6 - Futurists and ‘Homogenizers’ in Early Soviet Sound Film

Summary

Abstract: This chapter discusses a theoretical concept by Nikolai Anoshchenko, who attempted to reframe cinematic speech by approaching it not as a verbal but as a sonic phenomenon. The semantic power of sound was supposed to become greater than that of dialogue or monologue – an idea that shows a close relation to the sound poetry of Russian Futurists. The idea of mobilizing the phonosemantics of sound was only partly put in practice but the first few projects of the Moscow and Leningrad studios offer especially interesting case studies in this regard. These films suggest a homogenization technique that affects both voice and noise and share similar strategies of manipulating acoustic phenomena.

Keywords: film theory, Russian Futurism, film music, speech in early sound film, phonosemantics

The sound revolution took over ten years in the Soviet Union: until 1938, films were released in both sound and silent versions. Early Soviet sound film is known mostly for the manifesto “Statement on Sound” (1928) by Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov, in which the authors advocated for asynchronous sound, for a discord between sound and image, in order to recombine the two in new ways. These ideas were partially realized in Dziga Vertov's Entuziasm (Enthusiasm, 1931) and Pudovkin's Dezertir (The Deserter, 1933), and they were included in Eisenstein's several unrealized projects (the sound version of Staroye i novoye/The Old and the New, 1929; Sutter's Gold and An American Tragedy, both 1930; and MMM, 1933). In these scripts, Eisenstein developed the idea of an inner monologue based on the conflict between an inner and an outer voice, between the figurative and the abstract, the visual and the acoustic, the objective and the subjective, attributed alternately to the image and the sound. Vertov's film and Eisenstein's ideas are the most extensively analysed examples, even if the latter were rarely examined as acoustic phenomena and products of a sonic imagination. Until recently, however, other concepts and works have rarely been explored.

The early stage of sound film in the Soviet Union was shaped by passionate debates, experiments, and a variety of approaches. Technicians and governmental institutions discussed whether it would be better to import American sound equipment or to invest into domestic sound-recording technology, and which of the two competing labs – Pavel Tager and Alexander Shorin – should be given priority.