Friday, 31 January 2014

A morbid Russian tale

The Dying Swan (1917)

Directed by Yevgeni Bauer this Russian silent film is based on the ballet of the same name and stars Vera Karalli. A young mute woman wants to dance and a broken heart motivates her to finally begin a career in ballet where she dances The Dying Swan.

As this film only has a 49 minute run time it is really hard to fully flesh out the themes involved such as in The Red Shoes (1948) or Black Swan (2010) but this is still a fairly good marriage of cinema and ballet. It takes a little for all the story elements to come together but otherwise this is a pretty good story with a new dream sequence. Mostly the film is well made although obviously given it's early production date it's execution is a little rough around the edges.


3/5

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