Mad Love: The Films of Evgeni Bauer Yevgeny Bauer [videorecording]=

Special features include:
- Documentary Film Essay on Evgeni Bauer by Russian Film Scholar Yuri Tsivian

From case cover:
Russian film poet Evgeni Bauer combined the virtuosity of D.W.Griffith, the terror of Edgar Allan Poe, and the eye of Johannes Vermeer. He is, perhaps, the greatest film director you have never heard of. During his brief four-year career, Bauer created macabre masterpieces -- dramas darkly obsessed with doomed love and death and astonishing for their graceful camera movements, risque themes, opulent sets, and chiaroscuro lighting.

For decades, Bauer's films were buried in the archives -- declared too "cosmopolitan" and "bizarre" for the puritanical Soviet regime -- but with the fall of the Iron Curtain, Bauer's work has risen like a glorious phoenix out of the ashes of time.

In Twilight of a Woman's Soul (1913), Bauer's first surviving film, a society woman takes revenge on her rapist and then must make a new life after her husband abandons her. After Death (1915), an adaptation of a story by Ivan Turgenev, explores one of Bauer's favorite themes: the psychological hold of the dead over the living. In The Dying Swan (1916), an artist obessed with the idea of capturing death on canvas becomes fixated on a mute ballerina.

Vera Karalli, prima ballerina of the Bolshoi and Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, stars in After Death and The Dying Swan. Karalli's colleague, Alexander Gorsky, choreographed the films dances. Restored by Gosfilmofond and featuring scores commissioned by the British Film Institute, Mad Love is a must-have collection for all lovers is the equivalent of peering into the Tsar's magnificent Faberge eggs.

DVD video; Dolby Digital 2.0; stereo; NTSC; Regions 0; 1.33:1 as 4:3 fullscreen.

Silent with Russian intertitles and English subtitles.