Page 196 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 177
seriously? Does the worker class need fiction films or documentaries? With
or without a story? With or without a personal drama? What best
accentuates the heroism of the masses–everyday heroism or monumental
romanticism?
But the essential question, which brought bitterness, passion, despair to
these discussions, was the problem of sound films. Those who only know
sound cinema cannot imagine the panic which struck writers, directors,
actors, cameramen and editors the moment when, quite unexpectedly, the
cinema screen gave forth sounds. Documents in the archives, the
stenograms and articles of the period are only a pale and fleeting reflection
of all the emotion, the worry, the panic. For it was all the poetry of film art,
believed to be of its essence mute, that was in the balance and threatened
with extinction. 8

The industrial upheaval recalled here is already familiar from the American
experience; and equally familiar is the apparently genuine fear that sound would in
some way destroy the ‘essence’ of film art.
What was the reason for this evidently widespread fear? Most aesthetic
discussions of sound in the 1930s come down to the unhelpful assertion that, since
film is essentially visual and therefore silent, sound will inevitably distract from its
artistry. But a more interesting perspective is outlined by Theodor Adorno and
Hanns Eisler in their book on film music, where they trace the origin of
accompanying music for films to a need to still the unconscious fear of silent
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moving images that disturbed early cinema audiences. From this premiss they
argue that music has an equally important function in sound cinema, since the
‘immateriality’ of quasi-realistic speech is equally disturbing in relation to the two-
dimensional images. Thus, dialogue in the talkie is the direct successor to the silent
cinema’s intertitles and both of these instances of language offend against the basic
‘discovery’ of cinema, which is the representation of movement. The fundamental
divergence between speech and image is noted unconsciously by the spectator,
hence the need for music in sound films to ‘set in motion’ and ‘justify’ the essential
dimension of movement, which speech would otherwise inhibit, and to preserve the
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‘fragile’ representation of the external world offered by the sound film. Adorno
and Eisler’s theory suggests a possible explanation for the deep-seated fear of
sound that went beyond immediate industrial consequences: it identifies the threat
of de-stabilisation of the institution which had grown up during the silent period, in
which the mere presence of music played a crucial binding (rather than expressive)
role.
But there was another consideration that may have seemed more pressing to
the Soviet montage school. The late 1920s had seen a remarkable convergence of
theoretical and practical work around the concept of montage, which went beyond
such film-maker theorists as Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Kuleshov (each with his
own version of montage) to include writers, literary theorists, visual artists, theatre
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workers and others. Montage had become a key concept in many fields after its