Lilya Kaganovsky and Masha Salazkina, eds. Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. 314 pp. ISBN 978-0-253-01095-7.

© Laboratorium. 2016. 8(3)

Anna Fishzon

Anna Fishzon. Address for correspondence: Harriman Institute, Columbia University, 420 W 118th Street, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10027, USA. afishzon@gmail.com.

Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema, declares Masha Salazkina in her bold introduction, is a collection of essays that seeks to bring the “sonic turn” to Russian and Soviet cinema (as its much criticized “logocentrism” has been reproduced unwittingly in scholarship) and to foster an overdue dialogue between the latter and sound studies (pp. 1–3). It is important not to conflate completely these distinct but intimately related aims. The function of sound in film has been treated by influential theorists like Michel Chion (1999), Kaja Silverman (1988), and Mary Ann Doane (1980). While they are interested in sound as a social practice and voices as bearers of materiality and libido (and not merely speech and meaning), their treatment of audition and vocality remains largely cinematic, on the one hand, and ontologically grounded, on the other. For example, Silverman’s frame of analysis is primarily on screen while her assertion of sonic primacy speculatively points to the soothing maternal voice heard in the womb. In contrast, sound studies as elaborated by Jonathan Sterne (2003), Emily Thompson (2002), and James Lastra (2000) explores sonic experience with a relentless historicism, linking auditory practices, corporeality, and spatiotemporal arrangements to evolving technologies and “a new acoustic modernity” (p. 5). Technological innovations inform aural cultures; and what people hear—what they listen for—in turn affects the essential architecture of human subjectivity: the visual field, affect, gender practices, embodiment and gesture, perception of space and time, and the organization of emotional experience. A number of chapters in the volume take up the agenda of Chion and Silverman; fewer manage to map Soviet cinema onto the terrain delimited by Sterne and his colleagues. Yet the collection offers a promising beginning that doubtless will stir scholars to redefine and reposition Russian and Soviet cinema studies, expanding its audience and establishing its relevance for other interdisciplinary projects.

The volume’s three main sections assemble fourteen notable contributors from an array of fields: film studies, history, musicology, and literature. The opening chapters in Part One, “From Silence to Sound,” consider early experiments in graphic sound and film scoring. Nikolai Izvolov describes the efforts of the avant-garde composer Arsenii Avraamov, who made sonic art by repeatedly printing geometrical shapes onto the optical soundtrack of the filmstrip, as well as those of Evgenii Sholpo, who invented the Variopone, an optical synthesizer. Joan Titus then examines Dmitry Shostakovich’s score to Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg’s Novyi Vavilon (The New Babylon, 1929), the first collaborative attempt to create an “integral” musical counterpart to the visual elements of a Soviet film (p. 39). The next two essays by Valérie Pozner and Natalie Ryabchikova recreate the personal and ideological feuds, bureaucratic disasters, and technological difficulties entailed in bringing sound to Soviet film in the late 1920s and 1930s. As students of Soviet history might expect, the story of the transition from silent to sound cinema intersects in pedestrian and catastrophic ways with purge campaigns, the Cultural Revolution, and Joseph Stalin’s industrialization.

Emma Widdis’s last and most compelling chapter in the section analyzes the uses of silence in a number of early sound films, including Aleksandr Macheret’s Chastnaia zhizn’ Petra Vinogradova (The Private Life of Peter Vinogradov, 1934) and Abram Room’s Strogii iunosha (A Severe Youth, 1936). Widdis begins with a striking observation: the reproduction and audibility of silence were not possible in the era of silent film. Silence is not an ontological condition but an artifact of cinematic sound reproduction. And in the films Widdis examines sound renders silence visible. Silence literally appears to the spectator and directs her gaze, creating states of feeling and space for private contemplation. Macheret and Room deploy silence to heighten the dramatic impact of socialist objects and heroes and to present a model of Soviet subjectivity containing “a place for both sentiment and sensory pleasure” (p. 107). The melodies and rhythms of machines are heard more fully when protagonists grow mute; young, athletic bodies are better seen and sensed when viewed in untrammeled quiet. The new Soviet man, the films seemed to suggest, “needed to learn to feel, not just to speak” (p. 107).

The following sections each move diachronically as contributors’ themes and methods take them past the initial relatively short period of transition to sound film. The essays in Part Two are, in my view, the most daring in the collection because they go furthest in theorizing cinematic speech and voice as carriers of emergent Soviet subjectivities that stretched aural imaginations and created new modes of perception and feeling. Evgeny Margolit writes about the ways heteroglossia (multilingualism) conceptualized unity in diversity in the early sound era. Jeremy Hicks looks at challenges to acousmatic (off-screen, disembodied) “voice-of-God” narration in Soviet wartime documentaries. He shows, for example, how playwright Vsevolod Vishnevskii in a film about the Leningrad blockade subjectified his voiceover and undermined the official triumphalist perspective by focusing on individual suffering and employing “here” and “this,” as well as shifters like “we” and “us”—words that located the narrator temporally within the diegesis and among the victims.

In an exceptionally original and provocative contribution, film scholar Oksana Bulgakowa asks why the desultory, soft, and breathy voices of actors Marlon Brando and Innokentii Smoktunovskii achieved canonical status in the 1950s when ringing timbres were mandatory on stage and film just a decade before. Her answers visit territories beyond cinema history, connecting prevailing sonic expectations to technological inventions, gendered embodiment, and sensory experience. We are reminded that voices and speech patterns, like people, ideas, and technologies, are bearers of historicity. Bugakowa claims that the popular acceptance and critical praise of Smoktunovskii’s muffled inarticulateness were made possible by improvements in sound-on-film technology (better microphones and the advent of magnetic tape recording permitted a wider range of frequencies) and indexed new images of masculinity—more ambivalent, sensual, gentle, and open to intimacy. Elena Razlogova concludes the section with a chapter on the lost Soviet art of simultaneous translation of foreign films.

Part Three, “Music in Film, or the Sound Track,” features several strong chapters on film soundtracks as vehicles for political messages and for important aspects of late- and post-Soviet subjectivities. Kevin Bartig inaugurates the section with a lucid if narrowly musicological discussion of the foundational statements of Soviet composers and scholars about the nature and role of film music. A remarkable discursive cohesion emerges: in the 1930s most advocated for the integration of sonic and visual film components along the lines of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk while also insisting that music “amplify” rather than simply illustrate the emotions and actions of characters. In other words, even as Soviet composers and musicologists conceived music as the elaboration of cinema’s verbal narrative—an apotheosis of the nineteenth-century operatic synthesis of the arts—they emphasized film music’s unique part in “audiovisual counterpoint”: the independence of its storytelling function and the potential divergence between sound and image.

Anna Nisnevich’s essay on Aleksandr Ivanovskii and Gerbert Rappoport’s 1940 Muzykal’naia istoriia is one of the more impressive in the volume. Nisnevich argues that the film marks a radical shift in Soviet aesthetic and affective terrains. Whereas 1930s musical comedies like Grigorii Aleksandrov’s Volga-Volga (1938) told the parable of acoustic and social integration through the use of simple numbers—communal participation, transposition, and the ultimate transcendence of any one style or performance mode (for example, the folksy melody of the Volga song is sung a capella, performed by a full orchestra, and finally jazzed up and improvised upon)—the kul’turnost’-driven Muzykal’naia istoriia, featuring Bol’shoi Theater star Sergei Lemeshev, stressed inimitable talent, artistic expertise, and emotionally invested listening. According to Nisnevich, Muzykal’naia istoriia and comparable films revived the late-Imperial operatic canon in order to elevate audiences and show them new forms of engagement, not merely with music but also with subjectivity. My one disappointment is the author’s underexamination of Lemeshev’s voice as the chosen object of exalted sensibility and transformative listening. Like his contemporary, the lyric tenor Ivan Kozlovskii, Lemeshev had a plangent and delicate timbre. Both singers liberally employed a legato that was strikingly old-fashioned and feminine, more reminiscent of nineteenth-century bel canto than the heroic phrasing commonly heard in the West in their day. One might well ask a question similar to the one posed in Bulgakowa’s essay: why these specific voice types at this particular historical moment? What does the popularity of tenors like Lemeshev and Kozlovskii tell us about postwar notions of masculinity and how could their mannered styles and lachrymose timbres—the very materiality of their voices—be linked to key facets of kul’turnost’ discourse—for example, pronouncements on hygiene, domestic life, and romantic love?

Following Joan Neuberger’s “The Music of Landscape: Eisenstein, Prokofiev, and the Uses of Music in Ivan the Terrible,” a consideration of the plasticity and contrapuntal manipulation of the film score to communicate multiple, conflicted feelings regarding both Tsar Ivan and official historiography, musicologist Peter Schmelz examines the historical significance of Tengiz Abuladze’s polystylistic Monanieba/Pokaianie (Repentance, 1984). Schmelz borrows Alfred Schnittke’s musical concept to argue that the popularity of the film rests in its reflection of perestroika’s “polystylism”—the era’s tendency to mix high and low cultures and blend past, present, and future; its penchant for quotation, collage, and allusions to a wide variety of texts and sounds; its openness to shocking and colliding aural and visual experiences. I would have liked Schmelz to develop this claim even further by placing it in a broader political and social context and posing questions for future research. For example, what does it mean that Schnittke first introduced the strictly musical “polystylism” in the early 1970s, long before glasnost and perestroika made it an everyday phenomenon? How might the elastic and citational nature of polystylism—as well as its temporal and generic violence—be linked to the possibilities and limits of reform communism?

Finally, Lilya Kaganovsky’s essay on Valerii Todorovskii’s 2008 musical Stiliagi (The Hipsters), while more conventional in approach than some other contributions to the volume (and her own previous work), is nonetheless unfailingly cogent: it interprets the film’s musical attempt to both mourn and reintegrate aspects of the Soviet past, specifically its traditions of dissent and rebellion. Todorovskii utilizes and campily exaggerates the sartorial codes of historical postwar stiliagi, who sported Western fashions and listened to Duke Ellington in defiance of the Komsomol’s official youth culture. However, and this is particularly important for Kaganovsky, the music in the film is taken not from the counterculture of the Soviet 1950s—which consisted primarily of popular jazz standards rather than the latest rock and roll—but, anachronistically, from the glasnost and post-Soviet periods. Citations of 1980s and 1990s rock bands like Mashina Vremeni (Time Machine), Kino, and Zoopark (Zoo) evoke breathtaking transformations in the Soviet soundscape that signaled tectonic political change and rebirth. Stiliagi, therefore, “is not actually the exploration of the Soviet Union’s relationship to the West but rather of … Russia’s relationship to itself” (p. 264). As the film celebrates particular nonconformists, it also thematizes the very possibility of social and political nonconformity. The essay concludes with a brief mention of the 2012 performance and trial of the punk-rock collective Pussy Riot, the members of which shared Todorovskii’s “utopian vision of unity” in musically dissonant protest (p. 269).

Kaganovsky’s chapter is an apt bookend as it returns to the objectives outlined by Salazkina in the introduction and by sound studies generally: chief among them, exploring the role of “the affective and sensory regimes of sound in the formation of historical subjectivities” (p. 10). Indeed, as I suggested already, the volume is at its most exciting when it takes Soviet film sound out of the narrow context of Slavic studies (where previous scholarship has confined it) and locates it on a wider interdisciplinary stage. Like Widdis, Hicks, Bulgakowa, Nisnevich, and Schmelz, Kaganovsky shows cinematic soundscapes to be embedded in and inseparable from larger discursive structures, privatizing ideological imperatives and providing spaces for their refiguration.