My project "From Gardens to Kino: Evgenii Bauer's Artistic Career, Moscow, 1880 - 1917" will study the artistic work of a major director of early Russian film, Evgenii Bauer, whose output is relatively unknown. I will concentrate on the issue of space in his pre-cinematic work - amusement gardens and operettas - as well as in his films, dramas, which combined urban popular culture with elements of high culture. On a more general level, my work will establish links between cinema and other facets of modernity in the Russian cultural landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Emerging within the broad spectrum of arts and mass entertainments , Bauer's non-cinema works ranged from theater set designs for feeries, costumes and operetta posters to such 'heterotopias' as amusement gardens and gigantic spatial installations inside architectural buildings which incorporated artificial landscapes, panoramas, electrical amusements and theater performances. This vast territory of visual spectacles that people watched both before and after the emergence of cinema, will be presented within the larger context of Russia Fin-de-siecle culture and contemporaneous theories and practices of spatiality in the arts of theater, architecture, and painting. By examining various previously unknown or forgotten artifacts (e.g. Bauer's sketches, images of gardens and spatial installations), I make evident that the creative enterprises of this prolific Russian director extended well beyond cinema. Through this new multi-media perspective on spatiality in visual arts, theater and architecture in the late 19th and early 20th century Russia, I hope we will come to look differently on Bauer's cinema itself.