The Dying Swan (1917)

A grief-stricken ballerina becomes the obsession of an increasingly unhinged artist.

Director:

Yevgeny Bauer

Writer:

Zoya Barantsevich

Stars:

Vera Karalli, Aleksandr Kheruvimov, Vitold Polonsky

Cast

Cast overview:
Vera Karalli	...	Gizella - mute dancer
Aleksandr Kheruvimov	...	Gizella's Father
Vitold Polonsky	...	Viktor Krasovsky
Andrey Gromov	...	Valeriy Glinskiy - the artist (as Andrej Gromov)
Ivane Perestiani	...	Glinskiy's friend

Storyline

When Viktor meets Gizella one day beside the lake, he takes an interest in her and begins to call on her regularly. The one passion in the life of Gizella, who is unable to speak, is dancing. When Viktor deceives her and she finds him with another woman, she moves away and begins a career as a ballerina. Later, as she is on tour performing "The Dying Swan", the artist Glinskiy attends her performance. Glinskiy, whose own obsession is to depict death in his art, becomes fascinated by Gizella, and he is determined to use her as a model for a special project.

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Plot Keywords:

obsession | artist | ballerina | skeleton | tragic ending | 

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Genres:

Drama

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User Reviews

The dying image (of an era)

Only ten months after the January 1917 release of the film, the whole Russian worldview was going to be torn asunder. The Soviet cinema that emerged post- 1922 was going to commit itself in the pursuit of the mechanisms that drive forward the eye, a collective eye that did not contemplate any more but would set in motion by seeing.

So, this is a really precious film to have, I think; a snapshot of the world about to be swept aside, and the transfiguration of the core of that world in terms of cinema.

So, whereas with Eisenstein or Pudovkin, the heroic focus shifts on the disenchanted individual - the faces tired but resolute, the living hard but rigorously driven - who is transformed, subsumed into a mass of collective struggle redolent with immediate purpose, Bauer's films shows a life distraught with aimlessness, women as fragile, ethereal beings - a far cry from Pudovkin's Mother - and the members of a decadent aristocracy, the ruling class not quite able to even rule their own lives, as entombed in morbid fixations with images of the past. Faces are nervous, agitated, sunken from inner weights.

In Daydreams it was the image of a dead wife; here it is the image of a ballerina, the swan with broken wings, as evoking the essence of death. The young painter will eventually have to stage the picture of death he wants to immortalize.

On the whole, this one more gloomy than Bauer's rest, it evokes an atmosphere of Poe; a tragic, romantic exaltation of woe. It's potent as Gothic romance but - like Poe - rather comfortably nudged in its archaism. It's not something I will keep with me, unlike Daydreams and its Vertigo-esque dizziness.

Details

Country:

Russia

Language:

None Sign Languages

Release Date:

17 January 1917 (Russia)

Also Known As:

Den döende svanen

Company Credits

Production Co:

JSC "A. Khanzhonkov and K"

Technical Specs

Runtime:

49 min

Sound Mix:

Silent

Color:

Black and White