Yevgeni Bauer

Yevgeni Franzevich Bauer (Russian: Евгений Францевич Бауэр) (1865 – 22 June [O.S. 9 June] 1917) was a Russian film director of silent films, a theatre artist and a screenwriter. His work had a great influence on the aesthetics of Russian cinematography at the beginning of the 20th century.

Bauer made more than seventy films between 1913 and 1917 of which 26 survived. He already used the relatively long sequence shots and displacements that would come to be associated with camera virtuosos. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan called Bauer "The greatest director you've never heard of."

Biography

Bauer was born in Moscow in 1865, the son of the Russified Bohemian musician Franz Bauer and his wife, an operatic singer. From childhood, Bauer displayed artistic tendencies, and participated in his favourite dramatised scenes (his sister was a professional actress).

In 1887, Bauer graduated from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. He tried out a number of different professions, first working as a caricaturist, drawing satirical sketches for the press. He then became a master of art photography, before moving to work in the theatre, as a producer, an impresario, and a professional set designer. In the 1890s he married the actress and dancer Lina Ancharovna, whose surname he used during the First World War when he went under the pseudonym of Evgeni Ancharov, feeling that his own surname was "too German".