Director: E. F. Bauer. Performers: Emma Bauer, I. Mozzhukhin, N, Bashilov. *Her Heroic Exploit [Ee geroiskii podvig] farce in 3 parts. Director: E. F. Bauer. Performers: N. Bashilov, L. Tridenskaia, Iu. V. Vasil’eva, D. L. Chitorina, I. Mozzhukhin, E. Bauer. Life in Death [Zhizn’ v cmerti] drama in 3 parts. Director: E. F. Bauer. Performers: I. Mozzhukhin, A. Gromov, I. A. Lashchilina, P. A. Biriukov, N. R. Nikol’skii. Evil Night [Zlaia Noch’] film romance in 3 parts. Director: E.F. Bauer. Performers: I. Mozzhukhin, V. A. Karalli, M Kulikova, A. Gromov Ideals of Contemporary Youth [Idealy sovremennoi molodezhi] farce in 4 parts. Director: E. F. Bauer. Performers: D. Chitorina. 205 *Silent Witnesses [Nemye Svideteli] Drama. Director Evgenii Bauer. Script Aleksandr Voznesenskii. Performers Dora Chitorna, Aleksandr Kheruvimov, Aleksandr Chargonin, Elsa Kryuger, Andrei Gromov, Viktor Petipa. [A. Khanzhonkov], 1914. *Glory to Us, Death to the Enemy [Slava Nam— Smert' Vagram]Drama in 3 parts. Director: E. F. Bauer. Performers: I. Mozzhukhin, D Chitorina Tears [Slezy] melodrama in three parts. Scenario by A. S. Voznesenskii. Director: E. F. Bauer. Operator/cameraman: B. Zavelev. Music by I. Sats. Performers: V. L. Iureneva, I. N. Bersenev, A. Barov, N. N. Pomerantsev. Little Pages of Life[Stranichki zhizni] (Under the onslaught of passion/Pod natiskom strasti) Drama etude. Director: E. F. Bauer. Operator/cameraman: P. K. Novitskii. Performers: A. Kheruvimov, N. R. Nikol’skii, K. P. Novitskaia, S. Goslavskaia. The secret at the German Embassy [Taina Germanskogo posol’stva] Drama in 3 parts, 900 m. Scenario by A. Aleksandrovich. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Performers: I. Mozzhukhin. *Only Once a Year [Tol’ko raz v gorodu] farce in four parts. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Performers: Emma Bauer. *Cold Showers [Kholodnye Dushi] farce in four parts. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Performers: Emma Bauer. *Lyulya Bek Drama. Directed by Evgenii Bauer. Scenario by Anna Mar. Performers: Lidiya Ryndina, Mikhail Salarov (not listed in Khanzhonkov’s book) 1915 Brothers Boris and Gleb [Brat’ia Boris i Gleb] (Alternate Title: The Nikolaev Brothers/Brat’ia Nikolaevy) drama in 4 parts (second in the series Irina Kirsanova). Scenario by Antalek. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator/cameraman B. Zavelev. Performers: V. A. Polonskii, A. A. Vyrubov, L.G. Terek, S. S. Rassatov, O. V. Rakhmanova, I. Gorskii, A. Sotnikov. 206 *Daydreams [Grezy] (Alternate Title: Deceived Dreams /Obmanutye Mechty). Director Evgenii Bauer. Script M. Basov and Valentin Turkin. Cameraman Boris Zavelev. Performers Aleksandr Vyrubov, N. Chernobaeva, Viktor Arens, V. F. Verkhovtseva. Based on the novel Bruges la Morte by Georges Rodenbach, 1889. [A. Khanzhonkov], 1915. *The Happiness of Eternal Night [Schast'e Vechnoi Nochi]. Drama in four parts. Director Evgenii Bauer. Script I. Statkevich. Camera Boris Zavelev. Performers Vera Karalli, Ol’ga Rakhmanova, Vitol’d Polonskii, Oleg Frelikh, E. Popello-Davydova, Parel Knorr, Tamara Gedvanova. Preserved without titles. [A. Khanzhonkov], 1915. *Children of the Age [Deti Veka] Drama in four reels. Scenario by M. L. Mikhailov. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. Zavelev. Performers: V. V. Kholodnaia, S. Rassatov, V. Glinskaia, A. Bibikov, A. Sotnikov, I. Gorskii. The Doctor with the Canine Playground [Doktor s sobach’ei ploshchadki] farce in three parts. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Performers: Lina Bauer, N. Bashilov, L. Tridenskaia, A. Kheruvimov, Golub’, Plotin. Worthy Nation [Dostoinyi natsii]Drama in 4 parts. Scenario by Moldavtsev. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Performers: A. N. Bibikov, N. I. Margaritov, N. Snezhina, Emma Bauer, V. A. Polonskii, A. Sotnikov, N. Nel’skaia. *The Pearl Necklace [Zhemchuzhnoe ozherel’e] Tragic miniature in one part. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Evil Boy [Zloi mal’chik] comedy in one part (based on a story by A. Chekhov). Performers: N. Snezhina, V. Brianskii, P. Knorr, Lina Bauer. (no director listed) Irina Kirsanova (Executioner of another’s life/Palach chuzhoi zhizni) drama in four parts. Scenario by Antalek. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator: B. I. Zavelev. Performers: L. G. Terek, V. A. Polonskii, A. A. Vyrubov, V. Glinskaia, I. Gorskii, T. Gedevanova, A. Sotnik. Club of Morality [Klub nravstvennosti] farce in 4 parts. Performers: Lina Bauer, V. Brianskii. (no director listed) Idols [Kumiry] Drama in 4 parts (based on the novel by V. Lokk). Directed by E. F. Bauer. Performers: L. M. Koreneva, I. Mozzhukhin, R. Reizen, A. Vyrubov, A. Bibikov. 207 *Leon Drey (The Lady-Killer/Pokoritel' Zhenskikh Serdets) drama in six parts, based on the tale by S. Iushkevich). Directed by E. F. Bauer. Performers: N. M. Radin, N. A. Lisenko, B. S. Borisov, I. E. Duvan-Tortsov, R. Raisova, Lina Bauer, R. Reizen, Iudina-Brender, Dalilina, M. Khalatova. Antosha Punished [Hakazannyi Antosha] tragic-farce in two parts. Performers: A Fertner, Lina Bauer, V. Kholodnaia, V. Brianskii. (no director listed) [Nu, i polozhen’itse!] a summer picture in one part. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Scorched Wings [Obozhzhennye Kryl’ia] (Alternate Title: I search for a soul, shaken and beautiful/Ishchu ia Dushi, potriasennoi, prekrasnoi) drama in six parts, based on the novel by Iu. Slezkina, “Ol’ga Org.” Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator: B. I. Zavelev. Performers: V. A. Karalli, O. I. Runich, V. A. Polonskii, S. S. Rassatov, N. Margaritov, L. Tridenskaia, G. Azagarov, A. Bibikov. From Crime to Crime [Ot prestupleniia k prestupleniiu] comedy in three parts. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Performers: V. A. Karalli, A. M. Karalli-Tortsov. Song of Triumphant Love [Pesn’ torzhestvuiushchei liubvi] drama in four parts, based on a story by I. S. Turgenev. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Performers: V. V. Kholodnaia, V. A. Polonskii, O. I. Runich, P. V. Nikonova, A. Bibikov, A. Sotnikov. The Flame of Heaven [Plamia Neba] dramatic poem in four parts with a prologue and epilogue in verse. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Performers: V. V. Kholodnaia, A. A. Vyrubov. The Adventures of Shpeiera and his gang “Red Jacks [Pokhozhdeniia Shpeiera i ego shaiuki ‘Chervonnykh Valetov’] (Alternate Title: The Battle between a genius trickster and the handle of Son’ka-gold/Bor’ba genial’nogo aferista s Son’koi-zolotoi ruchkoi) drama in five parts. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Performers: N. Nel’skaia, B. F. El’skii, G. Azagarov, S. Kvasnitskii, P. Biriukov, N. Nigof. Native Souls [Rodnye Dushi] kino-romance in five parts, 1596 m. Scenario V. A. Karalli. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Performers: V. A. Karalli, O. Runich. *The Thousand and Second Ruse [Tysyacha Vtoraya Khitrost] comedy in one part based on the play by V. Azova ‘1001 Ruses’. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Performers: Lina Bauer 208 *First Love [Pervaya Lyubov'] comedy. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Performers: Glinskaya Jr., Emma Bauer Jr., V. Glinskaia, Tat’yana Bakh. The Murder of the Burned Ballerina [Ubiistvo baleriny plamenevoi] ugol.-sots. Kino-romance in 2 series and 5 parts. Scenario by N. V. Turkin. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Performers: Emma Bauer, N. Snezhina, V. El’skii, N. Margaritov, G. Azagarov, A. Bezirganov, L. Terek, A. Mirskii, P. Maksimova, A. Sotnikov, N Nel’skaia, V. Glinskaia. 1916 Beauty Must Rule the World [V mire dolzhna tsarit’ krasota] (Alternate title: Entreaty to Aphrodite/Prizyv Afrodity; Fateful Passion/Rokovoe uvlechenie) drama in four parts. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Performers: A. Gromov, N. Nel’skaia, V. Kholodnaia, Zhukov. Eternally only that which is lost (?) [Vechno lish’ to, chto utracheno] drama in 5 parts. Scenario by O. V. Rakhmanova. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Performers: I. N. Perestiani, P. Maksimova, Lina Bauer, A Gromov. Retribution [Vozmezdie] drama in five parts. Scenario by V. A. Karalli, based on the novel by M. Serao). Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Performers: V. A. Karalli, V. A. Polonskii, L. D. Ryndina, I. N. Perestiani, V. F. Strizhevskii. The Stamp of the Old Fighter [Grif starogo bortsa] drama. Scenario by I. Nevedomov (I. N. Perestiani). Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Performers: I. N. Perestiani, V. A. Karalli, V. F. Strizhevskii. *Yurii Nagornyi (Alternate Title: The Seducer/ Obol'stitel). Drama in four parts. Director Evgenii Bauer. Script Andrei Gromov. Cameraman Boris Zavelev. Performers Amo Bek- Nazarov, Emma Bauer, Andrei Gromov, Aleksandra Rebikova, Aleksandr Kheruvimov, E. Popello-Davydova. Preserved without titles. [A. Khanzhonkov], 1916. * A Life for a Life [Zhizn' za Zhizn'] (Alternate Title: A Tear for Every Drop of Blood/Za Kazhduyu slezu po Kable Krovi; The Rival Sisters /Sestry- Sopernitsy) drama in five parts, based on the novel by Georges Ohnet, Serge Panin. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Artist A. Utkin. Performers: V. V. Kholodnaia, V. A. Polonskii, L. M. Koreneva, I. N. Perestiani, O. V. Rakhmanova. 209 Life Conquering Death [Zhizn’, pobezhdennaia smert’iu] drama in three parts. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Performers: L. D. Ryndina, I. N. Perestiani, A. Kheruvimov, P. Maksimova, Kazankina. The Sorceress [Koldun’ia] drama. Scenario by G-man. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Performers: Lina Bauer, V. A. Polonskii, I. N. Perestiani, L. D. Ryndina. The Queen of the Screen [Koroleva ekrana] (Alternate Title: Great Silent/Velikii Nemoi) play in five parts. Scenario by A. S. Voznesenskii (based on his play “The Actress Larina”). Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Performers: G. M. Khmara, V. L. Iureneva, V. A. Polonskii. Lunar Beauty [Lunnaia Krasavitsa] drama in four parts, based on the novel by A. Bara. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Performers: V.V. Kholodnaia, P. G. Baratov. The Student Pevtsov’s Fiancé [Nevesta studenta pevtsova] (Alternate Title: Fiancé with the Past/Nevesta s proshlym) play in five parts. Scenario by A. S. Voznesenskii. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Performers: G. M. Khmara, A. A. Kheruvimov, V. L. Iureneva, V. A. Polonskii, N. S. Bronich. *Nelly Raintseva [Nelli Raintseva] (Alternate Title: ?/Dvigopis’) Scenario by A. Amfiteatrov based on his tale. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Performers: Zoia Barantsevich. K. A. Gorin, V. Pavlova, O. V. Rakhmanova, A. Kheruvimov. Nina. Drama (kino-opera) in five parts. Scenario by V. M. Goncharov. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Music by A. F. Arend. Performers: Z. Barantsevich, K. B. Dzhemarov, O. V. Rakhmanova. O, if only I Could Express Myself through Sounds [O, esli b mog vyrazit’ v zvukakh]. Tragic novella. Scenario by Z. F. Barantsevich. Director and Operator E. F. Bauer. Performers: N. Leshchinskaia, I. N. Perestiani, V. A. Pavlova, V.V. Svoboda. O Women! [O, Zhenshchiny!]. Farce in 3 parts. Performers: Lina Bauer, I. N. Perestiani. V. F. Strizhevskii, A. Kheruvimov, A. Gromov. *After Death [Posle Smerti] (Turgenevesque motifs.) Drama in four parts based on the story by I. S. Turgenev “Klara Milich”. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Performers: V. A. Polonskii, O. V. Rakhmanova, V. A. Karalli, M. Khalatova, T. Gedevanova, G. Azagarov, M. Kassatskaia. 210 *Lina's Adventure in Sochi (Priklyuchenie Liny v Sochi). Farce in four parts. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Performers: Lina Bauer. Broken Chains [Razorvannye Tsepi] (Alternate Title: Song of Love and Suffering /Pesn’ liubvi i stradanii). Drama in five acts. Scenario by B. Kh. Valevskii. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Performers: L. D. Ryndina, V. A. Polonskii, Lina Bauer, A. Kheruvimov. Bronski Sisters [Sestry Bronskie]. Drama in four parts. Scenario by V. A. Karalli, based on the novel by M. Serao. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Performers: V. A. Karalli, V. A. Polonskii, Lina Bauer, V. F. Rodchenko-Strizhevskii. Tale of the Blue Sea [Skazka sinego moria]. Drama in four parts. Scenario by Zoia F. Barantsevich. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Performers: Z. F. Barantsevich, V. F. Strizhevskii, I. N. Perestiani. Love Tornado [Smerch liubovnyi]. Drama in four parts. Scenario by A. Mar. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Performers: V. A. Karalli, V. A. Polonskii, Z. F. Barantsevich, I. N. Perestiani, Oli-Ort, M. N. Martynov. Human Abyss [Chelovecheskie bezdny]. Drama in six parts. Scenario by Liverii Avid, based on themes from the novel “Strong Will” by M. F. Directed by E. F. Bauer and I. V. Lazarev. Performers: V. A. Polonskii, A. I. Shelepina, I. N. Perestiani, A. Sotnikov. Another’s Soul [Chuzhaia dusha]. Drama in four parts. Scenario by M. A. Tokarskaia. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Performers: Lina Bauer, A. Gromov, V. F. Strizhevskii. I am a Tsar, I am a Slav, I am a Worm, I am God [Ia – Tsar’, Ia – Rab, Ia – Cherv’, Ia – Bog] (Alternate Title: Adventure of a Housemaid/Prikliuchenie gornichnoi) drama in four parts. Scenario by Shakhnovskii. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Performers: O. V. Rakhmanova, A. Gromov, N. Nel’skaia, O. N. Frelikh. Coachman, Don’t Drive the Horses [Iamshchik, ne goni loshadei] Novella in four parts, based on the romance by Ia. Fel’dman). Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Performers: A. V. Rebikova, N. Bashilov, N. Bassalyga, I. Perestiani, A. Shelepina. 211 1917 *The Dying Swan [Umirayushchii Lebed']. Tragic novella in four parts. Director Evgenii Bauer. Script Zoia Barantsevich. Camera Boris Zavelev. Performers Vera Karalli, Aleksandr Kheruvimov, Vitol’d Polonskii, Andrei Gromov, Ivan Perestiani. [A. Khanzhonkov], 1917. *For Luck [Za Schast'em]. Drama in four parts. Scenario N. A. Dennishchina. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Set designer Lev Kuleshov. Performers: N. M. Radin, L. M. Koreneva, T. D. Borman, Lina Bauer. *The King of Paris [Korol' Parizha]. Drama based on a novel by Georges Ohnet. Directed by E. F. Bauer and O. V. Rakhmanova. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Set Designer L. V. Kuleshov. Performers: H. M. Radin, Emma V. Bauer, V. V. Svoboda, M. O. Stal’skii, L. M. Koreneva, M. Boldyreva. *Lina Under Examination [Lina Pod Ekspertizoi](Alternate Title: The Turbulent Corpse/ Buinyi Pokoinik]. Farce in four parts. Performers: Lina Bauer. (no director listed in A. Khanzhonkov, but SW lists E. Bauer as director) The Lie [Lozh’]. Drama in five parts. Scenario by A. Smoldovskii. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Performers: V. V. Svoboda, L. D. Ryndina, A. V. Rebikova, A. Gromov, T. Borman. *The Alarm [Nabat]. Social drama in seven parts, based on the novel “Free path” by E. Verner. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Operator B. I. Zavelev. Set Designer Lev V. Kuleshov. Editor A. Khanzhonkova and V. D. Popova. Performers: N. M. Radin, V. A. Karalli, M. S. Narokov, K. P. Khokhlov, Z. F. Barantsevich, V. F. Strizhevskii, V. V. Svoboda. *The Revolutionary [Revoliutsioner]. Sketch in four parts. Scenario by I. N. Perestiani. Directed by E. F. Bauer. Performers: I. N. Perestiani, V. F. Strizhevskii, Z. M. Bogdanova, M. Stal’skii, K. Askochenskii, K. Zubov. 212 Appendix B: Sample Pegasus Table of Contents Pegasus 1.2 (December 1915) Table of Contents Announcements 3 Narcotic Kino-Drama. Anna Mar’ 7 Happiness of Eternal Night. Valentin Turkin 23 Love of a State Counselor. Evgenii Chirikov 26 Dangerous Voyage. Theodor Bremer 37 Literary Review Teachers and Pupils. Ianus 45 About “Pegas’.” Nikandr Turkin 49 Kinomatografia Nota Bene. A. Shtokfish 53 In which evil? Alek 56 Writer and artists of the screen. Veronin 60 Gzovskaia and Polevitskaia. Granimov 65 Bauer’s new production. N.T. 70 Theater Diary of Theater. Dii Odinokii 79 Art Theater 82 Kachalov. Dii Odinoki 84 Laniny’s country estate. V.C. 86 Evkika and Petronii. G Vinogradskii 88 “Kudeiar’” Olenina. Valentinov 90 Ballet and the Cinematograph. Vidi Slovo 92 E. V. Potopchina 95 Dance “Silhouette.” A. Areids 98 Open Letter. G. Kurdiumov. Petr Chordinin 100 213 Chronicle 104 Announcements 107 214 Appendix C: Sample of Pegasus Table of Contents Pegasus 2.8 (1916) Table of Contents Seal of the old Bortsa – Iv. Nevedomov 3 In the Dance of Life – Valerii Iazvitskii 11 Dying Swan – Zoia Barantsevich 21 Pages of Poetry Poems by Zoia Barantsevich, Valentin Turkin, Peter Filippova 37 Cinematography: Vulgarity of Art – Veronin 40 Chinese Shadow - Strzhigotskii 49 In Pursuit of sensation – V-nin 52 “Thoughts” – Valentin Turkin 53 Literary Survey Poetic Intrigue of Igor Severianin– Ianus 65 Theater Duse – Nikandr Turkin 70 Opera – S. I. Zimina 77 Klara Young – O. N. 86 On Whom Sin and Misfortune do not Rest 87 Notebooks of Pegasus – Granitov 88 Chronicle Under the threat of crisis. Eternity or burial? Rumours And facts, Who is to blame? Literature and Film. Theatrical Season 91 Announcements 197 215 Portraits and Drawings: Eleonora Duze, Klara Young, S. I. Zimin, M. I. Shuvanov, S. I. Zimina in 1914; scenes from the pictures: “The Golden Slipper,” “Eternally, that which is Early,” “Retribution,” “Bronskii Sisters,” “Broken Chains,” “American Uncle,” “In the Dance of Life”

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Asset Metadata

Creator Torre, Michele Leigh (author)

Core Title Dangerous beauty: representation and reception of women in the films of Evgenii Bauer, 1913-1917

School School of Cinema-Television

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 02/14/2008

Defense Date 12/18/2007

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Gender Studies,OAI-PMH Harvest,Russia,silent film

Place Name Russia (countries)

Language English

Advisor Kinder, Marsha (committee chair), Bowlt, John (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member)

Creator Email lowery@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1016

Unique identifier UC1317203

Identifier etd-Torre-20080214 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-46043 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1016 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Torre-20080214.pdf

Dmrecord 46043

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Torre, Michele Leigh

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu