Evgeny Bauer After Death

Evgeny Bauer

• After Death

Evgeny Bauer Movie-making career 1913-1917

After Death (1915)

• Paucity of intertitles: circumstances familiar to viewers.

• Mystic film based on Turgenev’s story “Klara Millich.”

• Story in turn refers back to Eugene Onegin

“Klara Milich” (1883) by Ivan Turgenev

• Lonely young man lives in Moscow with aunt. His friend drags him out to party, where he meets actress. He then goes to literary evening where he hears the actress read a passage from Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin where the heroine Tatiana writes to the man she has fallen in love with. He learns later that she has committed suicide onstage. Visits her mother and sister, obtains her diary and photo. Becomes visited by her image. Kiss seals his attachment to her. He has to die to be united with her.

Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin

• A novel in verse.

• Heroine Tatiana falls in love with hero Eugene at first sight. Writes him a letter.

• They have a conversation in the garden where he rejects her.

• Later she marries a rich nobleman.

• Eugene sees her and falls in love with her, but she rejects him, since she is now married.

What to look for...

• Camera: panning, travelling, close-up.

• Film effects.

• Composition of the shot.

• Cutting between shots.

• Recurrent themes and motifs.

• “Situation rhyme.”