Russian Filmmaker Evgenii Bauer (1865-1917): Cinema and Genealogies of the Built Environment in Modern Russia
FAIN: FEL-268066-20
Oksana Chefranova
Yale University (New Haven, CT 06510-1703)
Research
and writing leading to a book about Russian filmmaker Evgenii
Bauer (1865-1917), his work in garden design, theater, and film, and his impact
on artistic movements in Russia between 1880 and 1917.
From Garden to Kino bridges cinema and environment with a focus on the formation of modern Russian culture in the long nineteenth century. It tells a story of built environments in Late Imperial Russia through the artistic output of Evgenii Bauer, a prolific and aesthetically-innovative director of pre-revolutionary cinema who also created amusement gardens and theatrical féerie in Moscow and whose movement across different media provides a previously unexplored context for the arrival of cinema. Grounded in rigorous archival research, the book redraws the map of early cinema and Russian visual culture; it analyzes the practices of designing milieu and image-making between 1878 and 1917, while arguing that the built environment traverses boundaries between the world of nature and culture, encapsulates philosophical and narrative systems, and serves as an epistemic tool for understanding paradoxes of Russian modernity at the crossover between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Associated Products
TECHNIQUES OF SET DESIGN, TECHNOLOGIES OF ATMOSPHERE: PROFESSIONALIZATION OF FILM DIRECTOR IN EARLY RUSSIAN CINEMA (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: TECHNIQUES OF SET DESIGN, TECHNOLOGIES OF ATMOSPHERE: PROFESSIONALIZATION OF FILM DIRECTOR IN EARLY RUSSIAN CINEMA
Author: Oksana Chefranova
Abstract: The paper explores early cinema professionalization through the transmedial career of Russian director Evgenii Bauer, who worked across different arts and practices including amusement gardens, theater scenography, and painting. Specifically, it tracks emancipation of film directing in Bauer’s transition from the skills of stage designer to the crafts of film director as a profession, emerging circa the early 1910s. I argue that Bauer’s role as a set designer, that included more than twenty years in the pictorial theater of operetta-féerie,and his techniques in the fabricated environment are crucial for shaping a new profession of film director. I further argue that the set design practice functioned simultaneously as a juncture of these two professions and a site of their separation. Considering Bauer’s innovation in theater scenography – a reform of the stage wings that reveals a departure from the conception of space, offered by the post-Renaissance theater and dominated by the central axis – I survey how his architecture of the film set plays with materiality of various surfaces such as glass and gauze. I finally claim that Bauer’s conception of the set as a designed milieu converged with the privileging of mood, while his techniques, especially the veil effect, became technologies of atmosphere and markers of the film director’s craft.
Date: 11/17/2020
Primary URL:
https://domitor2020.org/en-ca/techniques-of-set-design-technologies-of-atmosphere-professionalization-of-film-director-in-early-russian-cinema/Conference Name: DOMITOR 2020