Page 194 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

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Making sense of early Soviet sound
Ian Christie

It is one of the movies’ little ironies that the most important
development in film-making–the revolutionary work of the Soviet
cinema–should have taken place at the precise moment when the
coming of sound made it temporarily invalid; that the one theory which
might have saved the silent cinema from destruction arrived just as the
silent cinema had drawn its last breath.
C.A.Lejeune 1

The world-wide impact of early Soviet cinema from 1926 to 1930 was so great
that it opened, quite literally, a new chapter in world cinema history, but a chapter
that demanded to be written quite differently from all others. The first films of
Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Kuleshov to be seen abroad claimed–and won–
recognition on the grounds of their essential difference from all other films,
whether the difference was perceived in stylistic, political, or psychological terms.
But, despite this universal acclaim, the reputation of Soviet cinema was soon to
prove vulnerable. One theme which emerged in the early 1930s was a reaction
against the extreme enthusiasm of the early period of ‘discovery’, no doubt linked
with the political disillusionment of the period. A typical response was that of
Grierson, who had been closely involved in launching Potemkin in New York in
1926 and urging Soviet techniques as models for the emergent documentary
movement in Britain, yet who, by 1935, found it ‘remarkable how, after the first
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flush of exciting cinema, the Russian talent faded’. As the Griersonian ‘theory of
decline’ took hold abroad, a second threat became evident at home: the heroic
achievements of the montage period petrified into a conventional monument to the
theory and experiment of the early ‘pioneers’.
Subsequent developments in both Soviet and non-Soviet cinema historiography
have tended to confirm this latter tendency. Bazin’s opposition between ‘image’
and ‘reality’ in silent cinema has exercised a persuasive influence on several
generations, discrediting the ‘manipulation’ and ‘trickery’ of montage and
Expressionist cinema, and thus further ensuring the relegation of montage to the
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museum. Soviet cinema historians, on the other hand, have tried to reconcile the
evident contradiction between 1920s montage cinema and the approved models of