The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1928-1935
294
The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1928-1935
294eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
As cinema industries around the globe adjusted to the introduction of synch-sound technology, the Soviet Union was also shifting culturally, politically, and ideologically from the heterogeneous film industry of the 1920s to the centralized industry of the 1930s, and from the avant-garde to Socialist Realism. In The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1928–1935, Lilya Kaganovsky explores the history, practice, technology, ideology, aesthetics, and politics of the transition to sound within the context of larger issues in Soviet media history. Industrialization and centralization of the cinema industry greatly altered the way movies in the Soviet Union were made, while the introduction of sound radically altered the way these movies were received. Kaganovsky argues that the coming of sound changed the Soviet cinema industry by making audible, for the first time, the voice of State power, directly addressing the Soviet viewer. By exploring numerous examples of films from this transitional period, Kaganovsky demonstrates the importance of the new technology of sound in producing and imposing the "Soviet Voice."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253033000 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/13/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 294 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Lilya Kaganovsky is Associate Professor of Slavic, Comparative Literature, and Media&Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is author of How the Soviet Man was Unmade, and editor (with Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Robert A Rushing) of Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960 and (with Masha Salzkina) of Sound, Music, Speech in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema (IUP).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE VOICE OF TECHNOLOGY AND THE END OF SOVIET SILENT FILM
Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg's Alone
THE 1930 WORKING SCREENPLAY OF Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg's first Soviet sound film Odna (Alone, 1931) contains the following crossed-out passage, addressed to the viewer:
Look up at the airplane, with a red star on its side, flying overhead. Listen to the sound of the motor. Follow with your eyes the flying arrow. Feel the weight of the heavy machine, soaring into the void. Someday the state will grind you up inside its motor, will force you ahead, along with itself, or crush you under its merciless weight.
Alone tells the story of a twenty-year-old teacher, Elena Kuzmina (played by FEKS actress Elena Kuz'mina), whose assignment to run a school in Altai leads to her near death. From the frozen wasteland, Kuzmina is rescued and brought by airplane back to the city (Moscow in this initial version), where an operation that amputates four of her toes saves her life. The crossed-out address to the viewer comes at the point when the airplane, sent to Kuzmina's rescue, can be seen flying over the desolate Siberian steppe.
Kozintsev and Trauberg began work on Alone in June of 1929, inspired by a newspaper account of a school teacher rescued by airplane from certain death. The airplane serves as a symbol of technological progress and the advances of the Soviet State. It appears in stark contrast not only the backwardness of the Altai village, but also to the vulnerable human body which it has been sent to rescue, bringing civilization and the never halting march toward the future to the remote corner of Siberia. And yet, the inexorable march of history, progress, and technology is marked in this first screenplay by a palpable anxiety. "Watch out," the crossed-out text of the screenplay says to the viewer, the inhuman machinery of the state is coming for you.
The Alarm
Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg's first Soviet sound film opens with a close-up of a bedside clock that begins ringing loudly as soon as the screen fades in from black. From the face of the clock we move to a close-up shot of the face of a young woman asleep, a woman who does not want to respond to the insistence of the alarm's call, and instead does her best to continue sleeping. She turns away from the alarm, she tries to silence it by throwing a pillow at it — but eventually, she must answer its call — she must get out of bed and begin the day.
This opening sequence is an allegory for the movie itself, since the plot of Alone centers on a young woman who, despite her initial reluctance, obeys the call of the state that sends her to a teaching post in a remote corner of Western Siberia. Filmed on location in Leningrad and Altai, the film tells the story of a recent graduate from a pedagogical institute, awaiting her first teaching assignment. She is in love with a handsome fizkul'turnik Petya (Petr Sobolevsky) and has made plans for a beautiful life in Leningrad with her fiance. Instead, she receives an assignment to teach in a remote village in Altai, far away from her dreams of happiness in the big city. She tries to refuse the assignment, but is ashamed and accepts it instead, bringing her alarm clock and the picture of her fiance Petya with her to her new post.
But the opening sound of the alarm clock works as an allegory in another way as well. Alone was put into production in June of 1929, and by October of 1930 the directors Kozintsev and Trauberg were making use of the newly emergent sound-on-film technology, responding to the call for mass entertainment, industrialization, and the cultural revolution that accompanied the First Five-Year Plan. Conceived from the beginning as a sound film, Alone was one of a handful of films fulfilling the new demand for "talkies" and paving the way for what Boris Shumyatsky called "cinema for the millions" and the birth of Socialist Realism. The sound of the alarm clock that we hear in the beginning of the film served as a wake-up call not only for the heroine, but also for the viewer. It marked the transition from silence to sound, for the first time, bringing the new technology of sound to the Soviet screen. According to film historian Neya Zorkaya, "the close-up of a jangling alarm clock, the opening frame of the film Alone (1931), caused a furor in the cinema theaters. The people laughed and rejoiced."
Kozintsev and Trauberg's Alone straddles the silent/sound divide. The film relies on the new technology of sound to deliver its ideological message. In his memoirs, Kozintsev referred to the ringing of the alarm as a nastoichivyi prizyv — an "insistent call" or "appeal"; a "slogan," a "military call-up" or "draft"; the call of "destiny"; and finally, Leninskii prizyv (Lenin's call). First the alarm and then sounds from the open window, including the singing of birds, the noises of traffic, and music from a hurdy-gurdy interrupt Kuzmina's sleep, disturbing the quiet of her small private room with their very public presence. Indeed, throughout the first part of the film, Kuzmina is constantly addressed by the demands of the state transmitted via different kinds of technology: loudspeakers, typewriters, radio, and telephone communicate the messages of "appeals, slogans, codes, orders, and decrees" (prizyvy i lozungi, svodki, prikazy, postanovleniia), interpellating the heroine into the role of Soviet citizen. Moreover, this is the baring of the cinematic device; like the heroine we, the audience, are addressed by the new technology, learning to accept our new position as auditors as well as viewers. In the film (and working screenplays), we find the word ty (you, fam.) written in large letters on walls, on posters, on fliers. The film, therefore, is consciously addressing itself to the viewer — its "sound effects" are meant to produce a response in us.
Kozintsev and Trauberg began work on Alone in June of 1929, and by October 1930 Alone was on its way to becoming one of the first Soviet sound films, along with Dziga Vertov's Entuziazm: Simfonia Donbassa (Enthusiasm: The Donbass Symphony), Sergei Yutkevich's Zlatye gory (Golden Mountains), and Nikolai Ekk's Putevka v zhizn' (The Road to Life), all released in 1931. Unlike Yutkevich's Golden Mountains or Ekk's The Road to Life, Alone did not make use of dialogue, "naturalistic" music, or laughter. The film contained only one line of spoken dialogue and relied instead on an extradiegetic sound track that included Dmitri Shostakovich's musical score, the song "How Good Life Will Be!" (Kakaia khoroshaia budet zhizn'), sounds of the howling wind, and the ritual chant of the village shaman. Shostakovich — who had earlier written the score for Kozintsev and Trauberg's New Babylon (Novyi Vavilon, 1929) — completely changed his way of film scoring, producing small pieces that could be easily cut, altered, and shuffled around. John Riley refers to Alone, with its "kaleidoscopic soundtrack" — a clever melange of music, sound effects, and speech — as "one of the most innovative early sound films."
Indeed, in an interview in 1935, the actor Sergei Gerasimov, who played the chairman of the village Soviet (council) in the film, stressed the dual nature of Alone, arguing that even though his role was completely silent, and even though the sounds of his snoring were added during postproduction, he, nevertheless, perceived work on the film as a whole as having taken place on a new plane of sound cinematography. "My part was not a sound part," he said. "Of course, it was a purely silent part. Even the snoring was done by the 'imitator' Krzhanovsky. And yet, for me, this was work at the level of a markedly more complex and more intelligent sound cinematography." Or, as Denise Youngblood has put it,
Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg's first "sound" film, Alone, has more silence than Golden Mountains but is less a silent film. ... Although it has very little dialogue, visually it is much more a sound film than most others of this period. The camera work is realistic, almost documentary in style, most if it outdoors; the shots are long; the cuts are fluid. Much of the sound was added later and is unrealistic (babbling voices, clacking typewriters), but Shostakovich's music is illustrative, rather than the "naturalistic" music (like singing) which was all too common in these early films.
Closer in experimental spirit to Vertov's Enthusiasm, Alone relied on extradiegetic, illustrative, almost contrapuntal sound to communicate the possibilities of new technology using alarm clocks, radio, trams, loudspeakers, typewriters, telephones — these objects produce sound in Alone, interfering with or silencing the words of the heroine. Like Alexander Dovzhenko's Ivan or Aleksandr Macheret's Men and Jobs (Dela i liudi, both films released in 1932), so in Alone the technological object is privileged over the human subject. What begins as a story about a teacher lost in the snows of central Asia is transformed into a story about the new voice of technology.
What is vital in thinking about Alone specifically as a sound film is the ways in which, starting from the initial ringing of the alarm clock, the film as a whole serves as an allegory for the transition from Velikii nemoi (The Great Silent or Mute) to synchronized sound, and from avant-garde experimentation to Socialist Realist convention. Most accounts of the Soviet industry's conversion to sound, while concentrating on the details of the industry's transformation (conferences, purges, reorganization, and centralization), have largely not taken into consideration the ideological impact of the transition, the ways in which the introduction of synchronized sound coincided with and in some ways, made possible, the shift in Soviet filmmaking away from avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, to Socialist Realist cinema of the 1930s and beyond. The use of sound in Alone makes clear the larger ideological stakes of lending a "voice" to film, of being able to, for the first time, hear the "voice of power" issuing directly from the screen.
Like that of the US or Western Europe, the Soviet film industry's transition from silence to sound was both technological and economic; but it was also, and perhaps primarily, ideological and aesthetic. The coming of sound demanded a thorough rethinking of cinematic technique (particularly evident with acting, where a highly gestural and iconic acting style gave way to a more naturalistic style), and more specifically, the elimination (or restriction) of montage with its rapid cross-cutting and dialectical construction. Moreover, for the Soviet film industry, this purely technological innovation also coincided with an ongoing cultural crisis and a profound top-down shift, as the cinema industry was completely reorganized and given new ideological directives that were easier to implement because the industry as a whole was now centralized under a single authority.
The first semiofficial conference on the shortcomings of the Sovkino film studio, a joint-stock production and distribution company, was held in October 1927. The conference — a "debate" organized by the Society of Friends of Soviet Cinema (ODSK) and the Young Communist League (Komsomol) — underscored the vital role that cinema was to play in cultural revolution of the First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932) and voiced its concerns over the failures of the current Soviet film industry. As a result, the Party promised to keep a closer eye on cinema. The First All-Union Party Conference on Cinema Affairs held in March 1928 focused its attention on the problems of the Soviet film industry, including its failure to make movies accessible to the masses, its failure to "cinefy" the countryside, its failure to become a self-sustaining industry, and its failure to negotiate the needs of ideology and profit. In January 1929, following the recommendations of the special commission, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of the Bolsheviks (TsK VKPb) issued a decree about the reorganization and purging of current cinema cadres and the centralization of the film industry. The purges of the film industry began in June, ended in August 1929, and were once again in full force by spring 1930.18 In keeping with the secrecy of the purges, Sovkino was quietly liquidated and in its place, in February 1930, Soiuzkino was formed, following the decree of the Council of People's Commissars (SovNarKom) on the establishment of a single Soviet-wide agency to oversee the film and photo industries. In November 1930, Boris Shumyatsky was appointed as its director. Sound film was born at the same time. And while the aesthetic and ideological shift away from the heterogenous film industry of the twenties became most visible in the elaboration of the precepts of Socialist Realism (made into the official doctrine of all Soviet art in 1934) and the films of the thirties, it is already apparent in the films of the period of transition that attempt to speak with a new "voice of technology," and to use the new technology of sound to pose questions about authority, language, national identity, and the relationship between the state and the citizenry.
Perhaps in no other country was the initial response of major filmmakers and critics against sound technology as profound as in Soviet Russia. Sound technology restricted the freedom with which film could be edited, requiring auditory and therefore visual continuity where silent film had not. Moreover, meaning would no longer be left to the assembly and comprehension of the viewer. The site for the production of meaning would shift away from what the formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum, in the 1927 volume Poetika kino, called the spectator's "internal speech" (vnutrenniaia rech'), to the audible word addressing the spectator directly from the screen. In his essay, "Problem of Cinema Stylistics," Eikhenbaum stresses the absence of the audible word as the central organizing principle of silent cinema, making the development of inner speech possible. He writes,
The invention of the movie camera made possible the exclusion of the basic dominant of theatrical syncretism, the audible word, and its replacement by another dominant, motion seen in details ... . The film viewer was placed in completely new conditions of perception, the opposite of the process of reading: from the object, from visual motion, to the process of making sense of it, to the construction of internal speech. The success of film is in part related to this new type of mental work which does not arise in everyday activities. ... Film culture, as a sign of the epoch, stands in opposition to the culture of the word, literary and theatrical, which ruled the previous century. The film viewer seeks relief from the word; he wants only to see and divine.
In his memoirs, Sergei Eisenstein similarly describes the difficult mental labor involved in watching movies. He imagines watching a film as a process of mentally gathering together different fragments of a single totality [oskolki tselogo], specifying that understanding film requires the ability to syncretize, to bring together the various details passing before one's eyes into an impression of a single unified whole. This hard mental labor is the essence of intellectual montage — the mental assembly of disparate images into a meaningful whole, the ability to "see and divine" the language of film. And it is easy to see how the introduction of sound — of the audible word — in cinema would forever alter the relationship of spectator to film and shift the site for the production of meaning away from the viewer, back to the film itself.
Kozintsev and Trauberg may or may not have conceived Alone from the beginning as a sound film, nevertheless, once introduced, sound came to structure the film, shifting the story away from a tale of "human sacrifice" to a tale about technology. Because the introduction of sound coincided with the historical moment of The Great Turn, sound in Soviet cinema helped pave the way of the film industry toward Socialist Realism, toward an ideological program that rigidly controlled what could and could not be shown and what could and could not be spoken on the screen. It is no wonder, then, that Ian Christie stresses the nature of Soviet sound cinema as a "new apparatus." The technology of sound altered the relationship between the film and the viewer, doing away with "internal speech" and substituting in its place the audible word that issued directly from the screen. Sound cinema made it possible to hear the voice of the Other, addressing itself to the spectator. No longer would the film viewer simply "see and divine" a multiplicity of meanings from the language of film — meaning would lose its plurality, imposing the singularity of the spoken word onto the multiplicity of the moving image. Cinema's new voice "hailed" the viewer from the screen, casting the Soviet subject in the role of its addressee.
The Loudspeaker
Kuzmina begins the film as a naive and slightly silly woman, whose dreams of the happy life that awaits her are represented by an outmoded and ideologically dangerous love for things: together with her fiance Petya, she admires the beautiful store displays with tea sets and modern furniture, dreaming of a future life in the great city, full of objects of desire (with Petya, one object among them). As with the sound of the alarm, she is then (re)called to herself when she receives her teaching assignment; from Leningrad and a happy future of well-behaved pupils, marriage, and material comforts, she must go to teach in a desolate Altai village, in the glush' (backcountry) of the Siberian steppe. Kuzmina receives this call in two ways. The first comes in the form of a letter — her teaching assignment that she collects along with her diploma; the second comes in the form of a loudspeaker in the middle of an empty square addressing itself to passersby: "Comrades! Today we are deciding the fate not of one, not of hundreds, but of millions of people. At this moment, we are facing the question: what have you done? What are you doing? What are you going to do?" Responding to the demand of the loudspeaker, Kuzmina answers with her only line of spoken dialogue in the film: "I'm going to complain!" (Ia budu zhalovat'sia!), she says.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Voice of Technology"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Lilya Kaganovsky.
Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Prologue
Introduction: The Long Transition: Soviet Cinema and the Coming of Sound
1. The Voice of Technology and the End of Soviet Silent Film: Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg's Alone
2. The Materiality of Sound: Dziga Vertov's Enthusiasm and Esfir Shub's K.Sh.E.
3. The Homogeneous Thinking Subject, or Soviet Cinema Learns to Sing: Igor Savchenko's TheAccordion
4. Multilingualism and Heteroglossia in Aleksandr Dovzhenko's Ivan and Aerograd
5. "Les Silences de la voix": Dziga Vertov's Three Songs of Lenin
Conclusion: Socialist Realist Sound
Works Cited
Index
Interviews
1. This book presents the untold story of the role the emergence of cinematic sound had on Soviet politics and culture. The author contextualizes media technologies in the midst of the political and cultural environment of the early Soviet era.
2. The author is a returning IUP author who is extremely active in both Slavic studies and film and media studies.
3. This book with have a market among both film and Russian/East European studies scholars and is a strong contribution to IUPs growing international film history lists.