Russian director Yevgeni Bauer made 26 films during a four-year career before his death from pneumonia in 1917. According to William M. Drew's fine career overview, Bauer made comedies, social dramas, and historical films, but what he's best known for are his dark tales of obsession. Three of these films, Twilight of a Woman's Soul, The Dying Swan, and this film, After Death, are available on DVD from Image Entertainment. Here, the fates of Andrei (Vitold Polonsky), an introverted, even misanthropic scholar, and Zoya (Vera Karalli), a mysterious, beautiful actress, intertwine into a tangled knot of guilt that even death can't dispel. Or maybe it's that only death can dispel it.

The centerpiece of the film (if the centerpiece can come near the beginning) is an incredible shot that embodies all the anxiety an introvert feels at having to meet a bunch of new people. Andrei, the shut-in academic, is coaxed to a party by his friend Tsenin (Georg Asagaroff). There, in a nearly five-minute tracking shot, he introduces Andrei to a dozen people, Andrei always following the exuberant Tsenin reluctantly, wanting to slink away or disappear. The camera shuffles slowly, erratically backward, brushing through a large potted plant, sometimes losing Andrei behind other partygoers and then altering course to regain sight of him, anticipating his movements by putting a particularly interesting-looking fellow at the center of the frame, but then, when Andrei passes him without shaking hands, it forgets him. This progresses until the dreaded moment when Tsenin leaves Andrei alone, and the terrified scholar drops into the nearest chair—can anything save this evening for him? Then he sees the beautiful Zoya across the room, and the camera mirrors his furtive glances, taking her in, leaving her, and coming back to her before going back to him. Now, finally, we get a cut: a closeup of him, staring; then a closeup of her, staring back. But he misreads her glance, or the torment of being left alone among strangers overpowers him, and he dashes off.

There are other technical marvels, such as some striking closeups of Zoya as she performs what appears to be a reading on a small stage; the camera, which seems to be employing deep focus, pushes in so close to her face as she sights Andrei in the crowd that it exaggerates her features, and finally, when it appears that her nose might touch the lens, we can see the shadow of the camera on her forehead. It's obvious, and given Bauer's skill, I can't help but think that this is not an accident but some kind of meta-moment, where he's drawing attention to the very medium he's employing. But again, Andrei dashes off without talking to her.

She wants to meet him, so she writes, requesting a meeting at a park. Once there, his brusqueness causes her to dash off, and three months later she's dead by her own hand. "It is rumored that unrequited love drove her to this terrible act," says the trade paper. He's crushed by guilt, haunted by images of her that appear as he sleeps—or is he awake? Could she actually be there? He retrieves her diary, which confirms his guilt, or at least his sense of guilt, and her visitations come more often, leading him to despair, illness.

Would that Bauer had made use of the double- and triple-exposures and masking that became common by the late silent period but were certainly in use by 1915. The visitations, which require match cuts for Zoya's appearance and disappearance, are abrupt, more parlor trick than ghostly manifestation, and their intention—to show how she's becoming increasingly "real" to him, either because her ghost is invading reality or because he's slipping into her netherworld—is thwarted because they're both so solid-looking. Modifying the tinting (the film is hand-tinted blue for night scenes, but when she appears it's usually the plain black-and-white of day scenes) only partly achieves the ghostly effect.

It's apparent that Bauer's filmmaking skills exploded in the two years after his first feature, the excellent Twilight of a Woman's Soul. He employs more camera movement, dramatic closeups, surer editing rhythms, and more elaborate shot setups, often employing partially closed doors or columns to break up the screen space. It might help that he directed an amazing eight films during that time; this was the first of eight films he directed in 1915, his most productive year. It's tempting to think that he somehow knew he'd have only four short years in which to make films, which could explain how he managed to make 26 films during his pneumonia-abbreviated career. Perhaps this foreknowledge of his own impending death led to his onscreen obsession with death and obsession, which are the twin poles of Twilight and this film. Or maybe the film has gotten to me.

—May 18, 2008