Twilight of the female soul (film)

Vera Dubovskaya is a young countess tired of the luxury surrounding her. After offering her mother to help her in her charity work, Vera decides to devote herself to caring for the unfortunate and disadvantaged. During one of the trips to the poor, Vera liked the locksmith and drunkard Maxim Petrov, who, by deceiving him into his closet, dishonored her. Shocked by what happened, Vera kills Maxim.

A year later, the noble prince Dolsky marries Vera and she marries him. However, he drives her away, learning about the story with Maxim. Vera goes abroad, where she forgets about the past and becomes a famous singer. The prince follows her and begs her to return, but Vera refuses. The prince commits suicide.

This is a dramatic story open to the world and people, a pure and kind girl from a prosperous family who languishes with wealth and idleness, who seeks to help the poor, support those who are at the bottom of their lives. But one of her charges turned out to be a drunkard, a bastard, a rapist, and she, defending herself, killed him. Another, beloved, who became a husband, did not believe, did not understand, did not regret it, however, as she later did him ... That’s what remains for her - her soul in the twilight of disappointment, loneliness, sadness, and him - a bullet in the temple ^[3] .

• By order of Swedish censorship, the demonstration of a painting in Sweden was banned ^{[4] [5]} .

The Sine-Fono magazine noted that the leading actor N. Chernova showed “good facial expressions and a beautiful gesture”, “artists Demert and Ugryumov are good partners for her” ^{[5] [6]} .

Film historian Veniamin Vishnevsky called this painting by E. Bauer “extremely characteristic of all his work” ^[7] .

Cinema expert Neya Zorkaya wrote about the film in the magazine “Cinema Art” (1997):

“The banal, in the spirit of the repertoire of the 1910s, name did not match the story told. It was a story about a young, beautiful and kind lady from high society who sincerely and heartily helps the poor. In one of the initial shots, through a window on the staircase of a multi-storey building, as if from the street, two pairs of female legs walking on the steps cut off by the upper frame in elegant shoes are visible: this is Vera (this is the name of the heroine) with a companion go up to the attic in the homes of the poor. Absolutely familiar in the mature cinema of a synecdog, a semantic detail, artistically expressive, helping the narrative and directing the viewer's attention in the direction necessary for the plot, at that time was almost a revelation. Bauer was the first to fight against the flatness of the screen, against static general plans that imitate the stage picture, and began to boldly divide the screen space, exploring the possibilities of vertical and deep compositions ” ^[8] .

In the monograph History of Russian Cinema, she also noted:

“... stood out by the originality of the directorial decision“ Twilight of the female soul ”... Here, a clear outline of the Russian psychological drama was given. It was the story of a young beauty, rich, kind, happy, suffering from her life contentment against the background of poverty and suffering of ordinary people. This first directorial experience of Bauer has already revealed a certain model of his future films - he will remove them in four years over seventy. In the best of them ... the basis is an acute social or psychological conflict, often the tragedy of property or class inequality ” ^[9] .

Culturologist Kirill Razlogov pointed out that "the originality of Bauer's creative search was clearly manifested already in his first independent work," Twilight of the Female Soul "" ^{[10] [11]} . Despite the fact that “the plot is built according to all the canons of the melodrama, but is marked by some originality; if its ending is moralizing, it is by no means stenciled ” ^[10] . The director “forced elements of film expressiveness, which in the overwhelming majority of films of the tenth years were either not used at all, or were revealed at moments of the highest dramatic intensity” ^[12] .

In this picture we already find almost all the moments characteristic of Bauer's work: spectacular scenery, deep stage scenes, complex spatial and black-and-white constructions, the inclusion of short stories and retrospectives introduced by double exposure or explanation in the caption, and even rhythmic editing, which was developed much later " ^{[ 11]} .

The historian Vera Ustyugova also noted that the film predetermined the director’s handwriting in the future.

Twilight of the Female Soul is Yevgeny Frantsovich’s first major film, not slow to appear in the provincial box office. The specifics of the film was not a tearful, tearful plot, but a completely amazing artistic construction of the picture. The canvas of the screen seems to be full of floral patterns: indoor flowers, whimsical lamps, gas veils, lace of ladies' clothes - all this first appeared in the film by E. Bauer and remained in the future as exclusive "characters" of his paintings ^[13] .

Researcher of Russian cinema R. Morley examined the film in the context of the position of women in society at that time (in the last decade of the Russian Empire) ^[14] . The sequence of scenes of rape of Vera is structured in such a way that the heroine involuntarily appears in the trap of an innocent and helpless victim of a male predator ^[15] . According to R. Morley, further director Bauer shows that “there are few differences between Maxim’s physical violence and the psychological pain caused by Dolsky” ^[16] . The end of the film shows that Vera, having a successful career and achieving financial independence, also achieved emotional independence, rejecting Dolsky’s declaration of love ^[17] . At the same time, Vera is the only heroine of the Bauer films, which does not allow love feelings to control her life. Other heroines of Bauer films either “forget about everything under the influence of love” or, while remaining emotionally estranged from men (for example, Mary in the film “ Child of a Big City ”), nevertheless rely on them ^[17] .

Rachel Morley also dedicated the third chapter to her film, Performing Femininity ... ^[18] . In a review of this book, Professor Y. Levchenko notes that in this chapter “the process that Morley declares to be paradigmatic for Russian culture between the two revolutions” is reconstructed and “nowhere else is the liberation and gaining of personal autonomy” ^[19] . This is due to the “excellent orientation of Bauer himself in the“ women's issue ”, which, along with his cultural and artistic sophistication, helps to give birth to an outstanding work” ^[20] .

Film critic Lidia Zaitseva so appreciated the significance of the film by Yevgeny Bauer: “According to the testimonies of cinema historians, this was the first picture marked by the characteristic features of his individual style, from the basic principles of which at the next stage a whole artistic direction will emerge that shaped the pictorial language of cinema as art” ^[21] .

According to some critics, “the film“ Twilight of the Female Soul ”(1913) is a fundamental artistic achievement of Russian cinema and a huge step forward in its development” ^[22] .

• Vishnevsky V.E. Feature films of pre-revolutionary Russia. - M .: Goskinoizdat, 1945 .-- S. 33-34. - 194 p.
• Zorkaya N.M. “Light Painting” by Eugene Bauer // The Art of Cinema. - 1997. - No. 10 . - S. 77-93 .
• Razlogov K.E. Artistry in popular culture // Questions of philosophy. - 1997. - No. 7 . - S. 63-73 .
• The Great Kinemo: Catalog of preserved feature films of Russia (1908-1919) / Comp .: V. Ivanova, V. Mylnikova, S. Skovorodnikova, Yu. Tsivyan, R. Yangirov. - M .: New Literary Review, 2002. - S. 171-172. - 568 p.
• Morley R. Gender relations in the films of Evgenii Bauer // Slavonic and East European Review. - 2003. - No. 1 . - S. 32-69 .
• Grashchenkova I.N. Cinema of the Silver Age. Russian cinema of the 10s and Cinema of the Russian post-October foreign countries of the 20s. - M. , 2005 .-- S. 253. - 432 p.
• Zaitseva L.A. The formation of expressiveness in Russian subsonic cinema. - M .: VGIK, 2013 .-- S. 28. - 311 p.
• Zorkaya N.M. The history of domestic cinema. XX century. - SPb. : White City, 2014 .-- S. 46–47. - 544 p.
• Ustyugova V.V. Last Year of the “Beautiful Era”, or Cinema Identification of the Province (by the Example of Provincial Perm of the Beginning of the 20th Century) // Bulletin of Perm University. Story. - Perm, 2014. - No. 1 . - S. 146-154 .
• Razlogov K.E. Planet movie. - M .: Eksmo, 2015 .-- S. 42. - 408 p.
• Morley R. Performing Femininity: Woman as Performer in Early Russian Cinema. - London:. B. Tauris, 2017 .-- 272 p.
• Levchenko, I. Rachel Morley. Performing Femininity: Woman as Performer in Early Russian Cinema. London: IB Tauris, 2017.272 p. // Laboratorium. - 2017. - No. 3 . - S. 173-177 .
• E. F. Bauer: pro et contra. Eugene Frantsevich Bauer in assessments of contemporaries, colleagues, researchers, film critics. Anthology / Comp., Comments N. S. Skorokhod, O. A. Kovalova, S. A. Semenchuk. - SPb. : Platonic Philosophical Society, 2016 .-- S. 72, 382, ​​709-712, 833, 836-837. - 960 s.

• "Twilight of the female soul" on the site "Encyclopedia of Russian cinema"
• Film page on the site "Encyclopedia of Cinema" (Russian) . www.rudata.ru . Date of treatment January 13, 2019.
• Neya Zorkaya, “Light Painting” by Eugene Bauer (Russian) . www.screenwriter.ru . Date of treatment January 13, 2019. on the site “Scenarist.ru”
• Zorkaya N.M. Silver nine hundred tenths (Russian) . www.portal-slovo.ru . Date of treatment January 13, 2019.on the site portal-slovo.ru