Social Science Research Council

"From Gardens to Kino: Evgenii Bauer’s Artistic Career, Moscow, 1880-1917"

My project will study the artistic work of a major director of early Russian film, Evgenii Bauer, whose output is relatively unknown. I will concentrate on the issue of space in his pre-cinematic work, specifically amusement gardens and operettas, as well as in his films and dramas, which combined urban popular culture with elements of high culture. On a more general level, my work will establish links between cinema and other facets of modernity in the Russian cultural landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Emerging within the broad spectrum of the arts and mass entertainment, Bauer’s non-cinema works ranged from theater set designs for féeries, costumes and operetta posters to such “heterotopias” as amusement gardens and gigantic spatial installations inside architectural buildings which incorporated artificial landscapes, panoramas, electrical amusements and theater performances. This vast territory of visual spectacles that people watched both before and after the emergence of cinema, will be presented within the larger context of Russian fin-de-siècle culture and contemporaneous theories and practices of spatiality in the arts of theater, architecture and painting. By examining various previously unknown or forgotten artifacts (e.g., Bauer’s sketches, images of gardens and spatial installations), I make evident that the creative enterprises of this prolific Russian director extended well beyond cinema. Through this new multi-media perspective on spatiality in visual arts, theater and architecture in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia, I hope we will come to look differently upon Bauer’s cinema itself.