Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema

Description

The use of sound in movies

This innovative volume challenges the ways we look at both cinema and cultural history by shifting the focus from the centrality of the visual and the literary toward the recognition of acoustic culture as formative of the Soviet and post-Soviet experience. Leading experts and emerging scholars from film studies, musicology, music theory, history, and cultural studies examine the importance of sound in Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet cinema from a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives. Addressing the little-known theoretical and artistic experimentation with sound in Soviet cinema, changing practices of voice delivery and translation, and issues of aesthetic ideology and music theory, this book explores the cultural and historical factors that influenced the use of voice, music, and sound on Soviet and post-Soviet screens.

Acknowledgements
Note on Transliteration
List of Abbreviations
Introduction / Masha Salazkina
Part I: From Silence to Sound
1. From the History of Graphic Sound in the USSR or Media without a Medium / Nikolai Izvolov
2. Silents, Sound, and Modernism in Dmitry Shostakovich's Score to The New Babylon / Joan Titus
3. To Catch up and Overtake Hollywood: Early Talking Pictures in the Soviet Union / Valerie Pozner
4. ARRK and the Soviet Transition to Sound / Natalia Ryabchikova
5. Making Sense without Speech: The Use of Silence in Early Soviet Sound Film / Emma Widdis
Part II: Speech and Voice
6. The Problem of Heteroglossia in Early Soviet Sound Cinema (1930-1935) / Evgeny Margolit
7. Challenging the Voice-of-God in World War II Era Soviet Documentaries / Jeremy Hicks
8. Vocal Changes: Marlon Brando, Innokenti Smoktunovsky, and The Sound of The 1950s / Oksana Bulgakowa
9. Listening to the Inaudible Foreign: Simultaneous Translators and Soviet Experience of Foreign Cinema / Elena Razlogova
Part III: Music in Film, or the Soundtrack
10. Kinomuzyka: Theorizing Soviet Film Music in the 1930s / Kevin Bartig
11. Ear of the Beholder: Listening in Muzykal'naia istoriia (1940) / Anna Nisnevich
12. The Music of Landscape: Eisenstein, Prokofiev and the Uses of Music in Ivan The Terrible / Joan Neuberger
13. The Full Illusion of Reality: Repentance, Polystylism, and the Late Soviet Soundscape / Peter Schmelz
14. Russian Rock on Soviet Bones / Lilya Kaganovsky
Bibliography
Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Former Soviet Union
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• MUSIC
• Película fotográfica
• URSS
• Multiple signal classification
• Cinema of Russia
• Post-Soviet states
• General officer
• History of classical music traditions
• Soviet Union
• Russia
• Cinema of the Soviet Union
• History of film
• General
• Film
• Union des républiques socialistes soviétiques
• Russie

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 07 mars 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253011107
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

SOUND, SPEECH, MUSIC IN SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET CINEMA
SOUND, SPEECH, MUSIC IN SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET CINEMA
Edited by Lilya Kaganovsky and Masha Salazkina
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 E. 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405-3907 USA
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2014 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sound, speech, music in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema / edited by Lilya Kaganovsky and Masha Salazkina.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01104-6 (paperback) - ISBN 978-0-253-01095-7 (cloth) - ISBN 978-0-253-01110-7 (ebook) 1. Motion pictures-Soviet Union. 2. Film soundtracks-Soviet Union. 3. Motion picture music-Soviet Union-History and criticism.
I. Kaganovsky, Lilya, editor. II. Salazkina, Masha, editor.
PN1993.5.R8S67 2013
781.5 420947084-dc23
2013042567
1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
List of Abbreviations
Introduction Masha Salazkina
Part I. From Silence to Sound
1 From the History of Graphic Sound in the Soviet Union; or, Media without a Medium Nikolai Izvolov
2 Silents, Sound, and Modernism in Dmitry Shostakovich s Score to The New Babylon Joan Titus
3 To Catch Up and Overtake Hollywood: Early Talking Pictures in the Soviet Union Val rie Pozner
4 ARRK and the Soviet Transition to Sound Natalie Ryabchikova
5 Making Sense without Speech: The Use of Silence in Early Soviet Sound Film Emma Widdis
Part II. Speech and Voice
6 The Problem of Heteroglossia in Early Soviet Sound Cinema (1930-35) Evgeny Margolit
7 Challenging the Voice of God in World War II-Era Soviet Documentaries Jeremy Hicks
8 Vocal Changes: Marlon Brando, Innokenty Smoktunovsky, and the Sound of the 1950s Oksana Bulgakowa
9 Listening to the Inaudible Foreign: Simultaneous Translators and Soviet Experience of Foreign Cinema Elena Razlogova
Part III. Music in Film; or, The Sound Track
10 Kinomuzyka: Theorizing Soviet Film Music in the 1930s Kevin Bartig
11 Listening to Muzykal naia istoriia (1940) Anna Nisnevich
12 The Music of Landscape: Eisenstein, Prokofiev, and the Uses of Music in Ivan the Terrible Joan Neuberger
13 The Full Illusion of Reality: Repentance , Polystylism, and the Late Soviet Soundscape Peter Schmelz
14 Russian Rock on Soviet Bones Lilya Kaganovsky
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
T HIS VOLUME CAME about as a result of our mutual frustration with the lack of English-language materials on sound in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema. In it, we have tried to bring together new work by scholars from several disciplines, providing a larger historical framework for the discussion of the sonic turn in Soviet film studies, as well as close readings of individual films that pay particular attention to the way sound, speech, and music operate in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema. We are grateful to Indiana University Press and in particular to our editor Raina Polivka, for her enthusiasm, advice, and support of this project. We also owe many thanks to the commitment and patience of our contributors to this project as the volume has gone through its various incarnations, as well as to the support and interest of several fellow-travelers and interlocutors, in particular Polina Barskova, Birgit Beumers, Vincent Bohlinger, Andrew Chapman, Katerina Clark, Nancy Condee, Julian Graffy, Naum Kleiman, Vera Kropf, Susan Larsen, John MacKay, Joshua Malitsky, Simon Morrison, Sergei Oushakine, Amy Sargeant, and Mark Slobin, as well as to our two external reviewers, whose attentive appraisals helped shape this book.
Likewise, we owe many thanks to our translators Andr e Lafontaine, Sergei Levchin, and Katrina Sark, and our team of editorial assistants for their work on this collection. We are particularly grateful to Dru Jeffries, whose meticulous readings helped bring this volume to completion.
Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema received generous support at both of our home institutions, as well as from national organizations, and of course, from family and friends.
Lilya Kaganovsky would like to thank the University of Illinois s Research Board; the federally funded Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center; the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; and the Program in Comparative and World Literature for providing research assistance, conference travel, and research travel support; and the American Council of Learned Societies, together with the National Endowment for the Arts and Social Science Research Council, for fellowship support that provided leave time for this project. She is particularly grateful to her friends and colleagues at Illinois, Cambridge, and beyond; and most importantly to R.R., S.R., H. ., A. ., and O. .
Masha Salazkina would like to thank Concordia University s Aid to Research Related Events, Exhibition, Publication, and Dissemination Activities and the Faculty of Fine Arts for providing research and translation funds for this project, as well as her colleagues at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema for their advice and support. Without Igor Salazkin s tireless search for books and Luca Caminati s unfaltering patience and unconditional support, none of this would have been possible.

Two of the chapters in the present volume were originally published in Russian in the excellent collection Sovetskaia vlast i media (Soviet Power and the Media, 2006), edited by Hans G nther and Sabine H nsgen. We are grateful to the editors, G nther and H nsgen, and to the authors, Nikolai Izvolov and Evgeny Margolit, for their permission to translate their work here. While the volume itself is out of print, an electronic version of the text is available at http://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/publication/23050177 .
Note on Transliteration
T HE TRANSLITERATION SYSTEM we use in this volume aims for readability in the text and accuracy in the notes. Russian names in the text are given in their conventional English-language spelling to render them more accessible, while Library of Congress system of transliteration is followed in all other instances. In translating titles of Russian films, we have also inserted articles where English fluency requires them.
Abbreviations
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii ( GARF )-State Archive of the Russian Federation
Gosudarstvennyi fond kinofil mov Rossiiskoi Federatsii-Gosfil mofond
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki ( RGAE )-Russian State Archive for Economics
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotodokumentov ( RGAKFD )-Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva ( RGALI )-Russian State Archive for Literature and the Arts
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial no-politicheskoi istorii ( RGASPI )-Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History
Tsentral nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva, Sankt-Peterburg ( TSGALI SPb )-Central State Archive for Literature and Art, St. Petersburg
SOUND, SPEECH, MUSIC IN SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET CINEMA
Introduction
Masha Salazkina
K IRA M URATOVA, ONE of the most celebrated and original contemporary Russian film auteurs, was asked in a 1995 interview what she had learned from her film-school mentor Sergei Gerasimov, whose filmmaking was so distinct from hers. She answered that he taught her to listen and to hear, awakening [in her] an interest in and an elation from listening. 1 In the same interview Muratova identified endless manipulations of accents, modes of delivery, and systems of repetition as distinguishing markers of her personal authorial style. There is little doubt that Muratova is the contemporary Russian director with the most developed sense of hearing; that she is a product of an institutional apparatus with its own complex relationship to the aural dimensions of cinema-which her comment about Gerasimov seems to imply-might well serve as a vector for reconsidering the aural in the larger tradition of the Soviet cinema.
The contributions that make up Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema take their cue from this elation of listening and the gift of hearing exemplified by Muratova by bringing together essays addressing different aspects of sound in the context of Soviet and post-Soviet film culture. The collection sees itself as an invitation to deep listening : to attuning our ears to the complexity of meanings that emerge if we not only take sound as an equal partner in audiovisual representation but also engage in what Steven Feld has referred to as acoustemology, that is, an investigation of the primacy of sound as a modality of knowing and being in the world. 2
The Sonic Turn
In the course of the past thirty years, a number of scholars in cinema and media studies, the humanities, and the social sciences have been challenging the centrality given to the visual in our social and cultural lives by uncovering the often-dominant function of sound in our experience and understanding of the world. In the process, they have raised questions not only about the material culture of sound but also about the curiously muted interest traditionally shown in it, which for so long