Yevgeni Bauer must surely be one of the most underrated directors of all time! His movies are beautifully composed with haunting narratives and damaged characters. He was also experimental to some degree, playing with tracking shots to open up the cinematic space as early as 1913.
After Death is surely his masterpiece, or at least one of them. It is a story of mad love; a bereaved young man is pursued by a lovelorn actress. He rejects her, prompting her to commit suicide (though the film hints there could have been additional factors to her choice). The young man, allegedly disinterested, becomes obsessed with the actress once she is dead. Visions of her appear to him in the night. Bauer blurs the line between the real and the imaginary with otherworldly imagery. Vera Karalli shines as the doomed actress; she has a Gothic beauty and already seems to belong to some other, more spiritual plane.
The Birth of a Nation still gets a lot of credit for "inventing" modern film-making, but this is a generalization. While one cannot deny Griffith's influence, there were other groundbreaking filmmakers working in the 1910s. After Death, released the same year as Birth, is testament to that fact.
After Death is surely his masterpiece, or at least one of them. It is a story of mad love; a bereaved young man is pursued by a lovelorn actress. He rejects her, prompting her to commit suicide (though the film hints there could have been additional factors to her choice). The young man, allegedly disinterested, becomes obsessed with the actress once she is dead. Visions of her appear to him in the night. Bauer blurs the line between the real and the imaginary with otherworldly imagery. Vera Karalli shines as the doomed actress; she has a Gothic beauty and already seems to belong to some other, more spiritual plane.
The Birth of a Nation still gets a lot of credit for "inventing" modern film-making, but this is a generalization. While one cannot deny Griffith's influence, there were other groundbreaking filmmakers working in the 1910s. After Death, released the same year as Birth, is testament to that fact.