| This dissertation investigates a historiographic periphery: the transmedial career of the most recognized Russian filmmaker of the silent era, Evgenii Bauer, whose practice, inhabiting several spaces and representational modes, figures as a complex site of cultural and intermedial translation in the context of Russian artistic modernity circa and following 1900. Bauer's work varied from designing amusement gardens to creating theater sets for operetta- feerie to filmmaking. Through close analysis of extensive archival materials, documents, and historical artifacts from the era, this project charts a history of space in its pictorial, figural, and intermedial connotations taken at the intersections of the garden, theater, and cinema.;Chapter One explores the vernacular Gesamtkunstwerk of the amusement garden, founded on the principle of a collage of heterogeneous components, through the themes of the picturesque, strolling, heterotopia, artifice, miniature, ruin, electricity, hydraulic spectacles, and mediation of nature. This chapter also surveys artificial garden installations inside the Moscow Manege and takes a detour to the Coronation festive illuminations of the city in order to explore further the role of the new technology of electrical light. Chapter Two probes the spatiality of feerie 's hybrid scenography, which fused lighting, diorama, painting, performance, music, dance, and film, by focusing on pictorialism, effect, apotheosis, tableau vivant, animation, simulation, technological movement, and the body. Chapter Three turns to Bauer's films, addressing the spatial discourse of surface through the trope of an early cinema aesthetic, the veil effect, by analyzing representations and functions of fabric and glass within the cinematic figuration. This chapter analyzes space via elements of mise-en-scene such as gauzes, draperies, curtains--the presence of which reveals aspects of the material culture of modernity--and glass partitions, whose visual poetics render a non-Cartesian crystal-like visuality. Incarnating the language of translucency through relationships of blocking, eclipsing, and veiling rather than one exclusively of transparency, the surface in Bauer's cinema emerges as a site of spatial paradoxes in modernity, a medium of vision, a crucial spatial figure of the melodrama, and a complex metaphor of the screen.;Through hybrid histories of the arts and interdisciplinary approaches, the thesis unpacks cinema as a part of more complicated web of material and figural relations within the larger context of the visual culture, including the garden and theater. The project places cinema in relation to what can be termed the cultural unconscious, through which cinema would resist singularity and, as a never completely stable form, exist within the multiplicity of relations to other spaces, artifacts, and images. |
