Silent Sunday: Child of the Big City (1914)
I don’t know, I’ve tried Yevgeni Bauer a few times over the years—the BFI’s Early Russian Cinema tapes at UNSW in 1997, the Mad Love DVD about eight years ago, and this one today (which I scammed from Youtube recently)—and I still don’t really get the acclaim. Having died as he did in 1917, he obviously went into eclipse when the Revolution hit later that year along with most of the rest of the Tsarist era Russian film industry, and what remained of his films didn’t re-emerge for decades thereafter. As such, I appreciate that he’s considered to be one of the most important figures of pre-Soviet cinema (though I’ll have to accept the judgements of others regarding some of his specific achievements), although I do so without really liking his films as such, and unfortunately I’m no nearer after seeing this. This is one of his social melodramas, in which a well-to-do young man finds himself tiring of the crop of “sophisticated” young women he seems to have cultivated, and sets out instead to rescue a bit of comparative rough trade; he saves a young girl slaving as a seamstress in a sweatshop, but unfortunately for him her life of poverty has given her dreams of riches she’s now in a position to act upon. Which she does, ruinously. Filmed in a style reminiscent of what I remember of the other Tsarist-era films I’ve seen, slow, given to deep tableau staging rather than cutting (albeit spiced with a few interesting high angles and camera movements one might not expect from this period), but the characters are really off-putting; she basically becomes a fairly horrible person the higher she rises in society (cf. the end: he shoots himself on her doorstep, she steps over his body quite casually en route to a restaurant), but there’s something so silly about him and his enterprise that it’s hard to feel too sorry for him when she fucks him over.
