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The Sounds of Music: Soundtrack and Song in Soviet Film

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

David C. Gillespie
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Abstract

In this article, David C. Gillespie explores the deliberate foregrounding of music and song in Soviet film. He begins with a discussion of the structural and organizing roles of music and song in early Soviet sound films, including tiiose by Sergei Eizenshtein, Grigorii Aleksandrov, Ivan Pyr'ev, and Aleksandr Ivanovskii. Gillespie then focuses on the emphasis on urban song in some of the most popular films of the stagnation years, such as The White Sun of the Desert (1969) and Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1979), adding considerably to the appreciation of these films. To conclude, he analyzes folk music in films about village life, especially those directed by Vasilii Shukshin, and explores the role of music in constructing a mythical and nationalistic discourse.

Type
Focus
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , Fall 2003 , pp. 473 - 490
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2003

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References

I am particularly indebted to Natasha Zaslavskaia and Elena Smirnova of the University of Bath for their invaluable assistance with analyzing popular song and its relevance in Soviet culture of the 1970s.

1 “Statement on Sound” (by Sergei Eizenshtein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigorii Aleksandrov), in Taylor, Richard, ed., TheEisenstein Reader (London, 1998), 81 Google ScholarPubMed.

2 Brown, Royal S., Overtones and Undertones: ReadingFilm Music (Berkeley, 1994), 14 Google Scholar.

3 James, C. Vaughan, Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory (London, 1973), 88 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Brown, Overtones and Undertones, 144.

5 Bordwell, David, The Cinema o/Eisenstein (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 220 Google Scholar.

6 Figes, Orlando, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (London, 2002), 496 Google Scholar. Tatiana Egorova also notes that the score for Ivan the Terrible was “original and innovatory“: “the music of that last great joint creative effort by Eisenstein and Prokofiev broke the established, stereotyped notions of the functional role of film music, enabling it to approach the nature of a sound-visual image based on a syndiesis of a higher order.” See Egorova, Tatiana K., Soviet Film Music: An Historical Survey, trans. Ganf, Tatiana A. and Egunova, Natalia A. (Amsterdam, 1997), 113 Google Scholar.

7 Taylor, Richard, “But Eastward, Look, the Land Is Brighter: Towards a Topography of Utopia in the Stalinist Musical,” in Holmes, Diana and Smith, Alison, eds., 100 Years of European Cinema: Entertainment or Ideology? (Manchester, 2000), 19, 24Google ScholarPubMed.

8 David MacFadyen comments that “popular songs in Russia after the death of Stalin make quiet claim to the material world, to a subjective interpretation of it… . What the Soviet Union, one-sixth of that global material mass, meant after the all-encompassing and semantically greedy culture of Stalinism vanished is both reflected and created by the songs which Soviet citizens waited to hear on their radios or watch performed on their television sets.” See MacFadyen, David, Red Stars: Personality and the Soviet Popular Song, 1955- 1991 (Montreal, 2001), 79 Google Scholar.

9 Gerald Smith quotes statistics on the availability of the tape recorder in the 1960s: “The open-reel tape recorder was first marketed in the USSR on any significant scale in 1960, when 128,000 were manufactured. The number reached nearly half a million by 1965 and topped the million mark by the end of the decade.” See Smith, Gerald, Songs toSeven Strings: Russian Guitar Poetry and Soviet “Mass Song” (Bloomington, 1984), 95 Google Scholar.

10 Vysotskii’s songs are also used in the film Ballada o doblestnom rytsare Aivengo (The ballad of the valiant knight Ivanhoe) directed by Sergei Tarasov in 1983, that is, three years after Vysotskii’s death. The songs are used as part of the soundtrack, the love lyrics reminding us of minstrels’ songs, others adding considerably to the excitement and tension of the battle scenes, especially when delivered in the singer’s characteristic raucous tones.

11 The song as performed in the film is slightly different from the version now retained in Okudzhava’s canon. The full text runs to four stanzas and is included in the recent collection Bulat Okudzhava, Stikhi. Rasskazy. Povesti (Ekaterinburg, 1999), 24.

12 Segida, Miroslava and Zemlianukhin, Sergei, Domashniaia sinemateka: Otechestvennoekino,1918-1996 (Moscow, 1996), 34 Google Scholar.

13 Klavdiia Shul'zhenko (1906-84) is to the Russians what Vera Lynn is to the English, a singer whose songs relate to wartime comradeship and pulling together. Her song “Sinii platochek” holds roughly the same appeal for Soviet servicemen as “The White Cliffs of Dover” did for the British.

14 Segida and Zemlianukhin, Domashniaia sinemateka, 257.

15 Dorizo’s song ends with the female singer denying her love for the married man, thus saving the family unit. Gerald Smith comments: “The awesome gap between the attitude expressed here and normal Soviet sexual relations will be apparent to anyone with even a superficial knowledge of Soviet life as it really is.” See Smith, Songs to Seven Strings, 23. It should also be noted that Rostotskii’s film shows die village as a place of abundance and plenty, in stark contrast to the neglect and hardship historians tell us actually existed.

16 Hosking, Geoffrey, Beyond Socialist Realism: Soviet Fiction since Ivan Denisovich (London, 1980), 163 Google Scholar.

17 Givens, John, “Vasilii Shukshin and the ‘Audience of Millions': Kalina krasnaia and the Power of Popular Cinema,” Russian Review 58, no. 2 (April 1999): 284 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Ibid., 273-74.

19 The song as it is performed in this film is a slightly modified version of Esenin’s poem. The poem runs to nine four-line stanzas, and the singer in the film performs stanzas 5-8. For the full text of the poem, see Esenin, Sergei, “Pis'mo materi,” Sobranie sochineniivpiati tomakh (Moscow, 1961), 2:155–56Google Scholar.

20 For a subjective but nevertheless informative discussion of Shukshin’s love of song and folk music, see Ponomareva, Tamara, Potaennaia liubov’ Shukshina (Moscow, 2001), esp. 179–90Google Scholar.

21 Red Guelder Rose was the second most popular film of 1974, with 62.5 million viewers. Segida and Zemlianukhin, Domashniaia sinemateka, 190.