Za schastem

This film, "For Luck", by the great director Yevgeni Bauer, involves a love circle, but it's all about sight. Lee, the daughter, has difficulties with psychological blindness. The eyes of the actors advance much of the continuity editing, directing where shots will cut to next. The eyes are also what the actors use most of all for emoting--for expression. Bauer uses fadeouts extensively, as he does in other films, which is associative to Lee's fading sight. I don't know how much of this was intentional, but that's besides the point.

Bauer was a visual director, so it seems appropriate that he'd make a film about seeing. Although, I don't think it's his best work visually (see "After Death" (1915) and "The Dying Swan" (1917)). This was the last film of one of the first masters of the young visual medium, and it's an early picture for one of its next revolutionaries. Lev Kuleshov, who would change cinema forever with his montage experiments, was the production designer for this film and has an acting role as a painter. "For Luck" opens on a lavish set, and you can see the typically high standard of set design and mise-en-scène of Bauer's oeuvre here. The painter character has only a small role in the love circle. One of the best scenes, however, is Kuleshov, as the painter, working as a production designer--as an artist--setting up a scene for a portrait within the film's story and without in making the film. It's the passing of the torch.