Page 197 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

178 MAKING SENSE OF EARLY SOVIET SOUND
initial development as a theory of the specificity of film: and with it was linked
another key concept, that of ‘inner speech’. The origins of this notion may have
been in Stanislavsky’s interest in ‘inner monologue’ or in Píaget’s study of
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language acquisition, but by the mid-1920s it had become a central feature of
‘Formalist’ critical theory and played an important part in Eikhenbaum’s seminal
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essay on the poetics of cinema, ‘Problems of Film Stylistics’. For Eikhenbaum,
montage is the rationalisation of the basic laws of film construction, controlling the
viewers’ ‘sense of time’; and montage relies upon–and to some extent produces–a
constant subjective ‘accompaniment’ to the experience of film viewing:

For the study of the laws of film (especially of montage) it is most important
to admit that perception and understanding of a motion picture are
inextricably bound up with the development of internal speech, which makes
the connection between separate shots. Outside this process only the ‘trans-
sense’ elements of film can be perceived. 14

If ‘inner speech’ provides the guarantee of film intelligibility, it is also the basis on
which filmic metaphor and other rhetorical structures depend. According to
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Eikhenbaum. ‘film metaphor is entirely dependent on verbal metaphor’. Clearly
such speculation was of prime importance to Eisenstein in the development of his
conception of ‘intellectual cinema’ and many of the montage ‘tropes’ of October
[Oktyabr’, 1927] and The General Line [General’naya liniya, 1929] can only be
interpreted according to the ‘inner speech’ hypothesis. By 1932, he was reminded
of

The ‘last word’ on montage form in general that I foresaw theoretically long
ago, of the fact that montage form as structure is a reconstruction of the laws
of the thought process. 16

Leaving aside Eisenstein’s hopes for sound as a ‘new montage element’, if the
whole edifice of montage was believed to rely upon the institutionalised activation of
inner speech, then the ‘outer speech’ of the talkie posed obvious danger. Not in
terms of a ‘visual’ art threatened by language, but of the plasticity and allusiveness
of inner speech suppressed by the standardisation of everyday audible speech.
What Eikhenbaum had termed ‘the intimate process of forming internal speech’, 17
interrupted hitherto only by the demands of reading intertitles, was to be replaced
by a pre-formed, externalised address from the screen which would make the
spectator little more than a passive eavesdropper. What was at stake in the sound
revolution, for the montage school, was nothing less than the underlying principle of
montage itself, the poetic interplay of inner speech and montage figures, the
participation of the spectator as actor.