Mad Love
The jury's still out as to whether Evgeni Bauer is really "the greatest film director you have never heard of" (as the liner notes on this DVD claim), but there's no disputing his talent or his undeserved obscurity.
An early Russian filmmaker of rare and often morbid imagination, Bauer reportedly made over 80 films before his death in 1917. Only about 20 of these films survived, however, and almost no one has ever seen any of them. The Soviet government didn't have a clue what to make of Bauer's bizarre movies, and, for the better part of a century, did what they did with all dangerously decadent works of art: they effectively hid them away from the world.
Flash forward to 2004, where every forgotten filmmaker seems to eventually have his day in the sun, thanks to DVD. Milestone Films and Image Entertainment, in collaboration with the British Film Institute, have unearthed three of Bauer's remarkable works and collected them on a must-have DVD edition appropriately titled Mad Love. Each of these newly restored films runs approximately 50 minutes and provides us with a fascinating window into Bauer's singular preoccupations with dreams, doomed love and strangely twisted eroticism. What is revealed is a curiously modern sensibility, a cinema that is relentlessly moody, poetic, intensely visual, and with a strong undercurrent of both the supernatural and the psychological.
Among the works featured here is Bauer's earliest surviving film, Twilight of a Woman's Soul (1913), a brutally candid account of the disintegration of a marriage after the husband discovers the wife has been raped. Also included in the collection is After Death (1915), an eerily atmospheric tale of a morose photographer haunted by the memory of a woman who committed suicide after being spurned by him. In what is perhaps the most accomplished of Mad Love's selections, The Dying Swan (1916), a death-obsessed painter becomes tragically fixated on the mute ballerina who is his model. The last two films both star Vera Karalli, legendary ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet, and were choreographed by the great Alexander Gorsky.
All of the films in the collection have been meticulously restored from archival prints. The transfers are a bit soft and worn, but generally look very good considering their age, and are fine showcases for Bauer's innovative, deep-focus cinematography and expressive lighting. Bauer was a former painter and set designer, and his imagery is charged with meaning influenced by both the Art Nouveau and Symbolist movements but ultimately of its own creation. If only for the astonishing dream sequences that pop up in virtually every one of these films, the disc would be indispensable.
Mad Love also includes a brief but extremely interesting documentary on Bauer by Russian film scholar Yuri Tsivian, a gallery of still photographs, and brand new scores for all three of the films, which were commissioned by the British Film Institute. Highly recommended for anyone with a healthy interest in silent movies, Russian cinema, and great films in general. 
This article appears in Jan 22-28, 2004.