• 

  Average Rating for Mad Love [1913] - 4 out of 5

  
  (based on 1 user reviews)
• Mad Love [1913]

  Jevon Taylor 15 August 2007

  

  This DVD features three films of Evgenii Bauer from 1913 to 1916. They are the only pre-Soviet Russian films I have ever seen, and I fear the only ones I will ever see.
  
  The first film is "Twilight of a Woman's Soul" (1913), full of subjective camera angles, carefully layered light and a host of incedible set design, all captured in deep-focus. The film certainly has erotic overtones, building tension between a virginal do gooder and the villainous object of her charity.
  
  The second film, "After Death" (1915), features some early, and masterly, camera movement. It is concerned with a socially awkward young photographer, Andrei, who is dragged to a social event by his mother. There he meets a young actress, who he spurns and who then kills herself. Andrei, replete with a growing morbid imagination, is then inexplicably drawn to the world of the dead. The story is based from the Turgenev story "Klara Milich".
  
  The third, and my favourite, film of the set is "The Dying Swan" (1916). It combines two themes of the earlier films, death and the erotic, in a faintly sinister tale of a depressed young woman, her philandering lover, and an artist obsessed with death, which he sees in her misery. It also contains a tour-de-force subjective camera movement, which homes in on her misery during a party and urges us to sympathise with her. The slightly necrophile ending also deeply impressed me.
  
  This DVD is really a unique oportunity to see three films from a period of cinema almost entirely overlooked. And of a, clearly, having seen the films, master director. The picture quality is good, music unobtrusive and the DVD features a video essay on the three films.

• Please review this title

  We will publish your review of Mad Love [1913] on DVD within a few days as long as it meets our guidelines.
  None of your personal details will be passed on to any other third party.

  Name

  Email

  Rating

  Synopsis (optional)

  Review

  Submit

  Thank you - we will review and publish your review shortly.

Three short films by Evgenii Bauer, one of pre-Soviet Russia's most significant film pioneers. 'Twilight of a Woman's Soul' (1913) demonstrates the director's instinctive mastery of depth composition and his use of elaborate décor. 'After Death' (1915), adapted from Turgenev's 'Klara Milich', concerns the hold the dead can have over the living. 'The Dying Swan' (1916) tells the story of an artist struggling to paint a picture of death.

This collection includes three silent films from the early 1900s by the innovative Russian filmmmaker, Yevgeni Bauer.