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The voice of technology and the end of Soviet silent film: Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg's Alone
Abstract
Looking closely at Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg's film Odna (Alone, 1931), this article elaborates the ways in which the new technology of synchronized sound altered the relationship between Soviet cinema and its viewer. Doing away with ‘internal speech’ and putting in its place a voice that issued directly from the screen, the new sound technology hailed the spectator directly, casting the Soviet subject in the role of its addressee. This article considers the role that technology plays both inside and outside the film, formulating specifically how sound technology comes to represent the voice of power that produces the film's heroine as a Soviet subject, and tracing the ways in which anxiety about technology and the operations of the State underpin Kozintsev and Trauberg's last silent avant-garde and first Soviet sound film.
The siege blacked out Leningrad. Public lighting was turned off; chipboard in windows prevented inside lighting from getting out. The darkness imposed its daily rhythm on Leningraders; at the same time, it hid the city from the view of German combat pilots. It lamed everyday life, which nonetheless continued to function. Darkness is a central topos of many literary testimonies from the besieged city.
Unlike previous studies of the Soviet avant-garde during the silent era, which have regarded the works of the period as manifestations of directorial vision, this study emphasizes the collaborative principle at the heart of avant-garde filmmaking units and draws attention to the crucial role of camera operators in creating the visual style of the films, especially on the poetics of composition and lighting. In the Soviet Union of the 1920s and early 1930s, owing to the fetishization of the camera as an embodiment of modern technology, the cameraman was an iconic figure whose creative contribution was encouraged and respected. Drawing upon the film literature of the period, Philip Cavendish describes the culture of the camera operator, charts developments in the art of camera operation, and studies the mechanics of key director-cameraman partnerships. He offers detailed analysis of Soviet avant-garde films and draws comparisons between the visual aesthetics of these works and the modernist experiments taking place in the other spheres of the visual arts.
Igor' Savchenko (1906–50) is a pivotal figure in the history of Soviet cinema, yet his work is very little known in the West. Born in what is now Ukraine (Vinnitsa) but educated in Leningrad, Savchenko made films in Moscow, Kiev and Ashkhabad. He returned throughout his career to Ukrainian topics, most notably and often controversially in the films Riders (1939), Bohdan Khmel'nytskyi (1941), Partisans in the Ukrainian Steppes (1942) and Taras Shevchenko (released posthumously in 1951). This article examines Savchenko's role in the emergence of Soviet sound cinema, most notably as director of the first Soviet musical, The Accordion (1934). Based on a poem by Komsomol poet Aleksandr Zharov, who wanted to defend the old village ways of music and dancing and passing the time from the changes brought on by collectivization — specifically, not to give the accordion over to the kulaks, but to preserve it for Komsomol youth. Yet, the film stages the new Komsomol ‘enjoyment’ music and dancing not in terms of pure unfettered pleasure, but in terms of bodily control: the new Komsomol body is disciplined and rigid, its movements stiff and controlled, while the ‘old’ kulak body is represented as loose, dissipated and disorderly. This ‘old’ body must be eliminated from the Soviet ranks (validating the project of collectivization), and this is done in Savchenko's film via the introduction of music to film: sound-on-film technology subordinates the bodily movements of the characters, acting as an external force and subjecting the new disciplined Soviet bodies to a rhythm whose source is located elsewhere, both inside (diegetic) and outside (extra-diegetic) to the image track.
In this article, Emma Widdis suggests that a sensory history is a crucial counterpart to the recent emotional turn in Russian and Slavic scholarship on Russian and Slavic history and culture. In particular, the Soviet revolutionary project was a unique attempt to create new models of human experience to correspond to the new political order—an attempt to shape sensory experience itself. Widdis suggests that the still-young medium of cinema was a privileged site for the investigation of new models of sensory perception, for the working out of the problematic relationship between the body, the mind, and the world that had such ideological potency in early Soviet Russia. Linking close readings of little-known films from this period to a broader analysis of the discursive field within which they operated, Widdis suggests that, in the period of transition between 1928 and 1932, intensified sensory (and particularly tactile) experience emerged as a new and revolutionary mode of being in the world.
Scholars of the first decades of Soviet cinema have conventionally broken their study down into sub-periods marked both by developments in the film industry and by political change. The year 1924 saw both Lenin's death and the restoration of the film industry after the dislocation caused by revolution and civil war. The late New Economic Policy (NEP) years would produce both the first great depictions of the revolutionary process by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Dovzhenko and the social comedies of everyday life of Kuleshov, Barnet, Ermler, and Room. The end of the decade saw collectivization and the First Five-Year Plan—and cultural revolution, which had a direct effect on the film industry. This second period also coincided with the start of the Soviet cinematic debate about sound film. The introduction of sound technology in the 1930s brought a new genre, the musical, but it also made it easier to use film for ideological ends, so filmmakers experienced increasing state intervention and censorship, and the number of shelved films grew. The third sub-period dates from June 1941 to May 1945 and is marked by the evacuation of the industry to Central Asia and its total ideological mobilization. The fourth, lasting from the end of the war to the Great Leader's death, saw a drive to re-impose orthodoxy and a dearth of films, the so-called malokartin´e, the two phenomena connected by Stalin's famous dictum that "we should make fewer films, but each of them should be a masterpiece."
There have been, broadly, four approaches to writing about the film industry of these years. The first was to study individual films and the careers of individual filmmakers, and here a conservative canon was observed, with most attention paid to the "great directors," to Eisenstein and Pudovkin, Vertov and Dovzhenko, and then, later, to the musicals of Aleksandrov and Pyr´ev. But the singular achievements of many other filmmakers and, more important, the links of these directors to their colleagues through the shared experience of cinematic education, professional organizations, and work in studios were insufficiently explored.1 The other approaches were the publication, re-publication, and translation of documents, exemplified by The Film Factory,2 still the most important single volume on the cinema of the period; contributions to the history of the industry in its political context, the approach taken in Richard Taylor's Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany and The Politics of the Soviet Cinema 1917–1929;3 and overviews of the cinematic process in historical context, as in Peter Kenez's Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917–1953 and Denise Youngblood's Movies for the Masses.4 These five pioneering books set the agenda for the development of the study of Stalin period cinema in the West in the late 20th century. It is notable that they concentrated their gaze on the 1920s and early 1930s, which are the years that saw the greatest artistic and political debate about the direction of the industry, and arguably the years of its greatest achievement. The fate and achievements of the industry during wartime and later attracted far less attention, in part because of the inaccessibility of the films of this period.
The approaches outlined above have not changed fundamentally in recent years, but a number of factors have led to a considerable expansion of the study of the subject. First and perhaps most important is that the video and DVD revolution has vastly increased the primary material which is accessible to scholars. Many of these films are re-issued in low-quality editions, poorly framed and with bad sound, and few attempts have been made by Russian publishers to re-issue the original versions of the many films that were de-Stalinized in the Khrushchev years, but it is now possible (indeed essential) to look at the achievements of the great cinematic masters in the context from which they sprang. This context is now being examined in many ambitious documentary films being made by Russian companies, the most innovative and thoughtful of which, Zvezdnye gody Lenfil´ma (The Star-Studded Years of Lenfilm), made for the Kul´tura channel, regularly includes footage from extremely...
A television documentary on speech therapy is visible on the screen. A logopedist (speech-defect expert) coaches a young man to overcome his stutter through hypnosis. "You will speak loudly and clearly, freely and easily, unafraid of your voice and your speech," she instructs. The boy hesitates but finally musters the words: "I can speak." Thus Andrei Tarkovsky begins Zerkalo [Mirror], his poetic film about personal memory and cultural trauma (conceived in 1964 and completed in 1974). The symbolism of this scene was impossible for Tarkovsky's Soviet intelligentsia audience to miss. The stutterer coming to speech allegorized the artist coming to free expression in Russia after Stalin, struggling to adapt to alternating intervals of liberating "thaw" and oppressive "freeze," fluency and silence, in the period of de-Stalinization that Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech at the 20th Party Congress of 1956 set into motion. The crisis of the solo stutterer's speech in the film stood in for the larger emerging crisis of how to represent socialist reality, a world that once had been captured solely by socialist realism - that is, until Khrushchev deprived Stalinism of its status as real socialism and thus invalidated the basis of socialist realism.
Drawing on contemporary critical theory as well as postmodern post-Soviet literature and film, Lilya Kaganovsky discusses the ways Stalinist socialist realist fiction, and in particular, Nikolai Ostrovskii's "How the Steel Was Tempered", articulates the "dominant fiction" of Stalinism: that is, the relationship between heroism, male subjectivity, power, and bodily integrity. Positing two models of exemplary masculinity (the healthy and virile Stalinist subject on the one hand, and the wounded, mutilated, blind, and paralyzed, but nonetheless, celebrated male subject on the other) this essay seeks to understand what purpose bodily mutilation serves in Stalinist texts. By examining Pavka Korchagin's insatiable desire to keep returning to the "ranks" of the party despite the toll each return takes on his body, Kaganovsky points to the mechanisms of power and pleasure at work in socialist realist texts that, in turn, reflect the cultural fantasy of Stalinism-the (un)making of the New Soviet Man.
Purges — whether. violent or non-violent — represent. an important part of the political history of Soviet cinema. They began to affect the cinema industry in the late 1920s and reached their height during the Great Terror of 1936–38. Research to date has provided us with information of who the main victims were and why these individuals were arrested. Nonetheless, we still lack a more empirical account of the real impact of the purges. This article seeks to offer such an account and elaborate further on how cinema institutions and their personnel were affected. Emphasizing the difference between the early and later purges, it argues that, in terms of the most influential film-makers and bureaucrats, the earlier purges of 1929–36. had a limited impact. The industry was in desperate need of qualified and experienced personnel and thus could not afford to get rid of talented artists and administrators. Recycling and adaptation to new conditions was the reality of the early years rather than a genuin...
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