Mad Love: The Films of Evgeni Bauer (DVD)

Cinematic poet Evgeni Bauer combined the technical virtuosity of D.W. Griffith with the terror of Edgar Allan Poe for beautiful effect never before seen in his time. During his brief four-year career, Bauer created macabre masterpieces with dark obsessions over doomed love and dramatic deaths, astonishing for their graceful camera movements, risqué themes and opulent set design. For too long, Bauer’s films were buried in the Soviet archives, declared too "cosmopolitan" and bizarre for Russia's puritanical regime. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, Bauer’s work has risen to prominence like never before, culminating in this collection of three of his most beloved productions:

TWILIGHT OF A WOMAN'S SOUL (1913), the first-ever surviving film directed by Bauer, tells the story of a society woman who kills her assaulter, and must make a new life for herself when her husband leaves her.

AFTER DEATH (1915), adapted from a story by Ivan Turgenev, explores the psychological hold of the dead over the living.

THE DYING SWAN (1917) sees an artist obsessed with the idea of capturing death on canvas becomes fixated on a mute ballerina.

Also featuring a 37-minute documentary on Bauer by Russian film scholar Yuri Tsivian and a stills gallery.