Page 195 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

176 MAKING SENSE OF EARLY SOVIET SOUND
1930s ‘realism’, tacitly acknowledging the world-wide reputation of the former at
the expense of the latter. Even recent ‘revisionist’ work–whether supporting
Vertov’s ultra-radical montage position, or challenging the ‘tyranny’ of montage–
has tended to accept as given the heroic mythology of montage and to ignore the
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challenge, or the ‘catastrophe’, of the coming of sound.
Looking at the frozen legacy of early Soviet cinema, inscribed alike in
conventional and radical histories, the absence of any sustained treatment of the
long transition to sound is striking. It is as if the brute industrial fact of sound, with
its attendant aesthetic and ideological implications, constitutes too great a
disturbance for narrative history, or indeed montage theory. Yet the introduction of
sound coincides with, and helps to define, the turning-point in Soviet cinema. It is
an example par excellence of the generally ignored intersection between the
specificity of cinema and the histories–economic, technological, political, ideological
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–that determine and are determined by it. Soviet sound cinema is effectively a
‘new apparatus’ by the late 1930s and the investigation of its emergence as a
domestic mass medium out of the pluralist ‘international’ cinema of the late 1920s
increasingly seems a priority, in order to ‘unblock’ the wider study of Soviet
cinema and indeed the history of world cinema.

THE THREAT OF THE TALKIES
The introduction of sound to Soviet cinema had two distinctive, perhaps unique,
features. First, because the rapid culmination of sound technology development in
Europe and the United States coincided with the end of the New Economic Policy
(NEP) and a new drive towards self-sufficiency in the USSR, there was a long
phase of rumour and speculation–to which the celebrated ‘Statement’ by
Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov belongs–before indigenous sound
production finally started in 1930. Second, even when production was under way,
sound and silent cinema continued to coexist for nearly six years–a length of
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transition exceeded only in Japan. Received opinion concludes that these delays
were wholly beneficial, allowing Soviet directors to avoid the ‘mistakes made
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elsewhere’ and to tackle sound production with confidence. But a closer reading of
even the few documents available suggests other considerations. This extract from
the memoirs of the veteran screenwriter Yevgeni Gabrilovich usefully summarises
the concerns of the wider community of Soviet film-makers on the eve of sound
and vividly evokes their response:

What subjects there were to discuss in those far-off days! How should one
depict the positive hero–simply positive, or with some human flaw? May the
heroine of a film be pretty, or is that a concession to bourgeois taste? What
is optimism and what pessimism? In what lies decadence and in what
heroism? How to vanquish formalism? How should satire be made an
affirmation of life? How should one react to the evident lack of political
culture of certain young masters of cinema who take themselves much too