[2] His feature debut was the 1953 children's adventure film The Blue Seagull (Sinji galeb) which distinguished his work from then-native Yugoslav productions through vivid visual style and natural acting.

The film tells a story about a World War II resistance fighter who escapes a train en route to the Jasenovac concentration camp and returns to Zagreb in an attempt to find his son and join the partisans in the Croatian hinterland.

[6][7] Three Girls Named Anna tells a story of an old man who lives alone believing that his daughter was killed in World War II as a child.

It tells a story about a rebel worker who challenges a manager during a communist party meeting in a huge construction company.

[11] During the 1970s, he directed the TV series Salaš u malom ritu (1976), a war drama set in Vojvodina, one of the most memorable works of Yugoslav television.

Contemporary Croatian filmmaker Hrvoje Hribar once wrote that "Bauer had a sense for the blind spot of [communist] ideology, so he put his films in a place where it was as close as possible, yet least influential.

In a late 1990s critics' poll of all-time greatest Croatian film directors, Bauer took second place, behind Krešo Golik.